Activist Keeps Close Watch Over a Dwindling Flock

Day after day, Leeona Klippstein has been counting gnatcatchers.

She pores through weighty documents and confronts government experts, suspicious that a cover-up is under way--and that developers in Southern California may have bulldozed more of the rare songbirds than the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is letting on.

Klippstein is among the harshest critics of a conservation plan widely touted as a groundbreaking compromise between environmentalists and developers to save the threatened California gnatcatcher and other troubled Orange County animals and plants.

Although the plan has won applause from many in the environmental ranks, Klippstein contends it is a dangerous precedent, a sham.

Hers is a lonely war, especially in an era that celebrates ecological compromise, not confrontation. Some members in the environmental world call her claims alarmist and extreme. Government officials say her counts of gnatcatcher fatalities are greatly inflated.

Still, federal officials acknowledged this month that they have launched a formal review of how many of the tiny songbirds still live in Southern California. The review arose out of concern that the tally of lost gnatcatchers could be approaching the legal limit and because of scrutiny from environmentalists like Klippstein, a Fish and Wildlife official said Saturday. Others credit Klippstein’s watchdog work for focusing new attention on the gnatcatcher’s welfare.

The question of gnatcatcher counts is a weighty one for environmentalists and developers alike. If too many gnatcatchers are lost, some construction in Southern California could be slowed temporarily--and the public could lose faith in the compromise effort touted as a way to save rare plants and animals as well as jobs.

Klippstein, 35, the outspoken co-founder of a group called Spirit of the Sage Council, is airing her criticisms just before U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is due in Orange County to sign off on a first-in-the-nation plan that some experts predict will be a blueprint for habitat conservation programs nationwide. A formal ceremony with Babbitt, State Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler and Irvine Co. Chairman Donald L. Bren is planned for Wednesday morning in Shady Canyon in Irvine. Klippstein is unfazed.

“The premise is illogical,” she says of the Natural Community Conservation Planning program. “This is a shell game, and we’ve all gotten wrapped up watching the hand but not watching the gnatcatchers.”

She says that soon before his suicide, a friend, who was a Fish and Wildlife biologist, told Klippstein that the number of lost gnatcatchers had already exceeded the limit--a claim that federal officials deny. After his death, she began trying to piece together gnatcatcher data in hopes of understanding his doubts about the NCCP program.

Now Klippstein has assembled an arsenal of paper--draft biological opinions, letters, bird counts--in her effort to focus attention on what she sees as flaws in the NCCP plan.

In June, she fired off a 37-page salvo to Babbitt and other high-level environmental officials, giving notice that her group and several others may sue the government and contending the plan violates the Endangered Species Act and other federal laws.

Interior Department Regional Solicitor David Nawi responded earlier this month: “We were very careful in putting together the documents she’s talking about and hope and believe we complied with all aspects of the law.”

Some characterize Klippstein’s actions as “paper monkey-wrenching,” a legal twist on the Earth First!-style activism made famous in Edward Abbey’s novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” While some radical environmentalists attempt to halt development projects by blocking bulldozers and pulling up survey stakes, others turn to legal channels, filing a multitude of records requests and launching lawsuits.

Others applaud her willingness to pelt government officials, journalists and fellow environmentalists with documents until they pay attention.

“I get calls from her at 7 o’clock in the morning and 12:30 at night, saying, ‘I found such-and-such,’ that she found a new place in the law where they messed up, or a new loophole in the law,” said Patrick Mitchell of Garden Grove, an active environmentalist.

Klippstein, of Whittier, a former U.S. Army emergency room technician, says she was drawn to environmentalism through an interest in the medicinal qualities of plants and concern about the vanishing coastal sage scrub habitat of Southern California.

She describes herself as a full-time volunteer for the Spirit of the Sage Council, a coalition of conservation and Native American groups. She has also worked with the Earth First! movement.

At the Fish and Wildlife Service, deputy state supervisor David Harlow chooses his words carefully when commenting on Klippstein’s criticisms.

