Fredell, who represents both the utility and Colorado Springs on the state task force, says the group may ask the USFWS to delay its decision on listing the mouse for another six months in order to give the state more time to come up with a conservation plan.
"Anything that's going to involve crossing a creek--new interceptors for wastewater lines, putting in paths for parks, whatever--it's going to be a more difficult process," he says. "There are a lot of details that haven't been worked out."
At the same time, Fredell says he's encouraged by what the task force has been able to accomplish so far. "You hear the spotted owl horror stories, the stories about projects being held up forever and the huge expense," he says. "We've come a long ways from the first few days after the proposed listing, when people were talking about going in and amending the Endangered Species Act. I think we've got a real opportunity here to set up a national blueprint for working through these kinds of things."
Biologists and local officials are also pleading for more time to come to grips with the mouse situation. However, the mouse may not have much time left. Jasper Carlton concedes that the Endangered Species Act "has plenty of club, but it doesn't have enough honey"--but he insists the act will provide more solid protection for the Preble's than further delays and interim conservation measures.
Still, even Carlton, who can sound like the voice of doom on the subject, says he's encouraged by the flurry of activity the proposed listing has generated.
"The riparian corridors on the eastern front of the Rockies are getting more management attention now than they've had for 25 years," he says. "We're not satisfied yet, but people are scampering to do some things. Hopefully, it's not just to keep the mouse from being listed."
Two weeks ago a battery of industry interests sponsored a daylong conference in Northglenn on endangered-species issues. There was the usual grumbling from sportsmen, farmers and developers about federal heavy-handedness and regulatory overkill; the usual hand-wringing over how to balance competing recreational, commercial and governmental demands on dwindling resources; the usual cries for reform and gnashing of teeth over the outrageous costs involved in accommodating some small creature of the night that happens to be standing--or jumping--in the path of the next mega-mall.
Saving riparian corridors wasn't exactly the burning topic of the day. The notion of a threatened ecosystem may simply be too abstract to be grasped easily, particularly when its most endangered inhabitants are rodents that bear absolutely no resemblance to Mickey Mouse.
Wildlife's Judy Sheppard calls the Preble's jumping mouse "enigmatic mini-fauna," as opposed to "charismatic mega-fauna" like baby seals and grizzly bears. "They don't have big, round, dark eyes, they're not fuzzy and furry, and they're generally not anything we can identify with," she notes. "I talk to lots of college and high-school students wanting to do papers on wolves and grizzlies. The species we tend to identify with are at the top of the food chain."
In reality, Sheppard says, the pests and varmints at the bottom of the food chain may be more important in ecological terms than the big predators at the top of the heap. "Everything in the food web has a role," she says. "I don't think any of us are smart enough to know exactly what those roles are. But when you begin to take pieces out, you begin to weaken the web, and we don't know at what point we will cause it to collapse."
It's a familiar argument, the kind of thing one hears from time to time in the ongoing struggle over endangered species: Don't mess with Mother Nature. For all we know, that plant could contain a cure for cancer. They were here first.
Curiously, such statements seem to emerge in the public debate only at a point when the species at issue is already in the soup, when its habitat is all but gone and its very right to existence is being questioned--when, in short, it may already be too late.
The data still isn't in, but biologists suspect that the Preble's may still have a chance. For the moment, it has our attention. That's more than it's ever had before, and that may be what it needs to keep its chances for survival from spiraling downward--corkscrewing, like a mouse without a tail.
