The Center for Biological Diversity announced Wednesday plans to file a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for “failing to designate critical habitat for red knot shorebirds in a timely manner.”
Listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2014, red knots are known to make a 19,000-mile round trip migration from the southern tip of South America to their breeding grounds in the Arctic, stopping in the United States along the way in both directions.
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“However, the Service failed to designate and protect critical habitat as required by law. An April 2023 revision proposed to designate 683,405 acres of critical habitat but has not been finalized. The Service is now more than 10 years overdue on its red knot critical habitat designation deadline,” the center said, and the designation of critical habitat is an important step in any species’ recovery.
The nonprofit conservation organization said in a press release Wednesday that the federal agency had been provided the required 60-day notice about the expected legal action for not securing “lifesaving protections” for the migratory species.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service’s delay in protecting the wild coastal areas that red knots call home is pushing them closer to extinction,” Danny Waltz, a senior attorney at the center, said in a statement. “The federal government must protect the delicate Eastern shores that the red knot needs to survive.”
Red knots have suffered one of the steepest population declines among shorebirds in North America over the last four decades. Experts have calculated the species has seen a 94% decline in abundance. Red knots depend on coastal stopover sites along the Eastern Seaboard where they can rest and gorge on food like horseshoe crab eggs to fuel the remainder of their migratory journey.
A center study found that plants and animals with federally protected critical habitat are more than twice as likely to move toward recovery than species without it, the center added.
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