The Richmond Times Dispatch
www.timesdispatch.com

September 11, 2000

When Margaret O'Bryan was a girl growing up in rural Hanover County, she would lie on her bed by an open window at night and thrill to the sounds of whippoorwills, owls and small frogs called spring peepers.

By day she heard the "bob white" of quail, the flutelike songs of wood thrushes, and the "teacher, teacher" call of ovenbirds.

Two creeks meandered through the family's forested 3-acre lot near Mechanicsville. The creeks teemed with fish, crayfish and frogs. They in turn attracted great blue herons and green herons, which prowled the waters for snacks.

Those days, those sounds and those animals are gone.

Starting in the late 1950s and continuing today, houses sprang up in the area along Meadowbridge Road in southern Hanover. The neighbors cleared trees and fields and created manicured lawns. The growth also brought a hospital, a convenience store and an office building.

With her husband, Wayne, O'Bryan still lives in the house her parents built in 1940. Most of her wild neighbors, however, have died out, their habitats destroyed by development. The creeks, tainted with sediment and chemicals that run off roads and yards, "are totally dead," she said.

"There's a feeling that something is missing when you don't hear the whippoorwill, or the wood thrush, or the ovenbird or the frogs," said O'Bryan, 55. By those sounds, she said, "you knew it was summer."

. . .

Increasingly, something is missing across Virginia. Native animals and plants literally are losing ground, dying out as their wild homes are destroyed or fragmented by development.

"That's the biggest crisis we have [facing wildlife] right now: the loss of habitat to urbanization," said Dr. Bryan D. Watts, director of the College of William and Mary's Center for Conservation Biology. "The problem is so large and so overshadowing that it may as well be the only problem."

An average of 45,400 acres, an area slightly larger than the city of Richmond, was developed each year in Virginia from 1982 to 1992. In the Richmond region, an area 11/2 times the city's size was developed during that span. Development probably accelerated during the hot economy of the 1990s, but figures aren't in yet.

"One of the things that has intrigued me is the outrage with which suburban Americans react to tropical rain-forest destruction, and their apparent inability to see the same thing is going on not only in our country but in our neighborhoods," said Dr. Alan H. Savitzky, an Old Dominion University biologist.

Today, about 800 animals and 605 plants are rare or endangered in Virginia. Habitat loss is the top threat to most. Animals in danger of disappearing from Virginia include the Bachman's sparrow, the red-cockaded woodpecker, the barking tree frog and the tiger salamander.

Many common animals are dwindling in numbers, too, according to a survey of some of Virginia's top biologists.

Declining songbirds include the tuneful whippoorwill and wood thrush, the colorful scarlet tanager and the ovenbird, which builds a nest resembling a tiny oven on the ground.

Scientists say songbirds get squeezed at two ends: Their tropical wintering grounds are being leveled, and forests in their North American breeding grounds are being cut into fragments so small they don't provide room to attract mates, raise families and hide from predators.

When roads, houses and parking lots break up forests into patches, populations of small animals become isolated. These are mammals such as native mice and voles, amphibians such as frogs and salamanders, and reptiles such as turtles and snakes. Predators, disease and natural disasters such as drought typically wear down these populations.

In a natural environment, other members of those species would recolonize that land. But that doesn't happen when the habitats are isolated, and the populations blink out like spent candles.

On a rainy night about 10 years ago, a University of Richmond biologist, Dr. Joseph C. Mitchell, found about 40 spotted salamanders squashed on a road in Short Pump. The cigar-size amphibians had been migrating to small ponds to breed. Now, Mitchell can't even find bodies.

"They and the places where they had bred, they're all gone. They're just flat gone. Their habitat's gone. There is nothing to breed in, so they're all gone."

. . .

Habitat loss can take many forms. It can be as obvious as a parking lot or mall where a forest once stood. Or it can be subtle - houses and roads that cut up forests and fields into patches so small that many animals can't use them.

Many animals die quickly, buried alive when the bulldozer moves through.

"I think there is this sense that when you cut the forest for my house, Bambi and all of Bambi's friends are going to migrate to some other, happier place and take up residence there. There is no real evidence for that," said Old Dominion's Savitzky.

Animals, such as rabbits, that can move to other habitats will find them already occupied. The newcomers will be disoriented and exposed to predators.

"They don't know the good hiding places or the good feeding places," said Dr. Carola Haas, a Virginia Tech ecologist.

. . .

From an airplane, the Richmond area appears to be heavily forested, a lush haven for wildlife. Not so, said Thomas L. Smith, director of the Virginia Natural Heritage Program, which works to protect rare species.

Many songbirds and other animals live in deep woods; they require large tracts of contiguous land. But our landscape is broken up by roads and subdivisions and businesses, and that destroys the forest's usefulness for these animals.

Also, many birds require brushy undergrowth to nest and hide in. But when you get off that plane and look at the forest from the ground, Smith said, you often find not undergrowth but manicured yards that make poor habitats.

"It can be incredibly deceptive," Smith said.

Another illusion: When people build homes in natural habitats, some animals prosper. Deer eat backyard plantings. Raccoons, opossums, squirrels, crows and blue jays thrive on people's backyard trash and bird food.

But these animals, their numbers artificially high, drive out others. Deer, by eating low-lying shrubs, destroy the underbrush many songbirds need. Raccoons, opossums, squirrels, crows, blue jays and cats eat songbirds, bird eggs, frogs, reptiles, turtle eggs and small mammals.

Many suburbanites see deer and raccoons and opossums and think they are living in a thriving wildlife habitat. It's not true, said UR's Mitchell.

"If you are seeing a lot of opossums and raccoons, and even deer, from my view, you're seeing a degraded habitat."

. . .

Within the past 40 years, a small bird called the Bachman's warbler, whose range included Virginia, apparently has become extinct because of the cutting of its swampy Southeastern forests. Within the past 21 years, a Southwest Virginia mussel called the forkshell apparently became extinct because of water pollution, another type of habitat loss.

If current development patterns continue, "then we're headed for some other species to become extinct," said Dr. Ruth A. Beck, a William and Mary biologist.

Walking along the bustling, six-lane Mechanicsville Turnpike over the Chickahominy River, Beck flushed a green heron, a fairly secretive bird. She pointed out dragonflies, turtles, brilliant red cardinal flowers and ferns, all signs of a healthy ecosystem.

She also pointed to a hole, the size of a golf cup, in the bridge where oil and other pollutants wash into the river.

This arrangement isn't ideal, but it shows people and wildlife can get along if some habitat is preserved, Beck said. "This is a little haven. . . . This is co-existing."

Beck drove by Henrico Plaza, a sad-looking strip of mostly vacant stores facing acres of weed-sprouting, carless parking spaces on the turnpike just west of Mechanicsville. Builders should reuse such places instead of destroying natural areas farther out, she said.

"This certainly isn't suitable habitat for animals. It's not even suitable habitat for shoppers."

. . .

Birds and frogs eat harmful insects. Trees cool the earth and suck up air pollution. People spend $3 billion a year nationally to watch wildlife. And some disappearing animals and plants may have as-yet-unknown benefits.

"The insect that's going extinct today may have been tomorrow's cure for cancer," said Smith, of Virginia's heritage program.

Tech's Haas, who grew up playing outside as a North Dakota farm girl, offered a moral argument for native plants and animals: They should be saved so future generations can experience them.

"For whatever reason, whether you believe God put these things here or evolution created them, they're here, and I just don't feel like it's my right to take them away.

"It's not that people are taking them away intentionally by building their houses, but you have to think about the consequences of your actions."