Red-Legged Frog Is Added to List of Threatened Species

A once-common frog living in remnants of California streams on Monday was declared a federal threatened species, the first to be unleashed by the Clinton administration from a logjam of hundreds of animals and plants held up by a yearlong congressional moratorium.

The California red-legged frog is believed to be Mark Twain’s fabled “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” But since Twain’s story was published in 1867, the West’s largest native frog has been eliminated from 70% of its historic range statewide--and from 90% in Southern California--largely due to urban and agricultural development of ponds and streams.

The olive-brown creature with a blush-colored underside is the first frog to make America’s list of endangered and threatened species. Worldwide, biologists say frogs and other amphibians are vanishing at a dramatic pace.

Monday’s decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service means private and public projects that could damage the frog’s habitat will undergo federal reviews requiring conservation measures. Included are planned residential developments in Carmel and near Palmdale next to Angeles National Forest.

The decision to list the frog was expected a year ago, but Congress, embroiled in a fiery battle to reform the Endangered Species Act, prohibited use of federal money to list species from April 1995 until last month, when President Clinton lifted the moratorium as part of the new budget deal.

Biologist Mark Jennings, who nominated the species in 1992, said the long-awaited protection comes in time to save from extinction a culturally important animal that many Californians remember from childhood days collecting tadpoles.

“This is not just some insignificant critter,” Jennings said, “it’s part of American folklore, and this puts it on the same plane as a lot of high-profile species like wolves and grizzlies. This was the frog that made Mark Twain famous.”

The frog--which prefers deep pools and dense, overhanging vegetation--was one of the most controversial among the species awaiting decisions from the federal government. It inhabits land coveted for housing and public water projects, and leaped to the top of the lineup when a federal judge, ruling in a lawsuit filed by Santa Barbara environmentalists, gave the wildlife agency until Monday to reach a decision.

California developers criticized the listing, saying it was made without adequate surveys to prove the species’ threatened status, especially on public lands. They worry that it will lead to restrictions on building, grazing and other uses of property, especially in Monterey, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, which have the largest blocks of remaining habitat occupied by the frogs.

The economic disruption “will probably be very great,” said Paul Campos, general counsel for the Building Industry Assn. of Northern California. “Small landowners may once again see their activity severely curtailed by having to go to the [Fish and Wildlife] Service.”

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But Wayne White, California supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the federal listing will pose few, if any, impediments for California development since most landowners are already working with federal biologists to protect the frog.

Gov. Pete Wilson’s resources secretary, Douglas Wheeler, agreed, saying the conflicts will be limited since wetlands occupied by the frog are scarce.

“Relatively minor economic disruption is anticipated, but the listing is still troublesome from the standpoint that it indicates degraded habitat,” Wheeler said. “The solution lies not in listing or punitive actions . . . but we ought to emphasize the need to protect habitat.”

In most cases, listing of a species does not stop development projects, but the wildlife service usually requires conservation measures which can be costly and time-consuming.

California environmentalists welcomed Monday’s decision but warned that several hundred other species--most of them in California--that had been blocked by the moratorium also deserve rapid federal action.

“So far, what we’ve seen and heard from the administration is a very meager down payment on its debt to the environment,” said Tara Mueller of the Natural Heritage Institute in San Francisco.

The frog is the latest example of the Clinton administration classifying creatures as “threatened,” instead of the more serious designation “endangered,” when they inhabit privately owned property and are likely to stir up a controversy. The designation gives the agency the authority to use more flexibility in minimizing economic disruption for landowners.

“It can quicken the pace of finding ways to mesh activities such as grazing and development with the species,” White said. “[A threatened species] may be able to withstand more effects from development and it gives us more opportunities for solutions.”

But Campos of the building association called it “window dressing.” The frog will be afforded all the same protections as an endangered species unless the wildlife agency invokes a special blanket provision, which it has not done at this point.

Until the second half of this century, the red-legged frog was abundant in two-thirds of the state, especially the San Gabriel Mountains, the Central Valley, the Sierra foothills and the San Francisco Bay Area.

In addition to the perils of development, the frog has been preyed upon by exploding numbers of non-native bullfrogs brought from the East Coast a century ago.

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“The frog is important to other creatures like the garter snake,” said biologist Jennings, a research associate with the California Academy of Sciences. “It does play an important role in ecosystems, and it occurs in habitats that humans for one reason or another have altered. It’s too late for some of the other places, but at least on the Central Coast there are still some very large blocks of habitat left.”

The frogs have been spotted recently in only one place in Los Angeles County, a spring-fed pond near Palmdale next to the Angeles National Forest. The land, slated for a new residential development, contains only four of the frogs.

More attention, however, will be focused on a large swath of property in the affluent coastal town of Carmel. About 2,000 acres of the 20,000-acre area have been earmarked for a housing development called Rancho San Carlos. The acreage is one of only three remaining places with a large population of over 300 frogs.

Carl Benz, assistant field supervisor for the wildlife agency in Ventura, said Rancho San Carlos developers have already agreed to create new wetlands to compensate for the development and that the frog listing will have little if any impact on the project.

Caltrans also has altered the route of a proposed bypass for the flood-damaged Devils Slide section of California 1 near Pacifica to “completely avoid red-legged frogs,” White said. And the Contra Costa Water District, building a $450-million reservoir, has moved frogs to a new area.

Managing frogs is new for the wildlife service, which is creating a specialized recovery team for the task. Jennings worries that the agency’s approach of allowing fragmented pieces of habitat surrounded by development may fail and the frogs will die off.

White acknowledged the risks of the piecemeal approach, saying it will be an experiment.

“We do have some very isolated populations and we know that,” White said. “That will have to be looked at and analyzed in the recovery process. We have to collect data and monitor what’s going on, so if it doesn’t work, we will know.”

Biologists in recent years have found dramatic declines in frogs worldwide, even in remote areas, and they suspect it could be due to ultraviolet rays from the thinned ozone layer and acid rain.

“The question of disappearing amphibians is becoming a critical issue,” White said, “and we’re just starting to understand it.”