Feds grant rare Southwest flower endangered status

Joe Duhownik

PHOENIX (CN) — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday declared that a rare desert flower that grows only in southwest New Mexico is now endangered.

Scientists once thought the swale paintbrush, first discovered in the 1890s, existed only in Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico, until the early 1990s when a Bureau of Land Management botanist discovered a small population in the Animas Valley of southwest New Mexico, which is now believed to be the last remaining habitat for the desert flowers.

“The disappearance of this ornate, almost luminous flower went unnoticed as cattle trampled our desert grasslands into a struggling remnant of what they once were,” Michael Robinson, a senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a press release. “Thankfully, this beautiful desert gem will now get the scientific attention and help the Endangered Species Act calls for.”

The Center for Biological Diversity sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in federal court in 2020 over 241 species awaiting listing by the service. Once it receives a petition to list a species, Fish and Wildlife has 12 months to determine whether to do so under the Endangered Species Act. But in 2020, more than 500 species made up the agency's backlog.

The conservation group WildEarth Guardians first petitioned to list the flower in 2007, but it wasn’t until the center’s lawsuit that the designation finally moved forward. Now that the plant is officially listed as endangered, Fish and Wildlife will develop a recovery plan for swale paintbrushes that likely will include reintroducing them to other habitats to ensure the species' survival — though the agency says it has struggled to find a comparable habitat to place the delicate flowers. It has, though, collected samples for storage and research, which it intends to replant in the future.

Among the reasons to list the species are “habitat loss and fragmentation, hydrological alteration, altered fire regimes, effects from intensive grazing pressure, exotic plant invasion, climate change impacts and the cumulative effects of multiple stressors,” according to the listing’s executive summary.

Despite multiple requests to declare a critical habitat, which would come with additional protections for the flower, the agency declined, “due to the risk that doing so would exacerbate the degree of risk to the known population by publishing locality information.”

Aside from the plant’s limited distribution, it is extremely sensitive to climate change and trampling under the hooves of grazing cattle.

Though Fish and Wildlife determined that overgrazing can prove detrimental, it will conduct more research on that and other anthropogenic effects before making any grazing determinations.

Mark Egger, the botanist who named the swale paintbrush, said he'd like to know more about how the cattle in the area are managed. He guessed that if the flowers are still there, then the area likely hasn't been overgrazed to a detrimental extent.

"That doesn't mean that overgrazing hasn't been a problem in the past and could be in the future if it's mismanaged," he said. "Grazing during the monsoon season would not be a good idea."

Egger said he doesn't believe that any large number of people would go out looking for the flowers; any who do may have a hard time finding them blended into the landscape.

Fish and Wildlife didn’t respond to a phone call requesting additional comment.

The remaining population of swale paintbrushes exists on a mere 28-acre swath of private land. A 2020 survey conducted by the New Mexico Natural Heritage Program found only 31 plants in the area — still a sizable growth from only two of the plants found in a 2017 survey of the same area. The flower thrives in flat, seasonally wet areas in arid grasslands, according to the organization.

Though Egger says that number doesn't mean much.

"They're annual plants," he said. "There may be 55 the following year, or there might be 5,000 the next year if conditions are really good."

Fish and Wildlife, and the Center for Biological Diversity, believe that the plant has been absent from Mexico since 1985. But in 2022, an amateur naturalist captured a photo of what appears to be a swale paintbrush in central Chihuahua.

"It really does look like the species," Egger said of the discovery. "It very well may still exist in Mexico, but these are photographs. They need to be verified with specimens to really be acceptable scientific reference."

The Endangered Species Act has been successful at preventing the extinction of 99% of the animal and plant species under its care, and it has put many species on a trajectory toward recovery. But chronic delays in providing protections imperil many other deserving species.