Earth is experiencing a biodiversity crisis. Species are being lost at an unprecedented rate as they face threats from human development, rising temperatures, pollution, new pathogens and predators, and more. In the United States alone, more than 1,300 species are currently listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Some — like the California condor or the North Atlantic right whale — have large groups working to protect them. The fate of other, lesser-known species are largely in the hands of a few individuals working at a state wildlife department, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), a conservation organization, or a university, whose sole responsibility is protecting a population against seemingly impossible yearly hurdles.

What ties many of these people together is not only the focus of their work but their optimism to keep at it despite the constant challenges. In a time when it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the state of the planet, these conservationists chip away at their tasks, embracing an analytical approach and an often-mundane on-the-ground reality as they work toward their lofty goal.

Unfortunately, this type of work is getting harder under the Trump administration, particularly when it comes to federal conservation programs. Since January 20, the administration has fired hundreds of staff at the USFWS, which was already understaffed, diminishing their ranks further.

Here are six species under threat and the people committed to saving them.

The Attwater’s Prairie-Chicken

The goofy calls of a million Attwater’s prairie-chickens once boomed throughout Texas and Louisiana prairies. But habitat loss and fragmentation, overhunting, and imported fire ants have all reduced the species’ range to two Texas counties. Today, conservationists aim to rebuild their numbers and ultimately to create a self-sustaining breeding population of 6,000 at the Attwater’s Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge.

Brooke Burrows, the refuge’s new manager, says that this goal is at least a decade away. Captive breeding programs at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, Houston Zoo, Caldwell Zoo, and Sutton Avian Research Center hold a significant flock, releasing new generations annually to the reserve. But captive bred birds have less than a 20 percent chance of survival once released, compared to a 50 percent annual survival rate for wild-born chicks.

The birds are at the bottom of the food chain, and “there isn’t anything that can be done about that,” Burrows says. In addition to the ants, which compete for the native insects chicks rely on for food, bobcats, raptors and other animals prey on them. A predator-deterrent fence at the reserve helps, but doesn’t eliminate the threat. (Of course, the predators at the release sites also serve an important role in the ecosystem)

Burrows was born in Florida and spent her foundational years in Texas. She first joined the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013 as an intern at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and has since worked at the Patoka River Refuge, the Detroit Lakes Wetland Management District, Minnesota Valley Refuge, and Kaua’i Refuge. She returned home to Texas to support the prairie-chickens at the end of 2023.

The effort has seen its share of challenges. Houston’s Tax Day Flood of 2016 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 reduced the population of wild birds to just 12. Available prairies are also a limitation: When there was a wild population of a million grouse, there were six million acres of coastal prairie. With today’s 200 birds, less than 1 percent of that prairie habitat remains. But Burrows refuses to lose hope.

“If it weren’t for people who had hope, we wouldn’t have this refuge or these birds on this landscape. Period,” she says. “We have overcome so much in the last several decades. Despite being underdogs, these birds keep finding ways to survive. They haven’t given up, and we can’t either,” Burrows says. “In Texas, we are proud of our state, our history. This bird is Texas’s grouse! We should all be proud to lift up this species and help it thrive.”

The Black-Footed Ferret

Black-footed ferrets once had a broad range across Central and North America, numbering in the tens of thousands before human development destroyed much of their habitat and extermination efforts led to steep declines in prairie dogs, which they rely on for prey. By 1967, they were thought to be extinct, but in 1981 a small population was rediscovered in Meeteetse, Wyoming. In 1986, just 18 individuals were known to exist.

Today, there are about 300 ferrets in captive breeding facilities and anywhere from 300 to 500 roaming the North American prairies. Justin Chuven, who serves as the project coordinator for the USFWS’s Colorado-based Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Program, is responsible for them.

Current population numbers represent a decline from years past, Chuven admits. Ferrets are constantly facing challenges from drought and human development, and more than anything, from the sylvatic plague, a flea-born bacterial disease.

Black-footed ferrets born in captivity are given lifetime vaccines against the plague. Still, it can indirectly wipe out their population by ravaging through prairie dogs, which make up to 90 percent of their diet.

In Chuven’s two years as project coordinator, he has kept up the work of his predecessors and kept his head high.

“If you look at the max number of animals in any given area for any given year, then you see that the population could thrive if the conditions were right,” he says.

His work could soon benefit from promising (if controversial) new technologies, such as cloning.

