Groups want cows corralled to protect jumping mouse habitat

Environmentalists have accused U.S. land managers of failing to keep livestock and wild horses out of streams and other wetlands in Arizona's White Mountains, resulting in damage to habitat required by a rare mouse species found only in the Southwest. The lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Tucson said the U.S. Forest Service is violating the Endangered Species Act and damaging the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse's habitat by failing to maintain fences, round up feral animals and enforce grazing regulations on forest land in southeastern Arizona. The mice live near streams and depend on tall grass to hide from predators. They hibernate for about nine months, emerging in the late spring to gorge themselves before mating, giving birth and going back into hibernation. They normally live about three years. Officials in the Forest Service's Southwest region disputed the allegations in the lawsuit, saying the agency has been working since the mouse was listed as an endangered species in 2014 to use new and existing fencing to control livestock access to riverbank and wetland areas all while balancing water rights. The battle over the meadow jumping mouse has lasted years. The listing of the mouse as endangered prompted the Forest Service to fence off streams and watering holes in some national forests to protect habitat thought to be ideal. Ranchers and others then complained that the federal government was trampling private access to public lands by cordoning off areas important for livestock and other animals that call the arid region home. In 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated nearly 22 square miles (57 square kilometers) along about 170 miles (274 kilometers) of streams, ditches and canals as critical habitat in parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona...MORE