Navy Goes to Bat for Songbird About to Shrike Out

SAN DIEGO — In nature, as in real estate, the first rule is location, location, location.

As such, it is not surprising that the San Clemente loggerhead shrike is on the brink of nonexistence.

The only place the tiny songbird is known to exist is San Clemente Island, a rocky isle 65 miles off the coast that serves as the Navy’s only bombardment range for destroyers, frigates and cruisers based on the West Coast. If there is a place more inhospitable to fragile living things, its name doesn’t come quickly to mind.

If explosive shells lobbed from ships don’t kill the shrike, fires started by incendiary ordnance will. And then, of course, there are the packs of feral cats and hungry rats that roam the island.

Put all these environmental terrors together and the San Clemente loggerhead shrike is the North American songbird most likely to go extinct. Only 15 shrikes are known to exist on the island.

But now, the Navy, prodded by a bird-lovers group, has escalated efforts to save the loggerhead shrike by reducing the bombardment schedule, creating fire breaks, using air tankers to put out bombardment-caused fires and importing one of the federal government’s ace rat-killers.

Most important, the San Diego Zoo is breeding shrikes for release, a first for an endangered songbird.

The tab for the multiyear save-the-shrike campaign is set at about $1 million a year. Officials concede there is no assurance of victory since there are no manuals on how to help a struggling bird propagate and flourish on an island, part of which is under active bombardment.

The strategy is to use various tactics and see what works.

“We’re riding in the wagon as we’re building it,” said Jan Larson, natural resources manager for North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado, which has responsibility for San Clemente Island.

The shrike is one of eight endangered species on San Clemente Island: three birds, four plants and a lizard. The shrike’s plight is ever more perilous because this subspecies (Lanius ludovicianus mearnsi) exists nowhere else, although its nearly identical cousin is prolific in mainland Southern California.

In the early 1990s, the Navy signed a long-term contract with the San Diego Zoo’s Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species to breed San Clemente loggerhead shrikes in captivity and release them on the island. The zoo has two bird keepers and a bird behaviorist stationed on the island to run the breeding center and monitor the mockingbird-sized shrike’s struggle for survival.

But releasing captive-born creatures, small or large, back into the wild is a dicey business, and survival rates historically are low. There is nothing to keep a captive-hatched, hand-raised shrike from flying immediately into the bombardment area or the maw of a predatory cat.

As a result, the shrike population by last summer had dwindled to its lowest level in history, despite the release of captive-hatched shrike.

Enter the Washington D.C.-based American Bird Conservancy, a consortium of bird-protecting groups. In July the conservancy notified Defense Secretary William Perry and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt that it planned to sue the federal government for failing to protect the shrikes on San Clemente Island as required by the Endangered Species Act of 1972.

Spearheading the conservancy’s effort was Gerald W. Winegrad, who had the advantage of being a former Navy lawyer and for 16 years a member of the Maryland legislature. He speaks both law and Navy-ese.

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Three weeks after Winegrad’s letter arrived, a meeting to which a West Coast admiral was summoned was held in the Pentagon to discuss the shrike situation. Shortly thereafter the Navy announced a series of measures to save the shrike.

Bombardment from ships will be curtailed on weekends and during the six-month breeding season. Fire breaks will be maintained, incendiary bombs discontinued, air tankers deployed to fight fires, a fabled rat specialist from the Department of Agriculture assigned to the island, and the breeding facility upgraded.

Whether the Navy would have taken such steps without the threat of a lawsuit is a matter of debate.

“But for our actions,” Winegrad said, “the shrike was on its way to extinction.”

Larson sees it differently. He notes that everything being done was in the planning stages even before the conservancy got involved.

“We aren’t doing anything differently because of the conservancy,” he said.

He added that the Navy spends $2 million a year on natural resources at San Clemente Island, and that preserving the endangered plants, birds and lizard has to be accomplished in the context of keeping the island a viable military installation, a sometimes contradictory proposition.

The Navy, which has owned the island since 1933, has 350 uniformed and civilian personnel stationed on the northern end of the 51-square-mile island. The island is used for weapons research and a communications center for ships and aircraft; an air strip is used for simulated carrier landings.

Access to the island is by invitation only. To the extent the public knows of San Clemente Island’s existence, it is probably because of the two-decade saga of its goats.

The Navy “eradicated” upward of 35,000 goats after determining that the goats, the descendants of animals brought by settlers in the 1880s, were an ecological menace. The most elusive of the goat herds were located by the use of “Judas goats” equipped with radio transmitters.

The goats were gone by 1991; most were killed, some were moved elsewhere. Without goats, however, weeds grew in great profusion and the fire menace increased geometrically. Since the bombardment zones on the island’s southern end are littered with 60 years of unexploded, but still lethal, ordnance, firefighting is problematic.

In the first nine months of 1994, 10 uncontrolled fires consumed more than 7,000 acres and killed an untold number of shrikes.

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To the non-aficionado, the gray, white and charcoal-colored San Clemente loggerhead shrike looks like a small falcon without talons. In the bird world, it is known as a voracious predator of insects. Not for nothing did the Navy call one its missiles “the shrike.”

Bringing a species back to life after its numbers have dwindled to little more than a dozen is a daunting task. Among other problems, the gene pool is rather shallow; from a genetic point of view, diversity is the ticket.

“It’s not the best of numbers, but it’s what we have to work with,” said John Azua, an animal care manager in charge of the avian propagation center at the zoo.

At present, there are 12 shrikes in captivity, awaiting release. The zoo has found ways to make shrikes “double-clutch,” that is, lay more eggs than normal. Larson says he believes the program will be successful if 10% of the captive-hatched birds survive and begin to breed.

“Our best hope is to get them established in areas that are not operational for bombardment,” Larson said. “The law says to protect the shrike and we’re going to do it.”

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Endangered Songbird

The only place the San Clemente loggerhead shrike is known to exist is San Clemente Island, a rocky isle 65 miles off the Southern California coast.