Dwindling ferret numbers created a “severe genetic bottleneck,” Chuven says, as the founding population for today’s surviving ferrets was only seven individuals. In April, the Colorado-based recovery center announced the birth of two clones of a ferret that died 30 years ago. If these clones begin reproducing, they will significantly increase the genetic diversity among the population.

Researchers have more to learn about the health of clones, their ability to reproduce, and unintended consequences of releasing them into the wild. There are not yet plans to rewild clone-descendent animals.

“It’s just absolutely amazing to see so many really, really smart people are dedicating their lives to the conservation of this species,” Chuven says.

While the sylvatic plague can seem like an impossible hurdle, Chuven sees a future when the black-footed ferret can be removed from the endangered species list, and the steps it would take to get there.

“It’s full of challenges of course, but this is really an optimistic story,” he says.

The USFWS’s black-footed ferret recovery program has suffered significant cuts since President Trump took office in January. Tina Jackson, the head of the federal program, was fired. So were two staffers at the its primary breeding facility, based in Colorado, and a staff biologist leading efforts in Wyoming.

The Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit

Pygmy rabbits are the smallest rabbit species in North America — adult animals are just a little bigger than a human fist. The Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, which is designated as a distinct population segment of the species under the Endangered Species Act, survives only in two small, shrubsteppe-rich habitats in Central Washington’s Columbia Basin, with the most recent population estimate at around 130 to 150 individuals.

The Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits, which have been isolated from other pygmy rabbit populations for at least 10,000 years, have struggled primarily due to habitat loss caused by farming and other development. The species was emergency-listed as endangered in 2001 when the population was estimated at just 16 individuals and has since been through several breeding and reintroduction efforts. The most recent began in 2011, led by Jon Gallie, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The department’s recovery plans aim, at a minimum, to create two distinct, stable populations of the rabbit in the wild, with a total population count of at least 1,400 adults. While that goal is still far off, the population is trending in a positive direction.

“I feel like we’re doing pretty good,” Gallie says. “We more or less have two populations on the ground right now.”

This feeling is relatively new, and Gallie knows more than anyone that it things can change at any moment. The Pearl Hill fire in the summer of 2020 burned 174,000 acres in its first 24 hours, burning two pygmy rabbit breeding enclosures, four acclimation pens, and 100 square miles of vital habitat, and killing half of all Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits.

Every summer, this threat looms.

“I still probably think about it once a week, just kind of hit my head against the desk,” he says.

He learned a lot from the 2020 fires. First, he realized that at this point, they pose a bigger risk to recovery than development, disease, and predation. He also learned the value of diversifying the landscape.

“Right now, our job is to not worry about what we just lost, but let’s get them into these new patches of habitat and see how that works,” he says. “And luckily we have a pretty good track record of most of the places we try.”

While 150 individuals may not seem like much, seeing the rise and fall of the species over nearly two decades puts it into context. Twenty years ago, there were no Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits in the wild.

“When I started in the region in 2008, there were none,” Gallie says, “and now we have 130, 150 on the landscape and they continue to sustain themselves and continue to colonize. That’s pretty exciting, pretty rewarding to put something back.”

The Dusky Gopher Frog

As the story goes, the last breeding population of dusky gopher frogs was discovered in 1987 when a USDA forest service technician heard a snore coming from within a pond in the De Soto National Forest in Mississippi (the frog’s call sounds like a human snore). Until then, the frogs hadn’t been seen since the 1950s. Most of today’s dusky gopher frog population can be traced back to that pond, and to a recovery effort that is now led by John Tupy, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Dusky gopher frogs were once abundant along the Gulf Coastal Plain in lower Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, yet the last known Alabama sighting was in 1922 and the last Louisiana sighting was in 1967. Like all amphibians, gopher frogs are an indicator of habitat quality, and their loss in numbers is a loud siren about habitat destruction over the last century.

Federally listed as an endangered species in 2001, the frogs are now the focus of a dedicated recovery effort. In 2016, tanks of frogs were moved from the pond to cattle tanks in the Harrison Experimental Forest, which is also located in De Soto National Forest. There, they have a stable water supply (unlike the pond, which dries each year) and are safe from predators.

Tupy is directing his efforts toward protecting existing habitat, head-starting tadpoles in cattle tanks, searching for more wild populations, translocating existing populations to expand their habitat, researching habitat needs, and expanding captive-breeding and reintroduction efforts.

In addition to habitat loss, recovery efforts are also coming up against a little-studied disease known as Dermomycoides that caused massive die-offs in 2003, 2016, and 2018. Learning more about it remains a top priority. Currently there almost nothing can be done to prevent such die-offs from happening again.

