NATURAL FINDS STUN SCIENTISTS : GROWING LIST OF PLANTS, ANIMALS IN PERIL, DATA SHOW.

Byline: Heather Dewar Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

In the bleak picture of North America's vanishing wildlife, there were a few bright spots in 1996:

A cowboy tracker went looking for mountain lions in the New Mexico high country and instead found a jaguar, the first one seen there in nearly 100 years.

In Oregon's aptly named Hell's Canyon Wilderness, a botanist climbed a remote rock outcropping and discovered nine colonies of a plant so rare it was thought to be extinct.

A North Carolina scientist combed a soggy patch of cut-over pine woods in coastal Pender County, hoping that one rare member of the buttercup family had survived. He found the buttercup - and 16 other rare plants, some that grow in only a half-dozen places in the world.

Still, a new Nature Conservancy study estimates that one-third of all U.S. plant and animal species are in some kind of peril, from slight to extreme.

An additional 110 plant and animal varieties are gone for good, and 416 are ``missing and feared extinct,'' said the conservation group's annual wildlife report card, which was released Thursday. The report surveyed about 20,500 of the roughly 100,000 known species in the United States.

To do this, the authors tapped historical records, scientific research and surveys by state wildlife agencies to compile state-by-state assessments of the number of species lost. As in past surveys, Hawaii, California and Alabama had the highest number of extinctions, while the Rocky Mountain states and northern Plains states had the fewest.

The overwhelming reason for the losses: destruction of the land where plants and animals shelter, feed and breed. But every now and then, nature shows surprising resilience.

Next year, the conservancy will spend $100,000 to mount 19 expeditions in 13 states, in hopes of turning up more previously unknown survivors.

Sharp-eyed scientists will search the hummocks of central Florida for the broad-leafed nodding cap, an orchid seen only once, in the 1960s. They will explore the banks of the Merced River as it flows out of California's Yosemite National Park, looking for the elusive Merced mint. They'll comb new subdivisions in Colorado looking for a plant whose Latin name means ``hidden flower,'' and which hasn't been spotted in decades.

All these and many others are classified as ``presumed extinct.''

``If people really go out and search for them, we hope they might find them,'' said Bruce Stein, a Nature Conservancy biologist and one of the report's authors.

Some of nature's families are in much greater trouble than others, the Nature Conservancy concluded. Birds are best off - about one in seven bird species is considered ``extinct, imperiled or vulnerable.'' Plant families lie in the middle, having lost one-fifth to one-third of their varieties.

Worst off are creatures that depend on abundant, clean water for their survival, a trend that has shown up in past years' reports. Two-fifths of all frog species are classified as in trouble, as are half of all crayfish and two-thirds of all freshwater mussels.

But unlikely as it may seem, big chunks of the U.S. landscape have escaped scrutiny - because they are too hard to get to, too uncomfortable to work in, or just not striking enough to catch the attention of scientists and amateur naturalists.

``There clearly are some things that people look much harder for,'' Stein said. ``For the less glamorous groups, the information isn't as good, because there aren't as many people looking.''