Habitat spat

The greater sage-grouse, a favorite of shotgunners and fanciers of colorful bird behavior, is teetering on the brink of extinction in the American West, according to environmental organizations. It’s a question the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is scheduled to resolve in 2015 by deciding whether to list the bird as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Efforts to save the bird under the act, however, could imperil the fragile economies of rural areas such as northwestern Colorado, say county commissioners, residents and energy-industry officials who maintain that coal mining and drilling for natural gas are every bit as threatened as the greater sage-grouse. The stakes surrounding the greater sage-grouse are the “equivalent of the oil shale shutdown” in 1982 for the affected counties, said former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, now the executive director of the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado. That’s a bit apocalyptic, said Luke Schafer of Conservation Colorado. The Bureau of Land Management, which administers nearly half of Colorado’s 4 million acres of greater sage-grouse habitat, is accepting through Dec. 2 public comment on an environmental impact statement and proposals to change the way the agency manages land. The BLM’s greater sage-grouse decision, due by Sept. 30, 2014, stands to affect about 6 percent of Colorado’s nearly 67 million acres, or nearly a quarter of the northwest quadrant of the state. That same quadrant also is home to some of Colorado’s most productive coal mines, a giant storehouse of natural gas and associated liquids far beneath the rough and arid exterior tailor-made for a bird that depends on sagebrush for food and cover. Garfield County Commissioner Tom Jankovsky, speaking in October in Rifle, said the development of natural resources in Garfield County worth $34 billion hangs in the balance, to say nothing of $406 million in property tax revenue to the county over 20 years. Garfield County commissioned its own $200,000 study of the greater sage-grouse in hopes of nudging the BLM toward placing its confidence in local officials to find ways to accommodate the bird and the energy industry. One potential element of the BLM approach to preserving the greater sage-grouse is the use of a four-mile buffer around leks, or mating grounds, for the bird. The buffer was proposed by the BLM’s national technical team of experts using observations and data from rolling high prairie similar to the habitat of Wyoming and Moffat County. Such a buffer wouldn’t work on the higher-elevation Roan Plateau, Jankovsky said. The plateau is fragmented by erosion on its steep slopes, and forests of aspen on one side and conifer on the other — both unfriendly to the grouse — bracket the bird’s habitat. “The biggest threat to the bird in our area is the encroachment of pinyon-juniper forest” into the sage lands in which the grouse thrives, Jankovsky said. Forested lands threaten birds because they provide vantage points on which predators such as raptors can scout for the ground-hugging grouse...more