Male sage grouse strut on a lek to lure females into breeding. Photo by Bob Wick, BLM
One often doesn’t get good news, but this week, the U.S. District Court agreed with conservation groups that the Bi-State Sage Grouse was illegally removed from its listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
Efforts […]
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When the Bureau of Land Management released its final analysis on sage grouse plan changes in early December, a flurry of media stories trumpeted the reduction of protected sage-grouse habitat from 10 million to 1.8 million acres of federal land. That sounds like a big bad deal, but the reality is even worse. The plan […]
Continue Reading →The Idaho BLM is proposing to remove juniper from over 600,000 acres of land in the Owyhee River area of southern Idaho ostensibly to benefit nesting sage grouse. Sage grouse avoid treed areas, so the idea is to cut down juniper to increase sage grouse habitat quality.
While there is no doubt from the literature […]
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The headline in a recent Capital Press article proclaims that “Preliminary data shows cattle, sage grouse can coexist”. http://www.capitalpress.com/Livestock/20171016/study-preliminary-data-show-cattle-sage-grouse-can-coexist
The article then goes on to quote various researchers who are at the beginning of a ten-year study. According to the article, grazing allotments were grazed according to traditional patterns for two years, then the […]
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FILLMORE, Utah— Conservation groups today condemned a U.S. Bureau of Land Management proposal to auction off 14,943 acres of public land in central Utah for fracking and drilling, which will hurt an imperiled population of greater sage grouse.
The Bureau previously announced that it would include lands occupied by the Sheeprocks sage grouse population and […]
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Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) and Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) have introduced legislation that is an extreme and irresponsible attack on your public lands and the wildlife they support. This bill has the Orwellian title of the “Greater Sage Grouse Protection and Recovery Act,” (S.273, H.R.527).
These bills would do the opposite […]
Continue Reading →A recent modeling study that looked at livestock grazing and sage grouse has been getting a lot of play in the media with headlines like “Livestock Grazing Can Benefit Sage Grouse, Study Says.” http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/study-says-some-livestock-grazing-could-benefit-struggling-sage-grouse/article_1d49f8a5-6e59-5954-9a55-9026961a44cf.html
And not surprisingly, representatives of the livestock industry are quick to pounce on the study as evidence that livestock grazing […]
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PORTLAND, Ore. – Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit environmental group, has launched a legal challenge to a management plan for five National Wildlife Refuges in the Klamath Basin of Oregon and California. The lawsuit, filed last week in Oregon, cites failures by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect sage grouse and rare native […]
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With much fanfare, as reported in the Great Falls Tribune, the Montana Sage Grouse Oversight Team announced that it will bequeath more than $1.5 million for a 18,033-acre conservation easement on the 44 Ranch west of Winnett in Fergus and Petroleum Counties. Ostensibly, the state money, as well as additional private and federal government […]
Continue Reading →The Department of Interior recently released its Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy whose goal is to reduce range fires in sagebrush ecosystems critical to sage grouse. The plan correctly identifies that cheatgrass is a major threat to the bird, as well as the sagebrush ecosystems. Cheatgrass is an exotic annual plant that greens up early, […]
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