Still, with a current breeding population of about 500, Tupy maintains hope when he thinks of how far the species has come, and of the numerous partnerships and decades-long efforts of organizations and universities that keep the momentum for recovery building.

The Hawaiian Yellow-Faced Bee

Yellow-faced bees were once among the most abundant Hawaiian insects, flourishing from coastlines to mountains across the islands. Today they inhabit only a few narrow, healthy strips of land, mostly on O‘ahu and Maui. Urban development has led to harsh declines in the islands’ bee populations in recent years, and in 2016, seven of Hawaiʻi’s 63 yellow-faced bee species were listed as federally endangered.

Yellow-faced bees are the only endemic bee family in the world’s most isolated archipelago, but they are not isolated from the diseases, toxins, habitat loss, climate variability, and increased agriculture production affecting pollinators worldwide. Non-native species remain their biggest threats, mostly non-native ants and parasitic wasps.

Paul Krushelnycky, an assistant researcher at University of Hawaiʻi, is focusing on restoring coastal plant communities in four sites (an important conservation effort in its own right, he notes) to provide the diverse floral resources needed to ensure a healthy, yellow-faced bee habitat.
Krushelnycky doesn’t let these obstacles eclipse his vision for more healthy coastal ecosystems supporting robust pollinator populations. He takes the journey step by step, learning more about the bees’ resource needs and building that information into habitat rehabilitation efforts.

Humans are responsible for this work, especially in Hawai‘i, Krushelnycky says, where so much habitat is under threat. His approach involves touring a narrow strip of native plants on an island overrun with non-native species, taking presence-or-no-presence bee counts on the strip, and designing artificial housing there for the bees, whose houses are, at times, completely overrun with non-native wasps. New species and pathogens are introduced to the islands each year, and one of the greatest challenges is anticipating what the future may bring.

He’s surrounded by a community of competent individuals too, he says, which includes project assistants, volunteers, students, and government and non-profit partners. In daily pursuits, despite the threats, the goal seems not just attainable, but inevitable.

The Island Fox

On the Channel Islands, an eight-island archipelago within the Southern California Bight, dwells a small, endemic species of fox. Six islands each carry unique subspecies, reflecting divergent evolutionary history split by the water.

In 1998, a North American raccoon made it to one of the islands, Catalina, by boat, passing along a fatal dog disease that killed 90 percent of the foxes on the island. Two years later, three more island populations crashed toward extinction. Decreasing bald eagle numbers contributed to the declines. Bald eagles, whose populations have suffered from DDT pesticide exposure, peacefully coexisted with the fox and drove away golden eagles, which hunt the small mammals. The introduction of farm and game animals also played a role in habitat destruction.

Pat Meyer founded her nonprofit, Friends of the Island Fox, in 2005 (the nonprofit joined the Channel Islands Park Foundation and Channel Islands Restoration in 2011, then returned to its status as an independent entity in 2020) to help save the foxes.

Meyer was first introduced to the foxes when she was researching material for an ecology lecture as a docent at Los Angeles Zoo in 1992, and met Tim Coonan, a naturalist at Channel Islands National Park. In 2003, a group of docents constructed recovery pens on the islands where the foxes could be protected from golden eagle attacks. During a meeting, Coonan posed the idea of Meyer starting a nonprofit to continue this work.

“I was concerned about my lack of experience and scientific knowledge, but how could I resist the chance to help such a beautiful canine, one so unique and in need?” she says.

Today, the nonprofit is recognized as the authority on the island fox. It helps fund research projects and supports the national park and Catalina Conservancy in their conservation work, and has been incredibly successful in its mission: Due to its efforts, the fox was removed from the endangered species list in 2016, after its population grew from just 15 individuals in 2000 to a sustainable population of over 800.

But that doesn’t mean Meyer’s work is done. Friends of the Island Fox today remains hard at work safeguarding foxes from new and emerging challenges. It tracks and monitors individual foxes, vaccinates populations against diseases, and studies the island ecosystem.

Without foxes on the Channel Islands, deer mice overconsume plants and spotted skunks overproduce. Many native plants, like the Catalina cherry, toyon, and manzanita, rely on the island fox to swallow and then disperse their seeds, which the insect and bird populations also depend on. The healthy plant population reduces erosion, keeping kelp forests around the island that so many marine species depend on intact.

“The fox work is fascinating in its strong illustration of how ecology studies uncovered the mystery of their decline and what recovery efforts were needed,” Meyer says. “Our work continues.”

This article has been updated to note the impact of recent Trump administration job cuts at the USFWS.