Coming Back from the Brink

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

To animal preservationists, leopard coats and alligator shoes have long ranked among the most flagrant symbols of human indifference to the fate of wild animals. Even among the general public, consciousness has been raised high enough so that anyone sporting finery made from the skins of endangered animals runs the risk of at least verbal assault.

The attackers may have to shift emotional gears, however. Last month the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally announced that the American alligator is no longer an endangered species. And, at a meeting this week in Ottawa, the U.N.'s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species will release a report urging not only that the common leopard be removed from its list of endangered animals but that legal hunting be resumed.

While the alligator's recovery has been "phenomenal," according to David Klinger of the FWS, it seems that the spotted feline may never have faced a catastrophe in the first place. Unlike its truly rare cousin the Himalayan snow leopard, the common leopard made the list, in the 1970s, largely for emotional reasons. Worries about shrinking habitats and excessive hunting were "clearly overblown," admits Jaques Berney, deputy secretary-general of CITES. "Leopards are not like cheetahs," he observes. "They're highly adaptable animals."

The push to recategorize the leopard is based on a five-month study, conducted in 23 countries by Rowan Martin, chief ecologist for Zimbabwe's department of national parks and wildlife management, and Belgian Biologist Tom de Meulenaer. The pair used eyewitness accounts and statistical computer modeling to estimate Africa's leopard population at a healthy 700,000 to 850,000. The 75- to 150-lb. cats have even been sighted recently on the outskirts of Nairobi. The biologists went so far as to recommend the resumption of international trade in leopard skins. The best approach to leopard management, they argue, is to legalize a limited "harvest," diverting revenues from poachers and providing an estimated $29 million to "governments and law-abiding citizens."

The reclassification of the alligator, however, is a true victory. Twenty years ago, the toothy reptiles had been so assiduously hunted, says FWS Director Frank Dunkle, "that many believed the species would never recover." Skin-seeking poachers had killed the animals by the tens of thousands. In 1966 Congress passed the first of the Endangered Species Acts, which banned hunting any animal at risk of elimination over a major part of its range. Such legislation was spectacularly successful for the gators, thanks in large part to the FWS agents who enforced it.

One of the heroes was David Hall, an agent who went undercover for nearly ten years in the swamps and bayous of the South. Hall would get to know the locals and start buying alligator hides from traders; at one point, he operated a tanning factory for more than a year. "The big traders would bring their skins to me in 18-wheel trucks," says Hall, "and we'd bust them on the spot. I know the real Crocodile Dundees, and I've arrested about half of them."

Alligator populations rebounded rapidly. Says Klinger: "All we had to do was stop the poachers, and the gators did the rest." In Alabama, for example, biologists reported a tenfold increase in alligators between the mid-1970s and the early '80s. By 1985 the FWS declared the animal no longer endangered in Louisiana, Florida and Texas, where 90% of the animals live, and last month it extended that decision to the seven other states where gators are found. "We've got more alligators than we know what to do with," exclaims Klinger, who says there may now be several million.

The alligator is not the only FWS success: the brown pelican, once in danger, is now off the list in several states. The bald eagle is up from its 1963 low of 417 active nests in the lower 48 states to some 2,000 breeding pairs this year -- not enough to be declassified but an impressive return for the national symbol. Unfortunately not all protected species can be coaxed into bouncing back. Despite government protection, there are no known California condors left in the wild; the remaining 27 are in captivity. And in 70 years of trying to save the whooping crane, the population has grown from a low of 15, in 1941, to just 170 birds. Nor can deletions from the endangered list begin to keep pace with the new additions. At the moment, 449 animal and plant species remain listed in the U.S.; 37 of them were added in 1987 alone.

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington and Robert Kroon/ Geneva