The Bulldozer and the Butterfly: Implications for Habitat Conservation Plans
by Robin Meadows
In the spring, tiny blue butterflies flit among the wildflowers on San Bruno Mountain, an oasis of peace amidst the bustling cities south of San Francisco. But the apparent serenity is belied by the controversy raging over the mountain, which is home to two endangered butterfly species--the Mission blue (Icaricia icarioides missionensis) and the San Bruno elfin (Euphydryas editha bayensis)--and the site of the country's first Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP).
Approved in 1982, the San Bruno Mountain HCP was conceived as a way of solving conflicts between landowners and endangered species: Developers have been allowed to build on parts of the butterflies' habitat in exchange for restoring other parts. Since then, about 40 other HCPs have been approved, and nearly 160 more are in progress. While they are concentrated in rapidly growing states like California, Florida, and Texas, HCPs are also catching on in Alabama, North Carolina, and other states. HCPs sound good in theory--but how well do they work in practice? Many say that HCPs are no panacea. "Everyone wants to hear that you can have your endangered species and development too," says Jacob Sigg, who is both president of the Yerba Buena Chapter of the California Native Plant Society and chairman of the Society's Invasive Exotics Committee. "But HCPs are another way around the Endangered Species Act. They probably weren't intended that way but that's the way they're working out."
Others say that HCPs are the best we can do under the circumstances. "Environmentalists are too strident about the San Bruno Mountain HCP," says Dennis Murphy, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford. "It's not as good as it could be, but it's pretty good in a nation with such strong private property laws."
Regardless of who's right, the successes and shortcomings of the San Bruno Mountain HCP will be sure to influence the fates of future HCPs. "HCPs will be the central theme of Endangered Species Act reauthorization under a Republican Congress that values protecting private property rights," says Murphy. Before the San Bruno Mountain HCP was implemented, the development company Visitacion Associates owned 70 percent (nearly 2,500 acres) of the 1,300-foot mountain. According to the terms of the HCP, Visitacion could build on 800 of those acres but had to let San Mateo County annex the remaining 1,700 acres to an existing park. Moreover, Visitacion had to set up a fund to restore the native grasslands that the butterflies require and that were being overgrown by gorse, fennel, and other invasive exotic plants. The county hired the Palo Alto-based environmental consulting firm Thomas Reid Associates to implement the HCP. Their responsibilities included controlling the exotic plants and restoring native ones, and monitoring the butterfly populations to make sure that all was well on the mountain. In 1993 the California Native Plant Society's Sigg charged that all was not well. According to Sigg, the exotic plants were spreading, and grasslands had not been restored in compensation for those destroyed during development. "[Thomas Reid Associates (TRA) and San Mateo County] have been pretty laid back about implementing the HCP," he says. "They say the plan is working but can't prove it."
But eradicating the well-established stands of exotic plants is easier said than done. "Without the HCP the mountain would be in much worse shape than it is now," counters Sue Stern, the TRA biologist primarily responsible for controlling exotic plants on the mountain. Indeed, without intervention, exotic plants would spread inexorably over the mountain. However, she also says that TRA has recently redefined their approach to implementing the HCP, and acknowledges that "Jake was instrumental in getting the ball rolling."
In response to Sigg's charges, TRA and Roman Gankin, the San Mateo County planner administering the HCP, invited weed control specialists David Bayer of the University of California at Davis and John Randall of The Nature Conservancy to visit and evaluate the exotics control program. Bayer and Randall concluded that the day-to-day work was fine as far as it went, but that TRA lacked a well-defined master plan. Most tellingly, while TRA had estimated the increased acreage of exotics from 1932 to 1981 when preparing the HCP in 1982, they had not quantified the extent of exotics since then. In other words, there was no way to track any progress in replacing exotics with the native plants essential to the butterflies and other rare species on the mountain. TRA took Bayer and Randall's comments to heart. "I learned a lot from John Randall," says Stern. In addition to making topographic maps of the exotics that will be used to quantify their acreage on the mountain, she has determined which exotics to eradicate first on a site-by-site basis for the areas with the most native plants--and therefore the best butterfly habitat. She has also begun working toward restoring native habitat with seeds collected from the mountain.
The lessons of the San Bruno Mountain HCP are twofold. First, for all their flaws, HCPs are better than nothing when it comes to conserving habitat remnants in rapidly growing areas. And second, the best laid plans are not enough. "I've gotten the feeling that it's all too easy to create all these HCPs and act as if the job is done. But if we don't check on them, we won't know how well they're working," comments Randall. "HCPs are the showpieces of modern conservation and here's the first one--but how well are we monitoring it?"
(ZooGoer 24(4) 1995. Copyright 1995 Robin Meadows. All rights reserved.)
