Rare Rodent Likely Extinct

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - One of the last specks of native habitat in California's San Joaquin Valley is a gray-green patch of iodine brush and salt bush purchased by the state two decades ago to protect one of North America's rarest mammals, the Fresno kangaroo rat.

But there's a problem: The rare rodents have vanished.

"We captured one kangaroo rat, twice, in 1992," said Patrick Kelly, director of the San Joaquin Valley Endangered Species Recovery Program. "Since then, we have found no evidence of their existence."

In the struggle to save biological diversity, few landscapes are more imperiled than California's great agricultural mecca - the San Joaquin Valley. Yet, to the puzzlement of Kelly, most environmental groups have not rallied to its rescue.

Many groups in fact are rarer in the valley than the Fresno kangaroo rat.

"We are a backwater," Kelly said. "Salt bushes are not giant sequoias."

A century ago, the San Joaquin Valley was one of America's richest biological landscapes - a vast carpet of lakes, grassland, scrub brush and marshes. Now, with most of the region converted to agriculture, it is an ecological emergency ward.

Once abundant, the riparian brush rabbit has withered to two population groups, each home to a few dozen animals. The blunt-nosed leopard lizard is fading like the evening light, a victim of what Kelly calls "the extinction engine: land conversion, fragmentation, isolation and degradation."

And the Fresno "k-rat"? Kelly fears it could be extinct.

Like a doctor making house calls, Kelly spends a good deal of time on the road, checking the ecological health of habitat and species. It a lonesome, sometimes frustrating job. "Species are hanging on by their toenails," he said. "An entire ecosystem is at risk."

Some groups - including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense - have made contributions in the region, said Daniel Williams, professor of zoology at the University of California, Stanislaus.

But most are seldom seen, he said.

"In general, environmental organizations have not really been interested in using their influence and political capital in the valley to assist endangered species and their habitat," said Williams, who oversees the university's endangered species recovery program. "They haven't paid that much attention."

Kelly received his doctorate in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley, writing his thesis on the dusky-footed wood rat, a biological cousin of the brush rabbit.

Since then, he has become captivated by his subject matter.

"We need to spread the word that it is as important to conserve rodents and other small mammals as it is to conserve grizzly bears and gray wolves," Kelly wrote in a recent biological journal, in an essay titled, "Oh Rats!"

Peter Brussard, former president of the Society for Conservation Biology said environmental groups are missing in action on other fronts, too.

"There are a lot of things nobody wants to tackle that are having major impacts on biological diversity," Brussard said.

"Maybe these are not sexy issues. But if environmental groups are in the marketing business, why aren't they trying to market these things?"