As folks know, including the government of Wyoming, which fears a sage grouse listing under the ESA, large continuous areas of sagebrush steppe are in big trouble.
It is fascinating how they blame wolves wolves for too few elk and then say there are too many antelope and deer and they need to have a big hunt to decrease their numbers.
Aren’t these overgrazed sagebrush lands described in the article grazed by cattle and/or sheep as well as deer and antelope?
The one constant in Wyoming politics is ranching and minerals come first, and wildlife gets what’s left except it always gets the blame.
Story “Antelope, deer decimating Wyoming’s ‘sagebrush sea‘” By Jennifer Frazer. Rocky Mountain News.
Note I borrowed the headline from “Headwaters News.’
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is past President of the Western Watersheds Project and the creator of The Wildlife News.
I like the way Jodi Peterson of Goat, the High Country News blog – http://blog.hcn.org/goat – phrased it: “Fewer hunters, fewer lands to hunt on and fewer hunting permits are all to blame, (Wyoming Game and Fish officials) say. No mention of the 26,900 wells that energy companies have drilled in Wyoming, or of the 51,000 more planned for the next 10 years. No mention of the fact that the BLM plans to issue about 4,500 drilling permits in the state this year (a 300 percent jump since 2002). No mention of the thousands of acres already lost to sprawl, or the additional 2.6 million acres of Wyoming ranchland the American Farmland Trust estimates will be swallowed up by 2020. Nope, it’s not that we need more habitat — we need less wildlife.”