By Rick Steelhammer
For HDMedia
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday that it has designated portions of Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties perched along the Virginia border as “critical habitat,” vital to the recovery of the endangered rusty patched bumble bee.
Nearly all of the designated West Virginia land lies within the Monongahela National Forest and adjoins a larger tract of newly designated critical habitat for the rare pollinator in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Virginia’s Bath and Highland counties. In all, 118,603 acres of critical habitat have been designated as a recovery zone for the endangered bee within the four West Virginia and Virginia counties. Most of that land lies on the Virginia side of the border.
Once common throughout the east and upper Midwest, the rusty patched bumble bee went into steep decline, vanishing from nearly 90% of its former range prior to its designation as an endangered species in 2017. It now exists in isolated pockets, with the largest remaining concentrations occurring in urban and suburban areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Factors believed contributing to the pollinator’s decline include habitat loss, climate change, disease, parasites and pesticide contamination. The bee gets its name from a patch of brownish-orange hair found on its abdomen.
Critical habitat designation
Thursday’s critical habitat designation includes a total of nearly 1.5 million acres including parts of 33 counties in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, West Virginia and Virginia.
A critical habitat designation could affect future development plans by federal agencies by requiring them to take into account the insect’s endangered species status and survival needs before authorizing construction. The designation does not affect private land ownership or create protected areas.
The critical habitat designation order follows a lawsuit filed against the agency by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of Minnesota Scientific and Natural Areas, which successfully challenged an earlier decision in 2020 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service not to designate critical habitat recovery zones for the imperiled insect.
Read more from HDMedia, here.
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