Thousands of Tiehm’s buckwheat plants, a rare desert wildflower that lives on 21 acres in Esmeralda County, have been destroyed.
The source of this destruction is a point of contention between Nevada conservationists and Ioneer Corp., an Australian mining company interested in developing an open-pit lithium mine in the flower’s habitat.
Patrick Donnelly, the Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity, released a statement Wednesday morning attributing the damage to human interference. Hours later, Ioneer Corp. released a statement arguing that the destruction was attributable to a “rodent attack.”
“We felt pretty incensed by the really outrageous allegations that were completely incorrect, that somehow this was a human attack on these 17,000 plants,” said James Calaway, the Ioneer executive chairman. He said cameras on site did not show any humans.
Conservationists with the Center for Biological Diversity discovered the damage this week on a “routine visit.” They found that 40% — 17,000 individual specimens — of the plant’s population had been dug up or destroyed. Donnelly called the argument that the damage was done by rodents “absolutely ludicrous.”
“The idea of an army of small mammals came to a very controversial mining site, selectively targeted only the endangered species at the center of that controversy, left shovel-shaped round holes in the ground wherever there was a buckwheat, disappeared without a trace leaving no droppings or footprints — it’s ludicrous,” Donnelly said.
Ed Grady, the president of the Eriogonum (buckwheat) Society and a professor at Ripon College in Wisconsin, has viewed photos of the damage. He says it's unlikely it was caused by rodents.
“I’ve never seen that before, and that’s what troubles me about this,” Grady said.
Earlier this year, Donnelly said, Ioneer’s biological consulting firm put up a poster in the town of Dyer offering a $5,000 reward for anyone who found a new population of the flower. Calaway called the inclusion of that detail in the release “pure propaganda.”
If people did take the buckwheat specimens, Donnelly said, those specimens will all die because the plants were all cut at the taproot.
“Poaching doesn’t seem super likely unless the poachers were just colossally stupid,” Donnelly said.
Donnelly sent a letter to the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nevada Division of Forestry and Ioneer on Tuesday recommending security measures including fencing the site, establishing 24-hour security, immediately stabilizing and rehabilitating of affected plants, and immediate termination of any monetary rewards for finding Tiehm’s buckwheat.
Representatives with the BLM and the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Calaway took offense to the allegations, writing, “There is no suggestion nor indication that this attack was perpetrated by humans as falsely stated by Center for Biological diversity. This is a baseless accusation and strikes at the heart of CBD’s credibility.”
Calaway said that Ioneer wants a “very methodical and very serious” count to determine the full extent of the damaged plants, as well as research into what type of animal may have caused the damage.
“Any kind of defensive response, assuming there is one, would be predicated on what kind of creature we're trying to keep from getting to the plants,” Calaway said.
Ioneer has propagated seedlings of the plants on other sites to see if the plant’s range could be extended. There have been rodent attacks on some of these propagated plants, he said.
“We didn’t see it as a monumental threat; then of course there was a bigger attack that took place,” Calaway said.
What both Donnelly and Calaway did agree on, however, is that the damage shows the vulnerability of the plant.
Calaway said that if there was evidence there were people going after the plants, they’d be on the defensive.
“We’d be the first ones calling for a federal investigation,” Calaway said. "It’d be the last thing on earth that Ioneer would ever want to have happen.”
Donnelly said that losing this much of the plant’s population was “utterly, utterly devastating. If we intervene, we can save the buckwheat still.”
Grady said that the loss of the plant, not the reason for the loss, is the most important thing to focus on.
“I think it’s important to note that, if the 40% of the entire population is accurate, it doesn’t really matter,” Grady said. “We just lost 40% of this population. I think that’s probably one of the more important things to consider.”