FWS urges protection of 16.5M acres for sage grouse

The Fish and Wildlife Service advised its fellow land management agencies to impose the most stringent protections on roughly 16.5 million acres of high-value sage grouse habitat in order to save the bird from the threat of extinction. The recommendation came from FWS Director Dan Ashe in an Oct. 27 internal memo to the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service that was obtained by Greenwire. It will likely inform BLM as it finalizes land-use plans covering 67 million acres in the bird's 11-state Western range in hopes of preventing its demise. The areas FWS mapped in the Great Basin, western Wyoming and north-central Montana are "a subset of priority habitat most vital to the species persistence, within which we recommend the strongest levels of protection," Ashe wrote in the memo to BLM Director Neil Kornze and Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell. The recommended sage grouse "strongholds" have been found to contain the highest densities of birds, are the most resistant and resilient to stressors like invasive species and wildfire, and are least susceptible to climate change, Ashe said. They're also predominantly located on federal lands. They are a subset of the 75 million priority areas for conservation (PACs) that Fish and Wildlife identified as key to the bird's long-term survival and worthy of the government's limited conservation resources. Conservationists privy to FWS's internal sage grouse work are calling the areas "super PACs." "Strong, durable, and meaningful protection of federally administered lands in these areas will provide additional certainty and help obtain confidence for long-term sage-grouse persistence," Ashe wrote. "The attached maps highlight areas where it is most important that BLM and Forest Service institutionalize the highest degree of protection to help promote persistence of the species." BLM's land-use plan amendments, set to be finalized in late summer, will be a key factor in September when Fish and Wildlife scientists decide whether the charismatic, chest-puffing bird is in need of federal protections. More than 63 percent of the bird's 165 million acres of habitat is on federal lands, most of it managed by BLM. Ashe yesterday told Greenwire that protection of strongholds, or lack thereof, will be a criterion in FWS's listing decision. But they're only recommendations...more