Environmentalists: Border fence putting Arizona pronghorns in peril

Arizona Republic
January 24, 2013
by Bob Ortega

PHOENIX -- The land where the antelope play, where Arizona meets Mexico, has been divided in recent years by taller and longer border fences.

 

They are meant to keep out or slow undocumented migrants and drug smugglers coming north from Mexico, but environmentalists say they're also helping drive two southeastern Arizona pronghorn antelope herds to the brink of dying out.

 

Environmentalists say the inability of the pronghorn — and other wildlife — to range freely across southern Arizona and northern Mexico has contributed to dramatic declines in the population of what are known as the San Rafael and Sonoita herds. From 122 animals identified in a 2005 count, the herds' numbers fell to 26 in a survey last year, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

The San Rafael herd is down to an estimated eight animals, and the Sonoita herd is down to an estimated 18.

 

While the number of animals spotted can depend on weather conditions and other factors, Game and Fish doesn't consider either herd sustainable, and the agency plans to capture and transplant enough animals from the Chino Valley area, north of Prescott, to reinvigorate them.

 

But there are questions about whether the transplants will work if border fences and other pressures on the herds go unchanged.

 

Dan Millis, borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club, said he suspects not. However, John Millican, a project manager with the Arizona Antelope Foundation, said he thinks the border fence may actually have protected the few pronghorn that are left from being shot by poachers in northern Mexico.

 

Millican and Millis agree that better studies would help make the fence's impact clear.

 

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) aren't really antelope, which are found only in Africa and Asia. However, they're commonly called pronghorn antelope because they resemble true antelope in behavior and appearance. The pronghorn is the only surviving species of the antilocapridae family. They're considered the second-fastest land animal in the world, after the cheetah, with a top speed of more than 60 mph.

 

Environmental reviews skipped

 

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration launched a massive expansion of the border wall and the Border Patrol. In 2006, Congress adopted the Secure Fence Act, and the Department of Homeland Security began contracting to build or reinforce fences in key areas along the U.S.-Mexican border, including in Arizona. Between the budget years 2008 and 2011, Customs and Border Protection spent $1.2 billion to build nearly 300 miles of fencing and roads along the U.S.-Mexican border, including areas around the Huachuca Mountains where the two pronghorn herds live.

 

To get that fencing up quickly, the Bush administration issued waivers of environmental- and endangered-species-protection laws and scrapped the environmental-impact studies and reviews that normally would have been required.

 

"We wish we had more scientific studies to point to," Millis said, "but the Department of Homeland Security has a poor environmental record. Borderwide, there's been very little funding for studies and habitat restoration and little of the due diligence that needs to be done."

 

Customs and Border Protection signed an agreement in 2009 with the Department of the Interior to fund up to $50 million in studies and projects along the border. The following year, the agencies launched $6.8 million in studies and projects along the Southwestern border. These included building a fish barrier in the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, restoring habitat for long-nosed bats in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and surveying and monitoring jaguars in southern Arizona.

Customs officials couldn't immediately identify further spending on border mitigation efforts.

 

Several studies that have been completed — on species such as the desert bighorn sheep in California and the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl — show that the habitats the animals need to thrive have been further fragmented. The chief causes are habitat loss due to development, habitat change from invasive plant species, the fences, the new roads along the fences and the increased Border Patrol presence.

 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has led a decadelong multiagency project focusing on Arizona’s other southern corner, near Yuma, where the population of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, a subspecies, has rebounded from 21 animals in the wild 10 years ago to more than 100 today. In addition, there are 125 more in breeding pens near Ajo, said Jim Paxon, chief of information for the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

Customs and Border Protection declined to discuss mitigation efforts in southeastern Arizona, but pointed, in a written statement, to the recovery efforts for the Sonoran pronghorn as “an example of our commitment.” The statement added that the agency “is fully engaged in efforts that consider the environment as we work to secure our nation’s border.”

Moving forward

Game and Fish tried twice — unsuccessfully — last winter to capture pronghorn near Chino Valley, using a quarter-mile-wide V-shaped trap leading to a corral, Paxon said. Officials decided against using a helicopter with a net gun because the mortality rate for the animals can run to 20 percent, vs. 3 to 4 percent using the corral traps, he said.

The captures have been postponed until next year, said Amber Munig, big-game supervisor for Game and Fish. Because the herd there spends much of its time on federal lands, the delay gives Game and Fish time to do a survey and gain permission from the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Munig said their goal is to transplant enough animals to boost the San Rafael and Sonoita herds up to at least 50 pronghorn each.

