BrianGarst.com

Fish and Wildlife Service puts woodpecker ahead of people, gets results good for neither.

The chain saws started in February when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes, a state-designated bird sanctuary, on notice that rapid development threatened to squeeze out the woodpecker.

The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods in the southeastern North Carolina town as protected habitat _ and subject to more stringent building restrictions.

Hoping to beat the mapmakers to the printer, landowners swarmed city hall to apply for lot-clearing permits. Treeless land, after all, needn’t be set aside for woodpeckers. Since February, the city has issued 368 logging permits, 90 in May alone, the vast majority without accompanying building permits.

. . .Bonner Stiller has been holding onto two wooded, half-acre lakefront lots for 23 years to pay for his kids’ college educations or cushion his retirement. He had both lots stripped of longleaf pines before the government could issue its new map.

“They have finally developed a value,” says Stiller, a state legislator who gave away the trees in exchange for the clearing. “And then to have that taken away from you?”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with common sense. When you threaten to take away control of people’s property (which often amounts to a majority of their livelihood), they are going to try to stop you. In this case, that means preempting any possible declarations of endangered habitat. Private property shouldn’t mean jumping through government hoops and having to go through endless bureaucratic red-tape anytime you want to build on your property. So, rather than risk that possibility, the people sensibly removed the problem trees before government said otherwise.

This is what happens when you place the welfare of birds ahead of people. It’s time to move past this unnatural notion that any endangered species must be protected no matter the cost. Species come and go, it’s a fact of nature. The willingness of some to destroy the lives of human beings, as often happens, in order to protect them shows shockingly misaligned moral compasses.