In a move that unnerved many environmentalists, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced last summer that the agency would be reviewing the federal conservation plan for sage grouse — a bird that matters at least as much to ranchers as it does to conservationists. In the West, sage grouse has become the symbol of an urgent effort to save the larger sagebrush ecosystem from disappearing to cropland, wildfires and invasive species.
But while Zinke said that the reason for the review was to manage sage grouse in a way that “allows both wildlife and local economies to thrive,” critics have suspected special interests. The plan, which covers 67 million federal acres, was last revised in 2015 by the Obama administration. At the time, all 11 western states with sage-grouse habitat were involved in the process, along with the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, among others.
“It wasn’t broken and it didn’t need fixing,” said David Yarnold, Audubon president and CEO. “This was a plan crafted by the states and it didn’t need the heavy hand of the Federal government — so let’s call it what it is: pandering to a few large energy interests and anti-public lands advocates that didn’t get what they wanted when this plan was sealed in 2015.”
The public comment period ends next month. Although Zinke has already lifted the ban on energy development for 10 million acres of sage-grouse land, the new land-use revisions won’t just affect oil and gas companies. Any changes will also impact ranchers, since their grazing permits often overlap with the bird’s habitat.
Some 34 million acres of sagebrush-steppe, as it’s known, exist in the U.S., making it the country’s most widespread habitat and yet the most at risk, with almost half of its former range still intact.
As sagebrush has disappeared, sage grouse, which rely on the plant for food and to hide their eggs, have also seen dramatic declines. Sage grouse used to number in the millions, but today just 200,000-500,000 remain, with the bulk in Wyoming and Montana.
Yet, those numbers are a major improvement over decades past. Efforts like the federal Sage Grouse Initiative are a key reason why sage grouse weren’t listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2015. Since 2010, SGI, which is led by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and made up of public and private partners, has conserved about 5.6 million acres of sagebrush-steppe, an area twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. The program has done this largely by convincing ranchers to put their property into conservation easements requiring that their land not be subdivided and, in some cases, not tilled.
“(Sage grouse conservation) is an issue that ranchers have been working on for the better part of two decades,” from collaborating on state management plans for the bird to improving individual ranch operations, says Ethan Lane, executive director of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Federal Lands and Public Lands Council. Part of the effort in 2015 was to make the federal sage grouse conservation plan consistent with state plans, but, Lane says, at the last minute the Obama administration ignored many of the nuanced concerns from states and local land managers. He hopes the DOI’s current review can clear up those inconsistencies.
Despite concerns over the regulations, ranchers aren’t at odds with the bird’s recovery.
“Cattle grazing and sage grouse are very compatible,” says Brian Martin, Montana Grasslands Conservation Director at The Nature Conservancy, one of many nonprofits involved with the SGI. In certain parts of the country like the northern Great Plains of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas, where 70 percent of sage grouse habitat is privately owned, ranchers are the bird’s best defense from habitat loss.
While cattle grazing has been blamed for a slew of environmental ills from soil erosion to climate change, well-managed grazing operations are often linked with healthy populations of sage grouse. To that end, the SGI encourages ranchers to delay their grazing in certain areas while the grouse are nesting, a practice that also gives those pastures time to recovery from earlier grazing episodes.
The public comment period ends on November 27th.