Munig said that while she couldn’t speak to the impact of the border fence, “We are looking at habitat issues and fragmentation in that area within Arizona.” The department has been working for years with other state and federal agencies, the Arizona Antelope Foundation and local ranchers to restore habitat in the areas used by the two herds, removing invasive species such as cheatgrass and juniper that squeeze out the native plants the pronghorn eat, she said.

Millican, who worked for 30 years for Game and Fish before joining the antelope foundation, said tackling another kind of fencing also has been key to connecting the fragmented areas where the pronghorn live. Arizona’s range lands are crisscrossed with barbed wire, old and new. That’s an issue for pronghorn, which shy from roads and, though fast, are not good jumpers, Millican said.

“Even when they’re really pressured, they prefer to go under a fence,” he said. But the lowest strand of older fencing, typically 6 to 8 inches off the ground, doesn’t give them enough clearance. So a major focus is working with landowners to replace the lowest strand of barbed wire with smooth wire 16 to 18 inches off the ground, which will keep livestock in but let the pronghorn through.

Millican agrees with the Sierra Club’s Millis that the border fence causes issues with other species moving back and forth. For the pronghorn, though, he said, “We have protections in the U.S.; there aren’t a lot of protections on the Mexican side.”

He said he’s confident that with proper habitat management on the U.S. side, the border fence won’t stop the herds from thriving again.

Millis, meanwhile, argues that other agencies and groups shy away from criticizing the Department of Homeland Security because “people don’t want to mess around with security issues.”

But he said there’s no question that the border walls harm the environment, “and now Arizonans are stuck with the costs of cleaning up the mess.”

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20130111arizona-pronghorns-environmentalists-border-fence-peril.html

Sonoran pronghorn threatened by water issues, coalition says

Arizona Daily Star / Conkite News Service
November 16, 2012
by Andrew Bovin

WASHINGTON - A new report lists the endangered Sonoran pronghorn as one of the species most threatened by water problems across the nation.

The pronghorn was one of 17 species identified Wednesday by the Endangered Species Coalition as threatened by water-quality issues or a lack of water in 10 different watersheds.

For pronghorns, which live in the Sonoran Desert between Southwest Arizona and northern Mexico, problems include a lack of rainfall, water-quality problems from industrial and agricultural runoff and habitat damage from Border Patrol activities, among other factors, the report said.

Leda Huta, the coalition's executive director, said the timing and duration of rainfall in the desert is vital for the pronghorn's survival for several reasons.

"It's not just water, but also what they're eating," Huta said. "Without water, they're not going to have food."

Another problem is off-road activity by Border Patrol agents. That damages vegetation that the herds graze on, said Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that make up the coalition.

"It changes the nature of the area," Curry said of border activities, pointing out that the border fence divides pronghorn herds between the U.S. and Mexico.

"The fence is certainly a problem because it separates the population in Mexico and the population in the U.S.," Curry said.

But the Border Patrol challenged that claim, saying it works to protect the environment while doing its job of protecting the border.

"The preservation of our valuable natural and cultural resources is of great importance to Customs and Border Protection, and we are fully engaged in efforts that consider the environment as we work to secure our nation's borders," the agency said in a written statement Wednesday.

The statement said the agency's work in the Barry M. Goldwater Range in Arizona, where it "has funded mitigation and recovery efforts for the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, is an example of our commitment" to the environment.

The report, "Water Woes: How dams, diversions, dirty water and drought put America's wildlife at risk," is the latest by the coalition, which releases a report every year listing areas that are at greatest danger from a different environmental threat.

Environmental groups nominate species that are reviewed by scientists, who put together a final list. Huta said the coalition chose species that "aren't a lost cause," where human changes could alter the situation.

"They wanted species where we can highlight what can be done," Huta said.

She said people can help by cutting water use and reducing their carbon footprint, which she said contributes to global warming, which can lead to drought.

Pronghorns were listed as an endangered species in 1967. Officials estimate that there are only about 500 in the wild, about 100 of which are on the U.S. side of the border.

http://azstarnet.com/news/state-and-regional/sonoran-pronghorn-threatened-by-water-issues-coalition-says/article_523e99c9-80c6-53b6-8579-fb838bf256e5.html

Border Fence Blocks Wildlife Movement, UA Study Finds

UA News
June 30, 2010
by Alan Fischer

A 4.88-meter-tall metal wall built along parts of the Arizona/Mexico border to try to keep out people is doing a good job of preventing the movement of some species of wildlife, University of Arizona researchers have found.

Some animals that live near the border dwell in fragmented habitats that are separated by vast spreads of unsuitable land, said Aaron Flesch, senior research specialist with the UA School of Natural Resources and the Environment.

