GoldenCheekedWarbler_ImminentDanger_Bunch_Bill_AustinTX_10November2018_Reel3462.wav

Bill Bunch [00:00:00] Well, with the, with the warbler, there had been a proposal, it had been a candidate for a long time and there'd been a proposal to list it, and also with the cave critters, from Travis Audubon Society - years before I arrived. And it was just sort of sitting on a shelf and we, we found out about that.

Bill Bunch [00:00:22] And then we're seeing that there was a major construction happening out in that Four Points area of northern Travis County that were directly threatening the best golden-cheeked warbler habitat in the world In the upper Bull Creek watershed, and then also a number of caves that are in that exact same area that were home to these cave critters.

Bill Bunch [00:00:48] So under the Endangered Species Act, there is a mechanism for citizen enforcement actions to force listings of species if there's imminent danger to their survival. So we filed notice of intent to sue letters, saying, you know, you've got to, you've got to move. You gotta list these critters right away.

Bill Bunch [00:01:15] And I partnered with a lawyer from the National Wildlife Federation in their, their national office up in D.C. to help with that, in particular on the warbler listing.

Bill Bunch [00:01:28] And the Earth Firsters were out in the field documenting the sort of strategic destruction of habitat because developers knew that the species was, could be listed any day.

Bill Bunch [00:01:47] And the most well-known of this incident, H. Ross Perot, who had later ran for President - he had bought a bunch of land for development up in northwest Austin and had started, you know, clearing, bringing in these giant, you know, tree-eating machines to just, you know, bulldoze and destroy this old growth, mixed oak / cedar woodlands, that's the warbler habitat. And he did so without any sort of permitting.

Bill Bunch [00:02:23] And so the Earth First activists discovered this, reported it to the City. The City red-tagged them, saying, hey, you know, you're doing pre-development construction clearing. You've got to get a permit.

Bill Bunch [00:02:36] And then we also alerted the Fish and Wildlife Service that this was going on.

Bill Bunch [00:02:42] Perot's people said, oh, they were clearing for agricultural purposes, not for development. And they brought some goats out there.

Bill Bunch [00:02:51] So, we talked about Mr. Perot, as the, the billionaire goat herd of Travis County. So that didn't fly too well.

Bill Bunch [00:03:01] So, after we filed this intent to sue for emergency listing, they did actually publish an emergency listing within a couple of weeks for the golden-cheeked warbler, and then later followed it up with the the normal endangered listing.