Endangered
!
Story and photographs by Jack Kotz
E
very day we enjoy seeing great egrets and
snowy egrets in our ponds and roosting in the
trees. Alligators loll on the banks in the spring,
soaking up the sun. Few remember that in our
area those species were threatened with extinction not long
ago. Their recovery has been a success story, but we still have
a number of threatened and endangered species on Kiawah,
some you know about and see on occasion. Others are harder
to find.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) is the primary authority on threatened species
around the world. The IUCN places threatened species
in three categories: vulnerable, endangered, and critically
endangered. Other categories range from “extinct” and
“extinct in the wild” to “not threatened” and “of least concern”.
In the United States, we also rely on the U. S. Fish &
Wildlife Service. Their categories are more straightforward.
An endangered species is “any species that is in danger of
extinction throughout all or in a significant portion of its
range.” A threatened species is one “that is likely to become an
endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout
all or a significant portion of its range.” Or, as they say more
simply, “endangered species are on the brink of extinction
now,” whereas “threatened species are likely to be at the brink
in the near future.”
The U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service has an online database
of endangered and threatened species by state (ecos.fws.
gov), and the page for South Carolina lists 16 animals (eight
Snowy egrets foraging in a tidal pool on Kiawah.
22
Naturally Kiawah