"When you have habitat that is fragmented on the landscape, movement is really important. Animals need to move among these small patches of available habitat in order to persist in these environments," said Flesch, lead author of "Potential Effects of the United States-Mexico Border Fence on Wildlife," a paper that appeared in Conservation Biology.

"You might have suitable patches of habitat where the animals can survive and reproduce, separated by large areas of no habitat that might be difficult to traverse," he said.

Flesch and his co-authors tracked the movements and behaviors of ferruginous pygmy owls and desert bighorn sheep to see what impact the man-made border barrier, as well as areas cleared for roads and agricultural development, potentially would have on their movements among suitable habitats.

"For sheep it is very simple: a quadruped is not going to climb a fence. And four meters is a pretty good jump. Bighorn sheep, deer, mountain lions, bear, they are going to be visibly excluded from crossing a solid fence," he said.

"Most people think a bird is going to fly up and over a wall because they have wings. Pygmy owls are limited to fairly dense stands of vegetation. They often times avoid large vegetation gaps, and they tend to stick to and stay in dense cover and not cross big swaths of open country."

Tiny radio transmitters were attached to juvenile birds right after they fledged, and researchers tracked their movements. The owls moved up to six kilometers per night, he said.

"Pygmy owls tend to fly really low. They are not great flyers: they are strong flyers, but they tend to fly low to avoid predation." Of the flights tracked, only 23 percent got up to four meters or higher, he said, with some just inches off the ground. "They tend to avoid large vegetation openings. And when they encounter large vegetation openings grater than 200 meters, they tend to turn around."

While the border fence is not posing the danger of an immediate risk of extinction for wildlife species, it could mean the end of some important cross-border movements, he said.

"Certainly the pygmy owl and the desert bighorn sheep are not going to go extinct because of the border wall. I don't think there is any question about that," he said. "But what happens is if habitat is fragmented north of the border and there is not a lot of it to begin with, and the populations are small? If populations wink out locally (go locally extinct) in some of those patches, the overall number of animals might not be enough to foster persistence into the long term without some additional immigrating into that population from Mexico."

"The issue is more a local one – or a bi-national one. We need to work together to maintain populations across the international border at a certain level. The border is just a political boundary; animals don't recognize it."

Researchers can help policymakers find the best way to balance border security with the needs of wildlife species.

"There are concerns about immigration and border security, and my take is that those issues are here to stay. And so what needs to happen is people from academia, people from civil society, need to start working better with the Department of Homeland Security so that future actions for border security and infrastructure are done as thoughtfully as possible," he said. "It would be nice to have cooperation with concerned interests in Mexico about how to continue monitoring border security and adapting or building new infrastructure so that is has the least impact possible."

High-technology solutions could play a role in resolving the ongoing problem.

"We need to think of ways we can maintain those values, maintain wildlife, while at the same time enforcing immigration laws," he said. "We wanted to point out a few things like motion sensors, vehicle barriers, radar, things that people could use to figure out where illegal activity is happening or not happening, and potentially even monitor wildlife. That was our goal."

Matt Clark, a study co-author and conservation scientist working on border issues with the Defenders of Wildlife, noted this type of research should be better funded and expanded to include other species and border security impacts.

"There is an urgent need for governmental agencies to partner with universities and non-governmental entities to conduct scientific research to quantify the direct and indirect impacts of the border wall, patrol roads and human disturbance on wildlife," he said. "Only with objective information can these impacts be pinpointed and properly mitigated for. There are solutions whereby the goals of border security and wildlife conservation can be aligned."

http://uanews.org/node/32605

Wall Worries: Grijalva pushes the Department of Homeland Security to review the border fence's environmental destruction

Tucson Weekly
August 13, 2009
by Tim Vanderpool

Call it an expression of public will, or just political pandering; either way, you can't call the new wall on our southern border benign.

Cutting a daunting swath from California to Texas, it has degraded waterways, chopped up private property and wreaked environmental havoc by severing wildlife-migration routes and pummeling habitat.

Now, three years after the construction began, and with nearly 700 miles of the fence and barriers complete, Rep. Raul Grijalva is pushing for a fresh—some would say first—look at the environmental fallout from the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

On July 23, Arizona's District 7 congressman sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urging her department to conduct a full analysis of those impacts, and consider steps toward repair. The letter was co-signed by 42 of his congressional colleagues.

Grijalva says the time was right, given that Napolitano hails from the borderland—she was Arizona's governor before succeeding Bush appointee Michael Chertoff last year as head of Homeland Security—and that the fear factor behind the fence has waned a bit.

