About two weeks ago, the small plant with a yellow flower was rototilled into the soil at Camas Meadows Golf Course. The 15-acre site represented approximately 90% of the world’s population of Bradshaw’s lomatium, which was listed under the federal Endangered Species Act from 1988 until 2021. At that point, federal regulators took it off the list because of successful recovery efforts.

“It’s such a rare plant globally. Just a handful of populations. But there, at this one site, it’s just incredibly abundant, covering the landscape as far as you can see. It’s really a striking population,” said Jesse Miller, the lead state botanist for the Washington natural heritage program at the Department of Natural Resources.

Miller led the most recent survey of Bradshaw’s lomatium on the Camas Meadows Golf Course in April. His random sampling estimated the population at more than 3.7 million individual plants.

Bradshaw’s lomatium has small tufts of bright yellow flowers like Queen Anne’s lace that attract diverse pollinators. As a member of the carrot family, it has a large tap root that was historically food for Indigenous people in the region, as well as wildlife. Currently, it grows in just a few locations in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and Southwest Washington. The Camas population of the plant produced a large field of yellow flowers.

“It appears that pretty much the entire population has been disced or tilled. From what I could see just looking from the road, it’s pretty much the whole area where the plant occurred as of this spring,” Miller said, adding that some could resprout.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson Andrew LaValle said the agency was aware of the events at Camas Meadows Golf Course but declined an interview request. He wrote in a statement that the species has improved significantly since it was first protected: “Populations currently remain robust elsewhere in the species range. The Post-Delisting Monitoring Plan includes monitoring at 18 priority sites, 17 in Oregon and one publicly owned site in Washington. Since delisting, there are four newly established and protected Oregon sites.”

The co-owner of the Camas Meadows Golf Course, Matti Olson, allowed researchers to collect Bradshaw’s lomatium seeds for nearly 20 years. He said not all the habitat was tilled and he thinks the plant will come back, but they’re also growing clover in its place.

“My point of view is that if it’s such a hot topic and all this, they should spend some time and effort trying to acquire it to have forever,” Olson said.

Walter Fertig, the Washington state botanist from 2017-2022, did surveys of Bradshaw’s lomatium populations at the golf course. Now working as manager of the Washington State University herbarium in Pullman, he was surprised to see photos of the once-abundant meadow ecosystem in Camas.

“It’s pretty shocking to see. They pretty much plowed up the entire area,” Fertig said.

‘Bellwether of a larger problem’

The rototilling incident is just the latest example of a vulnerable plant species losing federal protections too soon, according to Fertig and Peter Dunwiddie, a retired ecologist with The Nature Conservancy and the University of Washington who has worked with Bradshaw’s lomatium.

While the USFWS described the importance of protecting habitat in its delisting decision, the vast documented majority of the species was destroyed in a single event. Today, Bradshaw’s lomatium requires human intervention to survive in the long term, like prescribed fire or mowing. The researchers worry the remaining populations will slowly decline.

Fertig believes other species have also lost protections too early, including golden paintbrush, Ute ladies’-tresses orchid, Nelson’s checker-mallow, and water howellia.

“There have been a number of cases now where species have been delisted where the experts that have worked most closely with them — people like myself — have deemed the delisting ill-advised,” Dunwiddie said.

In August 2021, Tom Kaye, the chief scientist at the Institute for Applied Ecology in Corvallis, joined the men in signing a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opposing the delisting of golden paintbrush. The three, who had served on the agency’s technical advisory team for that species, wrote that the Service was relying on insufficient data and took an “unrealistically optimistic view” of the plant populations. In the letter, they noted the species population was declining, except for “artificial reintroduction” of planted golden paintbrush.

“We believe the species does not meet the criteria for delisting, and that delisting golden paintbrush at this time will put the species in jeopardy,” the letter reads. Wild golden paintbrush populations have continued to decline since being delisted, according to Dunwiddie.

Now, they see the loss of the majority of the world’s Bradshaw’s lomatium as another example of rare plants being delisted without adequate protections in place.

“It’s, to me, a bellwether of a larger problem that’s cropping up,” Dunwiddie said.

Kaye also worked closely with Bradshaw’s lomatium.

“What we’re learning from this kind of event is that these species may remain vulnerable. And some of the threats we thought we had seen evaded, are not,” Kaye said.

Precarious future

Fertig believes USFWS is under internal pressure to demonstrate that the Endangered Species Act works so it can avoid criticism and maintain funding. On top of that, he said, land managers are faced with a constant backlog of other species that need attention.

“When they’re told, ‘Oh it’s no longer listed, it’s recovered,’ there’s 50 other things they need to work on. And they fall through the cracks. They just do,” Fertig said. “I don’t question anybody’s sincerity, but the reality is if I don’t have to manage for this species, I’m not gonna.”

Rototilling millions of rare plants also shows how the federal Endangered Species Act treats plants fundamentally differently from animals. While animals are treated as a public good, plants are treated more like property, Fertig said. Plants are protected from harm on public land, but not on private property.

“Private landowners can really do whatever they want, including plowing under rare species,” Dunwiddie said.

Protections do exist on private property if federal dollars were spent on conservation, if there’s a conservation easement on the property, or if a protected species is located on land restricted by a separate federal law, like protections for wetland habitats.

In 2021 as the USFWS delisted the Bradshaw’s lomatium, the agency said the species had recovered significantly, and they had few concerns anything would change on the privately owned golf course habitat.

“Although no formal protections are in place that would prevent future development, we have no information to indicate that it is likely the site would be developed,” the delisting document states.

With the damage done, the root’s future is more precarious than it was three years ago.

“So much of the population was really hanging out on a couple of sites,” Dunwiddie said. “And the biggest one was not protected. It had zero protection at all. That raises all kinds of red flags in my mind.”

According to Fertig, the tilled Camas site suggests the USFWS’ delisting decisions rely too much on population numbers and not enough on how well they’re protected.

“That habitat can be wiped out in an afternoon. It might be a fire, it might be a flood, it might be a plow. Whether there were 50 plants there, 10 million, 20 million. It’s still a very small postage stamp piece of habitat that is very vulnerable to a major disturbance like getting plowed up,” he said.