“It’s always difficult to look at a broader planning horizon,” Harlow said, adding that changing gears to look at “a larger planning process versus an individual, species-by-species or project-by-project review just makes people uncomfortable.”

The Orange County central-coastal plan, approved by the Board of Supervisors in April, is the first of its kind created under the NCCP program. It will create a 37,000-acre preserve system designed and managed to protect rare wildlife while granting developers new certainty when building outside the preserve’s boundaries.

The program, intended to prevent the confrontations between landowners and government regulators often provoked by the Endangered Species Act, focuses on the coastal sage scrub habitat where the gnatcatcher lives.

Klippstein believes that many more gnatcatchers have been removed by development, fires and other pressures than federal officials are reporting, with 1,000 pairs or fewer remaining in the United States. She disagrees with a Fish and Wildlife report that as many as 3,000 gnatcatcher pairs may remain in the United States, and she contends that report was heavily edited by Fish and Wildlife officials, with gnatcatcher counts inflated in the process.

Jonathan Atwood of Manomet Observatory in Massachusetts, widely considered a leading gnatcatcher expert, says the federal estimate of 3,000 gnatcatcher pairs in the United States may well be correct. But the number of birds can fluctuate from year to year, complicating the counting process, he said.

Under 1993 guidelines, no more than 5% of the sage scrub or 116 pairs of gnatcatchers were to be “taken” or removed while preserve plans were designed. Klippstein believes that limit was exceeded, with more than 300 pairs of birds removed from central and coastal Orange County alone.

She says her suspicions arose from conversations with a friend, James Burns, who helped write the report as a staff biologist at the Fish and Wildlife office in Carlsbad. Burns, 26, died in La Verne April 25. Police said he shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

Klippstein believes that work pressures played a role in Burns’ death. However, La Verne Police Sgt. Darryl Seube says that a six-page handwritten suicide note focuses on marital problems.

Whatever the cause, his death sent Klippstein searching for drafts of the biological assessment of the NCCP Orange County plan that Burns helped write, and she has concluded that those drafts show that important information about the gnatcatcher population was removed.

She says the May 24 final biological report differs dramatically from earlier drafts. She showed a reporter text dated April 16 that contains some sections, such as a lengthy discussion of the problems of fragmenting natural habitat, that are shortened, changed or removed in the final report.

In response, Gail Kobetich, field supervisor at the Fish and Wildlife office in Carlsbad, said staff reports, whose early drafts are often prepared by junior staff biologists, normally undergo editing by more senior biologists. “It’s regular practice,” Kobetich said.

“It’s usually a matter of removing detail without removing substance,” said Kobetich, who maintains that the substance of the Orange County NCCP report was not changed.

Kobetich did confirm that the number of lost gnatcatchers is approaching the ceiling set in 1993, and that the federal government last month began a required 90-day study of the gnatcatcher population.

If the limit were reached, developers with plans for sites containing gnatcatchers could be stalled until an NCCP plan for the area was completed, he said.

No development slowdown is anticipated in central-coastal Orange County, where the plan agreement is to be signed this week. But other NCCP preserve plans remain incomplete in southern Orange County and San Diego County--and if the study shows the gnatcatcher population is smaller than Fish and Wildlife estimates, that could put a freeze on some development until NCCP plans for those areas are in place.

The 1993 guidelines call for a monitoring program of how much sage scrub and how many gnatcatchers can be removed while NCCP plans are prepared, with status reports developed every six months.

Kobetich said last week that although no formal six-month reports were prepared, the service continually monitored how many gnatcatchers were lost to development.

And how many birds really have been lost? That remains something of a mystery. The Fish and Wildlife tally shows 203 individual gnatcatchers lost so far during NCCP planning--just shy of the 232-bird ceiling. Klippstein claims service records show the number much higher.

Dan Silver of the Endangered Habitats League, who supports the NCCP, said of Klippstein’s work that if she’s holding government officials accountable, “That’s good work.”

However, he cautioned: “We absolutely support holding the wildlife agencies accountable, but we don’t want to see the programs themselves dismantled.”