"I sensed an opening," he says. "Before, when we'd bring this up, we'd hear, 'Oh, you're promoting terrorism,' from Chertoff and his minions. Anytime we'd even mention the idea of mitigation, study, monitoring, evaluation, we'd hear 'Aah, you're helping harbor terrorists.' They'd wave that bloody rag every time.

"There's a different attitude now," Grijalva says, "a professional attitude, not an ideological attitude. I know that Janet (Napolitano) wants to do the job to keep the border secure. But she's dealing with it in a professional manner and a policy manner, which, to me, creates an opening."

Homeland Security spokeswoman Sara Kuban declined to comment on Grijalva's letter, except to say that Napolitano would be in contact with the various members of Congress.

Meanwhile, Grijalva's request has drawn plaudits from environmentalists, including Dan Millis, coordinator of the Arizona Sierra Club's Borderlands Campaign. "To the Sierra Club, this is a very important and very urgent issue," Millis says, "and I definitely think the timing is good. I don't think a serious look at this has been taken yet, at least by the higher-ups in the Department of Homeland Security."

The letter to Napolitano expressed concerns "regarding mounting environmental and societal impacts related to border security infrastructure and operations." It also requests that the secretary work with other agencies "to create and fund a robust border-wide environmental monitoring program and to provide sufficient mitigation funding for damage caused by border security infrastructure and enforcement activities."

That this letter was dispatched with any optimism at all reflects the sea change since Chertoff's time. In his drive to complete the fence, he repeatedly brandished his congressionally granted authority to waive bedrock environmental laws—such as the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act—to keep fence construction humming. In many cases, he used the waiver as a threat, browbeating land-management agencies into abdicating their resource-protection responsibilities.

Southern Arizona's San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area could be a poster child for that abuse. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management cobbled together a half-assed environmental assessment of the fence's potential impacts—concluding that the Normandy-style barriers "won't impede animals or people, because they have enough distance from the ground up," according to a BLM spokeswoman. "They're really just to keep vehicles from driving through the riverbed."

But in hindsight, such kowtowing has "damaged" those agencies, says Stephen Mumme, a border environmental management expert at Colorado State University. "It has led to the impression along the border that they're not using sound science—that they were being heavily influenced by political considerations in the Bush administration and continuing even now.

"If anyone, they were responsible for saying—even if it was politically unpopular—that they needed to have a better sense of what's going on," Mumme says. "But in the last administration, I think it was politically dangerous for managers to say that."

Of course, Chertoff's frantic pace didn't occur in a vacuum. Even as the project rolled forward, there was a steady drumbeat from anti-immigrant right-wingers such as Glenn Spencer and his Arizona-based American Border Patrol. Spencer's group routinely flies along the border to monitor the fence's progress, and loudly complains when there is a slowdown.

That pressure hasn't entirely vanished; Grijalva's efforts come as the Senate is considering a measure to expand "pedestrian" fencing to the entire 700 miles of barrier mandated by the Secure Fence Act. This high steel fencing is meant to block people from walking across the line, and is far more extreme—and damaging to wildlife—than the vehicle barriers now lining much of the border.

But there's been scant attention paid to the enormous social costs inflicted by this security juggernaut. Consider the impacts endured by Texas families who have seen their property—much of it passed down through generations—sliced in half by the wall. More fallout has been felt in Nogales, Ariz., where downtown merchants last year were engulfed by floodwaters that had backed up behind a concrete barrier placed in storm drains by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Then there's the fiscal factor: Grijalva cites Congressional Budget Office estimates that the border barrier has cost taxpayers an average of $3 million per mile to build. Another 15 percent will be added for continuing maintenance.

But the cost to the environment is incalculable. According to biologists, damage to habitat and wildlife migration is impacting species ranging from tiny lizards to mule deer, bighorn sheep, coatis, bears and jaguars. That's exacerbated by damage to watersheds and riparian areas. Again, the San Pedro River could be a perfect example. Two years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a "temporary" vehicle barrier across the river near Sierra Vista, south of Tucson. The placement followed roughly two miles of fence already existing within the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

Groups such as the Sierra Club fought that fence, and lost. Meanwhile, the clock is still ticking, says Millis. He notes that the Department of Homeland Security recently transferred $50 million to the Department of Interior to help soften impacts upon endangered species along the San Pedro and elsewhere.

"But that's all off-site mitigation, basically trying to restore potential habitat for endangered species in the same quantities that it was lost along the border. It doesn't really address the big problems that are happening on the line every day, and that we have tons of pictures of—wildlife blocked by the wall, huge erosion problems in wilderness areas, etc., etc.

"Now there's a huge priority on getting the science in order," Millis says. "This whole thing was really just shoved down our throats."

