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"Sage Grouse"
The month of March was an active month for sage grouse. Not only have sage grouse started to assemble on their strutting grounds known as leks due to the abnormally warm start of the month but the season for strutting has begun Washington D.C. and Boise, Idaho and other areas in western states. On March [...]
Continue Reading →The Owyhee BLM has finally issued a Proposed Decision on the so-called “Group 1″ allotments but, unfortunately, the BLM really doesn’t go far enough to reverse damage caused by decades of abusive livestock grazing and they didn’t collect enough information to rationalize their decision even though the Environmental Assessment (EA) consists of a whopping [...]
Continue Reading →While Idaho taxpayers are facing budget cuts to public education and health care, ranchers are busy writing self-serving bills to provide money for “studies” that will paper over destructive impacts of livestock grazing on sage grouse.
Last year saw thousands of people marching on the grounds of the Idaho Capital in Boise. People were marching [...]
Continue Reading →Hailey, ID. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed an Endangered Species Act (ESA) listing rule and critical habitat designation for the Gunnison sage-grouse that will designate the species as Endangered and provide 1.7 million acres of critical habitat in Colorado and Utah.
Gunnison sage-grouse (Centrocercus minimus) has a more restricted range than the closely-related [...]
Continue Reading →SAGE GROUSE: PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE CAUSES
When I was in college, one of my favorite courses was animal behavior. One of the more memorable lessons I learned was the difference between proximate and ultimate causes of behavior. Proximate and ultimate causes of events are important to distinguish.
For instance, say a researcher finds that sedimentation [...]
Continue Reading →In Nevada nowadays it is all the rage to blame predators for habitat problems created by overgrazing by livestock. That is clearly illustrated in an article published in the Elko Daily News which describes the efforts that the State of Nevada has undertaken under pressure from livestock groups cleverly disguised as hunting groups.
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Continue Reading →Resource Management Plans Won’t Affect Already Permitted Activities
With a decision by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) about whether sage grouse should receive Endangered Species Act protection due by 2015, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has begun a process to revise the Resource Management Plans (RMP’s) which dictate how resources are managed [...]
Continue Reading →Giant wind farm planned for the top of sage grouse-rich plateau is dead-
A couple weeks ago we got word that the China Mountain wind farm project was in trouble when the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ordered two more years of study of it because the area was such important occupied sage grouse [...]
Continue Reading →Extractive Industry Determines the Fate of Sage Grouse in Idaho.
On Monday, March 12, 2011, the Idaho Governor Butch Otter’s Sage Grouse Task Force had its first formal meeting. Originally the meeting was to be organized by the Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation (OSC) but something happened and rather than have OSC organize the [...]
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