Wildlife Protections Take a Back Seat to SpaceX's Ambitions

Seems like the problem here is the FAA. Both Boeing and SpaceX have been able to bend the FAA to fit withing their respective business plans. I believe companies will do whatever they're allowed to get away with. Whether they should be doing those things is an entirely different matter. The FAA has allowed both of these companies a wide latitude and they've abused the privileges they've been provided.

Do you blame the companies or the agency refusing to reign them in?

For reference, they apparently referenced a study that was noted by its own authors to be incorrect in claiming that there were piping plovers sightings that were decreasing.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1811120996914757818

Quoted below:

What’s worse, this story is super misleading!

In one instance it claims, “three years of data collected by the Coastal Bend group near the SpaceX site indicated a 54 percent decline in the threatened piping plover population through 2021.”

This is false. The frequently cited study conducted by Newstead and Hill (2021) is outdated and unreliable for describing potential piping plover population trends over time.

The 2021 study did not consistently perform field visits during the same time of year. In some years, surveys included periods when piping plovers were actively migrating and in other years surveys only included months when winter residents were likely to be present. They also did not always check both kinds of habitat that are present during each survey.

Point being, the piping plover population being sampled was inconsistent across years. This is important because the occurrence of piping plovers at any given location at any given time is highly variable. Presence or absence may be due to a wide variety of factors unrelated to changes to the population size; birds may simply be someplace else. And, the more times they looked for piping plovers in a year, the higher their population estimate was.

It's also important to understand piping plovers do not nest in Texas. With very few exceptions, piping plovers observed in Texas are either migrating to or from wintering areas further south along the Mexico Gulf Coast or in the Caribbean, or reside in the vicinity over winter. Piping plovers tend to return to the same wintering areas year after year, even when conditions at those wintering areas change due to extreme weather or human-caused disturbance.

Now here’s the kicker: In response to questions about the reliability of their study, Newstead and Hill reanalyzed their data and published a follow-up report (2022) which found no significant change in population abundance of piping plovers at Boca Chica over time. A decreasing trend in abundance over the first three years of the study was balanced by an increase in the final year of the study (once data from additional survey visits was added to the analysis).

For our part, we have conducted nine years of monitoring using a protocol developed with US Fish and Wildlife Services, and for the past two years we have ensured consistent sampling throughout the year by surveying monthly. The findings show little to no strong evidence of trends, either increasing or decreasing, for any of the target species, including piping plovers.