Sage Grouse have a real possibility of becoming the next spotted owl of the west.  Just last year we all thought we had dodged the bullet, at least in the immediate future, when the Interior Department reached a settlement with two wildlife advocacy groups. The agreement reached between these parties stated that Sage Grouse would be considered a candidate species for endangered species listing but would be precluded at this time due to lack of resources and because there were other species with a higher priority. The reprieve we thought we had achieved was short lived. Western Watersheds Project (WWP), not satisfied at all by this delay and wanting to force a listing, went back to the courts, this time in Idaho to Federal Judge Windmill. Last month Judge Windmill sided with WWP and told the agency it must speed up the process of determining the bird’s status. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had thought that it would wait until at least 2015 to make a determination. It’s hard for me to believe that WWP’s real goal is to protect the Sage Grouse. More likely it’s to remove livestock grazing from the public lands. If WWP was genuinely concerned for the birds they could and should have participated in the state working groups searching for ways to protect and improve Sage Grouse habitat and increase their populations; in other words, working  with everyone that is genuinely concerned  about Sage Grouse to find a solution rather than being adversarial. There’s something wrong with the system when groups sincerely concerned, both  private and governmental, come together, spending a lot of their time and money developing solutions and creating projects on both public and private lands only to have one radical group and a judge destroy all their hard work. 

The number one threat to Sage Grouse in the Great Basin is loss of habitat by catastrophic fires. There are three elements needed for a fire; ignition, oxygen, and fuel. Man can’t stop the lightning or shut off the oxygen, but we can reduce the fuel loads by thinning the forests and by using livestock grazing, not to eliminate fire because that would be impossible, but to reduce the size and intensity of fires.  If Western Watersheds Project is successful in its attempts to eliminate public lands grazing, the effects on the Sage Grouse population will be devastating.

To add to the Sage Hens plight we now have an energy development rush occurring in the west. Both State and Federal wildlife professionals are very concerned about how these projects are being put on the fast track with very little consideration given to effects they will be having to Sage Grouse habitat. In some states like Wyoming, natural gas development is going full speed ahead because of new technology that allows gas companies to extract gas where they couldn’t before. In other states, like Nevada, there are renewable energy projects in the process of development and many others that are being proposed. A number of projects involving wind turbines are being proposed in prime Sage Grouse habitat. One needs to remember that it’s not only the huge turbines and their blades swooshing around day and night, but the whole infrastructure needed to support the project, such as roads for construction and maintenance and the transmission lines necessary to put the energy into the grid. The companies developing these projects know that if their proposed projects are on public land they will be protested, appealed, and litigated by the environmentalist groups. So they do one of two things; offer these groups a payoff to drop their objections and go away like El Paso Pipeline did with Western Watersheds. Or they demand that the EIS’s have in them that any negative effects created by the projects will be mitigated by reducing or eliminating livestock grazing. They usually propose doing this by offering a permit buyout to willing sellers or paying permittees by the AUM not to graze.

If energy companies are allowed to continue to develop their projects in prime Sage Grouse habitat, it will be a slam dunk for WWP and groups like them to get a judge to force the agency to list Sage Grouse as endangered species.   Listing the bird as endangered will hasten its recovery because no one wants to have an endangered species on their private property, which is exactly where many Sage Grouse are. I suspect you could see land owners try to hide the fact that they have Sage Grouse or try to get rid of them so they don’t have to deal with the heavy hand of the government’s Endangered Species Act.