The Congressional freeze on expenses for sage hen listing is a hopeful step toward scientific and political propriety. Meanwhile, negative economic and ecological impacts of the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and other agencies continue range-wide.
Persistent grazing allotment reductions enhance cheatgrass invasion of the range, requiring expensive chemical and mechanical treatment. Basically, herbicides, drill-seeding and contractors expand agency budgets, unlike grazing cheatgrass with cattle and sheep. Agencies reduce public land grazing while ignoring results on private land where ranchers can rotate herds after grazing down cheatgrass before natives emerge.
Fundamentally, cheatgrass becomes fuel for fires which are the principal unquestioned off-budget spending approved for these land management agencies. Apparently with little effective oversight of their bureau-scientific complex, agencies evidently have established policies tending toward large firestorms.
They receive emergency funding with no substantial inquiry into methods of avoiding fires in the first place. Their studies seem to focus on justifying costs and blaming climate change, not eliminating firestorms. This especially is troubling since historical records and common sense show that grazing down fuel eliminates the problem before it erupts in flames. Range-wide, fires apparently take nearly 200,000 sage hen each year.
In addition to grazing down fuel, livestock provide food for the sage hen, who have no gizzards and must consume soft matter. Livestock excrete grouse-edible soft matter in abundance – readily apparent on stock-producing land across the 11 states of the birds’ range.
A significant factor persistently evaded by all land and wildlife management agencies is predation. Bureaucratically avoiding the scientific method by allowing no discussion, regulators declare predator effects unimportant to the matters facing sage hen. Yet population mortality calculations indicate more than 1.4 million sage hen embryos and nestlings are killed each year by predators. Evidently 1.1-1.3 million due to ravens, the rest predominately by coyotes.
Though based on government numbers and research, regulators never acknowledge either the base numbers or the mortality analysis … population mortality which is understood by every ranch and farm child. But if bureaucrats acknowledge existence of an immediate and effective solution to saving millions of sage hen, they would not be able to increase their employee headcount and control of the private sector.
