Lawsuit Launched to Protect Threatened Songbird's Habitat in Arizona, New Mexico, California

The Center for Biological Diversity notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today of its intent to sue the agency for failing to protect lifesaving critical habitat for the western yellow-billed cuckoo. The songbird once ranged widely in the western United States but has declined to as few as 350 pairs concentrated in Arizona, New Mexico and California. The Center has worked for its protection for two decades, first submitting a scientific petition to list it under the Endangered Species Act in 1998. After more than a decade of delay, the Service finally listed the western cuckoo as threatened in 2014. The agency also proposed the protection of more than half a million acres of the species’ critical habitat, but it has failed to finalize the designation. The yellow-billed cuckoo depends on healthy streamside areas for breeding, nesting and feeding. Its disappearance from vast expanses of its former habitat is due largely to damming of rivers, water withdrawal and livestock grazing. Climate change threatens the cuckoo with increased drought, and pesticide use and collisions with communication towers and other tall structures further imperil the bird. Today the bird survives in scattered locations in small numbers, including along California’s Sacramento, Eel and Kern rivers; the Colorado, Gila, Verde and San Pedro rivers in Arizona; New Mexico’s Gila and Rio Grande rivers; and scattered locations in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming and Utah. Historically it was common from the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle to the mouth of the Colorado River...MORE