Escape from Extinction

Winston E. Banko combines business with pleasure. Professionally, he is a biologist, stationed in Hawaii, bird watching for the U.S. Department of the Interior. It therefore gave him special pleasure when, while hacking his way through an island rain forest in search of rare biological specimens, he spotted a bird with a "yellow posterior and a peculiar, sickle-shaped bill." The bird was the Mauinukupuu (pronounced noo-koo-poo-oo), which had been considered extinct since 1896.

Because of Banko's discovery, the Maui nukupuu was removed from the Interior Department's roster of extinct animals and put on the official list of "Endangered Species of Native Fish and Wildlife." The rest of that list, as announced last week, amounts to a catalogue of the 20th century's assault on wilderness life in the U.S. Some of the animals named may eventually drop off the list and disappear forever. A few, like Banko's bird, are species that have reappeared from apparent oblivion. A sampling:

sbMAMMALS. Indiana bat, Utah prairie dog, Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, Texas red wolf, black-footed ferret, Florida panther, Florida sea cow (manatee).

sbBIRDS. Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel, California least tern, the Aleutian Canada and Tule white-fronted goose, Laysan and Mexican duck, California condor, Florida Everglade kite, Southern bald eagle, masked bobwhite, whooping crane, Yuma and light-footed clapper rails, Eskimo curlew, Puerto Rican parrot, American ivory-billed woodpecker and Northern and Southern red-cock-aded woodpeckers, Laysan and Nihoa finches, Bachman's and Kirtland's warblers, dusky seaside and Cape Sable sparrows, and Hawaii's duck, goose, hawk, stilt, crow, gallinule and coot.

sbREPTILES AND AMPHIBIANS. American alligator, blunt-nosed leopard lizard, San Francisco garter snake, Puerto Rican boa, Santa Cruz long-toed salamander and Texas blind salamander, Houston and Inyo County toads.

sbFISH. Shortnose sturgeon, longjaw cisco, Piute, greenback and Montana west-slope cutthroat trout, Gila and Apache trout, the desert and Moapa dace, humpback chub, Colorado River squawfish, Cui-ui, Devils Hole, Comanche Springs and Owens River pupfish, Pahrump killifish, Gila top minnow, Maryland darter and blue pike.

As the "endangered" list grows year by year, many additions continue to come from animals heading toward extinction. Names that disappear from the list are sometimes the names of species that have finally been killed off. Yet sometimes a name comes off the list because the animal is making a comeback. One example: the grizzly bear, once thought doomed, now boasts a stable U.S. population of about 800.

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