Few species of North American songbirds have experienced the dramatic population declines of the cerulean warbler. Where forests only a generation ago were filled with the warbler’s high, musical buzz, now the cerulean’s song is rarely heard at all. Between 1966 and 1999, cerulean warbler populations declined 70%. This species is in danger of extinction and has been proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act; but the cerulean needs immediate citizen involvement to become listed. An interior forest species, the cerulean warbler depends on old-growth, un-fragmented forest for successful foraging and reproduction. The species is known to utilize both bottomland hardwood and upland forests throughout the Appalachians. In some areas, they are also found in mature forests on dry slopes and ridges. The cerulean winters in the mountains of Columbia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Peru.

Extinction Pressures

The fragmentation of stable old-growth forests (due to logging, road-building, and development) has destroyed the cerulean’s preferred nesting habitat. Historically, almost 24 million acres of bottomland hardwood forest existed throughout the lower Mississippi Valley, from southern Illinois to coastalLouisiana.Currently, fewer than 5 million acres remain. Additionally, mountaintop removal mining, a method of mining coal by removing the tops of mountains and placing the overburden in stream valleys, has destroyed large portions of the cerulean’s suitable breeding habitat. Unfortunately, the area of the country with the highest density of ceruleans – the Southern Appalachians - is also in a coal-mining region where mountaintop removal mining is practiced. Cowbird parasitism has also been attributed to the cerulean’s dramatic population decline. Brown-headed cowbirds typically lay their eggs in the nests of other songbirds, sometimes ejecting warbler eggs from the nest, causing the host parents to raise cowbird fledglings rather than their own. Cowbirds inhabit open, grassland areas. Forest fragmentation creates more “edges”, which expose forest interior species to a higher risk of parasitism.

Cerulean Update

Conservationists file suit to save songbird Feds ignore citizen petition while songbird’s numbers plummet Asheville, NC – February 28, 2006 ­Conservation groups representing almost 1 million members filed suit today against Interior Secretary Gale Norton and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), compelling the agency to consider a citizen petition to add the Cerulean Warbler to the nation’s list of threatened species.
Five conservation groups, including the National Audubon Society, Defenders of Wildlife, Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project (SABP), Western North Carolina Alliance and Heartwood filed suit in District Court in Washington D.C. The groups claim that FWS failed to meet its legal obligation to consider their petition, which was filed in 2000.
“If I were legally required to do my job,” said Tracy Davids, Executive Director of SABP, a regional conservation group based in Asheville, NC, “and I let it ride for five years, I’d be unemployed right now. While bureaucrats twiddle their thumbs, this beautiful songbird is tumbling towards extinction.”

The Cerulean Warbler population has dropped almost 82% throughout its U.S. range over the last 40 years, making it the fastest declining warbler in the country. Known for its bright blue plumage and distinctive song, the Cerulean breeds in the summer in eastern forests and migrates to South America for winter. Once common, it has grown increasingly rare as forests in both hemispheres have been destroyed and fragmented by logging, surface mining and development. “We need to catch the Cerulean in its rapid fall before it hits endangered status,” said Doug Ruley, Senior Attorney in the Asheville, N.C., office of the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit organization representing the groups. “There is no excuse for the agency to have stalled this long.” 28 groups filed the original petition in 2000, seeking threatened status and critical habitat designation for the warbler. Over the past five years, however, the FWS repeatedly dodged their legal obligation to respond to the citizen petition. In the intervening years, the rate of the bird’s decline appears to have quickened, and threats to bird’s survival have worsened.

Under the Endangered Species Act, the FWS has 90 days to determine whether a citizen petition presents enough information that a listing may be warranted. If so, the agencythen has 12 months to determine whether to list the species as threatened or endangered. In October 2003, FWS issued its longoverdue 90day response, finding that the Cerulean may in fact warrant threatened status; it has yet to issue the 12monthdetermination, now several years late.
“We owe it to our children and grandchildren to be good stewards of the land and leave behind a legacy of protecting endangered species and the places they call home,” said Tracy Davids. “The Endangered Species Act must be fully enforced by citizens like us when the government fails to do so.”