They include spacing out oil and gas wells and prohibiting drilling during sage grouse mating season.
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Environmentalists who sued to force Tuesday’s decision were certain to challenge it, while industry groups and some Western governors argue that measures already enacted to prop up the bird’s population go too far.
Greater sage grouse range from California to the Dakotas.
Holst hadn’t been told what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) decision would be, but he said the lineup for the announcement made the decision “fairly transparent”.
Kathleen Sgamma, a vice president of the Western Energy Alliance, said her group had likewise “heard from a number of sources” that the administration would decline to list the bird formally while issuing a final version of the plan it proposed in May.
A determination that the grouse does not need protection under the Endangered Species Act would reverse a 2010 finding that it was headed toward possible extinction. Under a federal court settlement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service faced a September 30 deadline to decide the birds’ status one way or the other. Nearly half of sage grouse live on federal lands. It’s encouraging that as the largest land manager of sage-grouse habitat, the BLM is protecting the lands most important to the bird, which is an indicator species for the health of the sagebrush-steppe ecosystem, and 350 other species.
The guardians charged that BLM “removed priority habitat” status from 16 million acres in the sage-grouse habitat that was deemed essential for the bird’s conservation as recent as 2013. Numerous permits for drilling and other development have been delayed to analyze their potential impact on birds.
The Northwest Colorado region, including Moffat and small parts of Routt and Rio Blanco counties, is home to more than 70 percent of Colorado’s sage grouse. Western industries – like oil and gas, mining and agriculture – say that listing would cost them billions of dollars in lost economic activity.
Current and historical distribution of the sage grouse in the United States.
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Conifer trees that were out of place in the habitat grew wildly, providing a new place for golden eagles, hawks and other birds of prey to perch to hunt and kill sage grouse. “This model of science-based, landscape-level conservation is truly the future of conservation”. “It’s sort of ingrained in our soul a little bit, this image of the wild West and what that meant to America”.