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/wall-worries/Content?oid=1281501

Some concerned about negative impact of border fence

KVOA - Tucson
August 10, 2009

It's been almost three years since the government announced plans to build a fence along the southern border. Since then a big portion of it has been built.

But some claim it's not solving all the problems, instead it's creating problems.

Bill Odle lives right by the border in Cochise County. He sees the impact of illegal immigrants every day. He also sees the impact of the recently built border fence.

"Washed all the material against the fence, you can see how deep it is," Odle says.

He's watched as crews cut a hole in the fence to get equipment in to move the debris.

"This is supposed to stop people, vehicles what have you and it's obvious people can just walk through here," Odle says.

He and others are concerned about the environmental impact of the fence.

The Sierra Club recently sent the Department of Homeland Security a letter, 43 members of Congress signed it.

"We're asking that monitoring and mitigation happen on a border wide scale. We need a fund that looks at problems we're having in places like this and uses science to address these problems," says Dan Mills with the Sierra Club.

Bill Davis with the Cochise County militia, a border watch group, acknowledges the problems with the fence, but says it is making an impact.

"The old joke was there would be a lot of 16 foot ladders, but it's still slowing them down. If they're one at a time climbing a ladder instead of 40 running across," he says.

Indeed some smugglers have found creative ways to avoid the fence including trucks with ramps built on them, ultra-light airplanes, and likely ladders, but those leave little evidence and are tougher to catch in the act.

In response, the Department of Homeland Security issued this statement: "Secretary Napolitano will respond to the members of Congress in regards to their letter. The Department does not respond to correspondence through the media."

http://www.kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=10881551&nav=menu216_2

U.S.-Mexico Border Fence May Snag Wildlife

Discovery News
July 8, 2009
by Jessica Marshall

July 8, 2009 -- The United States-Mexico border fence may block more wildlife border crossings than people crossings. The already limited populations of pygmy owls and bighorn sheep will likely be among those further threatened by the fence, says a new study.

"In some respects, it's as obvious as the nose on your face: If you put up a 20-foot chunk of steel, things probably aren't going to move across it, but we have to show it," said Paul Beier of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who was not a part of the study. "It's kind of a shame that we need to prove the obvious, but we do. So this is an important paper in that regard."

Since the U.S. government authorized construction of a fence along 700 miles of the border between the U.S. and Mexico in 2006, scientists have raised concerns that a person-tight fence would also exclude many species that rely on habitat on either side of the border. The new research suggests such concerns are valid.

"Borders are only political boundaries," said the study’s lead author Aaron Flesch of the University of Montana in Missoula. "They're not biological boundaries." The study, published recently in Conservation Biology, focused on desert bighorn sheep and ferruginous pygmy owls.

By combining information about bighorn populations along the Arizona-Mexico border with computer models, the study's coauthor Clinton Epps of Oregon State University were able to predict the effect of the fence on how sheep move from one group to another.

Epps found nine populations within his study area that would become isolated from populations across the border. What's more, two populations on the U.S. side of the fence rely on a path that dips through Mexico, so they would become isolated from one another, despite both being "American" bighorn.

"The ability to move between mountain ranges is pretty important to maintain genetic diversity," Epps said, "But probably more importantly, the populations are so small, that they can just wink out." Without cross border connections, the habitats couldn't be repopulated by sheep in nearby groups.

The pygmy owl seems an unlikely species to be blocked by a border fence, given that it can fly. But the team found that 80 percent of the owls' flights are less than 13 feet above the ground, with most of those less than 3 feet above the ground. What's more, the owl tends to make short, direct flights, avoiding stretches across open areas such as the zones of cleared vegetation on either side of the fence.

"Their survival in Arizona is probably dependent on movement from Mexico into the U.S.," said Flesch, who conducted the owl study. "That's why a 700-mile-long border fence is so relevant to their recovery and the recovery of so many other animals."

Jaguars, desert tortoise, wild turkeys, bears, and Sonoran pronghorn are among other species that may be affected by the border fence.

Flesch and others support using virtual fences instead of physical barriers along the border, especially in critical habitat areas. Surveillance technology could allow wildlife to pass freely, while still catching illegal traffic across the border, they propose.

Some vehicle barriers -- vertical posts close enough together to stop cars or trucks, but not so close as to block people or wildlife -- could also be used with less obstruction of wildlife movement.

The border fence is all the more significant in today's warming climate, Flesch noted. The border happens to fall at a boundary between two climates, so many species will tend to nudge their range north as climate warms. If they are blocked by the fence, their habitat may leave them behind.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/08/border-fence-wildlife.html