Reuters/Commerce City, Colorado
A long-simmering debate in the American West over the fate of a ground-dwelling bird reached a climax on Tuesday as the Obama administration denied Endangered Species Act protections to the greater sage grouse in favour of less rigid habitat conservation measures.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the need to list the charismatic bird as threatened or endangered was averted by the success of “unprecedented” collaboration among state and local governments, scientists, ranchers and other private interests over the last five years.
She credited those efforts with significantly reducing threats to the sage grouse across 90% of its breeding habitat, staving off any immediate risk of extinction.
“This is the largest, most complex land conservation effort in the history of the US,” Jewell told a news conference, joined by four Western governors and a host of top federal land managers, at a wildlife refuge in Colorado.
The plight of the grouse, a key indicator species for the vanishing sagebrush ecosystem of the American prairie, has pitted conservation groups against oil and gas drilling, wind farms and cattle grazing in one of the biggest industry-versus-nature controversies in decades.
Tuesday’s announcement marked a turnabout from a 2010 finding by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency, that endangered species protection for the grouse was warranted but that other species were a higher priority.
The conservation strategy implemented since then offers an alternative for saving the grouse while allowing activities such as energy development, mining and ranching to co-exist with the chicken-sized prairie fowl, Jewell said.
The greater sage grouse, known for its elaborate mating rituals, once ranged by the millions across a broad expanse of the western US and Canada.
They are now believed to number between 200,000 and 500,000 birds in 11 Western states and southern Alberta.
Despite long-term declines, sage grouse populations “remain relatively abundant and well-distributed” across the bird’s 173mn-acre (70mn-hectare) range, Fish and Wildlife officials said.
Fish and Wildlife Service chief Dan Ashe said losses were expected to continue, “but we believe at declining rates.”
In addition to conservation programmes for state and private lands representing 45% of sage grouse habitat, a patchwork of 98 US land use plans also were revised to protect the bird on federal property that accounts for most of the rest.
The federal plans impose a new set of tiered limits on development inside 67mn acres (27mn hectares) of designated habitat, with tougher restrictions on about half the total. Even more stringent protections will apply to a subset of those “priority” zones comprising 12mn acres (4.8mn hectares).
Officials also pointed to newly adopted plans for curtailing two key environmental threats - rangeland wildfires and the spread of an invasive weed known as cheatgrass.
The announcement was immediately welcomed by the Denver-based industry group Western Energy Alliance and the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association while receiving mixed reviews from environmental groups.
National Audubon Society President David Yarnold endorsed the decision, calling it “a new lease on life for the greater sage grouse and the entire sagebrush ecosystem.”
But Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist for WildEarth Guardians, said the plans offered too little protection with too many loopholes, though he said his group would review the details before deciding whether to bring a court challenge.
Protections from oil and gas drilling, for example, are much weaker in Wyoming, which accounts for 40% of all sage grouse habitat, than in other states, Molvar said.
Unlike many such battles of the past, commercial interests this time have embraced conservation efforts aimed at avoiding potentially tougher restrictions under the Endangered Species Act.
A file photo of a sage grouse. A long-simmering debate in the American West over the imperiled ground-dwelling bird reached a climax on Tuesday, as th
