Sage Grouse restoration – Western conservation politics under ESA gun

By Ron Moody

A feather storm of emails about sage grouse has passed through the Inbox over the past month or so.

With so much virtual clamor, and with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) taking comments on Sage Grouse management plans in administrative districts across the Rocky Mountain West, and with Rocky Mountain states scurrying to come up with their own Sage Grouse plans, a person could be forgiven for thinking something good is about to happen for the dowdy ‘Sage Hen.’

Don’t count on it.

This once-cherished game bird is, first slowly and now more quickly, losing its grip on existence as formerly wide-open sage prairies are sliced and diced by human exploiters. Nothing visible so far in all the proposed ‘management plans’ is likely to change the bird’s fall into “endangered species” purgatory.

The ESA (Endangered Species Act) is intended to be the last resort before extinction.  Sometimes ESA has worked to restore a healthy population to a species (bald eagle, alligator), sometimes it hasn’t (spotted owl, various amphibians).  Where we stand today, we can only speculate as to the end result of an ESA listing for the sage grouse.

What is certain, however, is that resorting to the ESA to save the Sage Grouse will be the most protracted, toilsome, divisive and costly of all the choices people could make. All the human interests connected to the legal status of the sage grouse will be harmed by an Endangered Species listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and they all know it.

With predictable perversity, however, those speaking for the various economics interests active on the western landscape are going into the management decision-making process with myopic focus on their own wallets. Just as predictably, environmental and conservation voices (they are not the same) are asking for monumental shifts of land use policy with no substantive means of making their vision materialize.

So both BLM and State Sage Grouse plans eventually will constitute the lowest common denominator of what’s left after oil and gas companies, ag and livestock interests, local electric co-ops, transmission companies, etc. have fully employed their political pull to shape their share of the management burden to their own liking.  Over on the green side, management plans will deliver just enough ecological discipline so wildlife advocates can make faint claims of victory in fund-raising letters.

This low-ball outcome may be enough to save the Sage Grouse from actual extinction. But I see no hope that it will put the species back as it was when the game stock could support a three-bird daily bag limit – or even support a hunting season for that matter.

Indeed, the first scapegoat offered up by the industry crowd is the upland bird hunter. “It makes no sense to be hunting a bird that is in danger of being listed,” they say.

Well, yes it does make sense. 

In their zeal to make somebody else pay the piper for sage grouse restoration, industry people are adamant that state fish and wildlife agencies carry the leadership burden. They do this for two reasons: first, it is thus the sportsmans’ wallet that is flattened, not theirs; and second, they know state agencies are even more vulnerable to political manipulation by “job-creating” industries than is the federal BLM.

Bird hunters probably have more to give than they have offered to date in terms of bag limit and season reductions. But zero should not be an option. Once a hunting relationship is severed by ESA, or by the state, only long, costly, chancy litigation will ever bring it back. 

More importantly, ending hunting entirely means that society as a whole thinks hunters should continue to pay for sage grouse management via game agency activity while they are simultaneously elbowed away from the resource table.  That might have worked in past decades. Today, however, a shrinking hunter population and economic factors are strangling state agency budgets.  Unless agency revenue sources broaden, species that don’t produce enough license dollars will fall into that non-game species black hole obscurely listed in every department budget.

There is one judgment, however, that hunters cannot escape. ESA listing of a game species is, by its very fact, an indictment of failure on the part of the North American System of Wildlife Management. 

The methods by which sportsmen restored waterfowl, for example, by demanding passage of federal and state laws then funding habitat via duck stamps and Ducks Unlimited have not been offered to the sage grouse.  Prairie species as a group have not enjoyed the attention of an ‘unlimited’ or ‘forever’ sportsman support group.

One persistent criticism of the North American System is that it plays favorites among species.  The wildlife species that wins the hunter popularity contest get the support it needs to prosper. Other species languish on a scale proportional to sportsman interest.

Like the grizzly that once shared its prairie domain, sage grouse require large-scale habitats. As always habitat is the key to survival. But habitat restoration on any scale is costly. On a large scale it is dauntingly expensive.  So somebody is going to have to pay the piper’s price or the sage grouse is doomed to that eternally endangered limbo that is the most common product of the ESA.

All of the folks, both public and private, who make money off the western landscape, and folks like hunters and bird watchers who take their reward in barter with nature, could come together and agree to a cost-share plan offered in a positive ‘can-do’ spirit.

No sign of that happening yet. We’re still in the eye-gouging, don’t-look-at-me phase of the democratic decision-making process. Given our western tradition of never moving beyond this phase I’m not predicting anything good for the Sage Grouse.

WHAT TO DO?
BLM Lewistown District plans open houses Dec. 10 at the Yogo Inn in Lewistown and Dec. 18 at the Petroleum County Courthouse in Winnett. Both meetings are 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. The Greater Sage-Grouse Draft RMP Amendment/Draft EIS is available at http://blm.gov/f9kd.

The Montana Sage-grouse Advisory Council is seeking comments on the DRAFT Greater Sage-grouse Habitat Conservation Strategy. Deadline is Dec. 4, 5 p.m.  The strategy details a state-led effort to address threats to the species as identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and to preclude the need for listing the sage-grouse as a federally threatened or endangered species.

http://fwp.mt.gov/fishAndWildlife/publicComments/sageGrouseAC.html