Sage Grouse
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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…
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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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A Wind developer in southern Idaho has hit a two-year road-block that casts significant doubt on whether the wind project sited in pristine sage grouse habitat along the border of Nevada will ever be developed at all. BLM defers China Mountain decision for two years – Elko Daily Free Press “stupid bird.” We’ve covered the…
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Federal Court Decision Holds That Protecting Sage-Grouse Must Take Priority Over Livestock Grazing in Owyhee Canyonlands and beyond in Southwest Idaho Early last week the federal district court of Idaho affirmed Western Watersheds Project’s challenge to five Bureau of Land Management (BLM) grazing decisions in southwest Idaho’s Owyhee Canyonlands that harmed Greater sage-grouse. Judge rules…
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The effort to list the Greater Sage-grouse via the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been an uphill battle. However, even as the end-game has yet to be realized, the effort itself has been remarkably successful at prompting bureaucratic backflips and a whole lot of paper-shuffling to accommodate consideration of the species. Unfortunately, many of the existing and developing…
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On December 1st, at a presentation given by Bob Budd about the Wyoming Core Habitat Plan for sage grouse, it was pretty obvious that the livestock industry has things pretty much locked up with the agencies and politicians. The presentation was given in one of the big, new hearing rooms in the basement of the…
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The sage grouse population of Idaho has been in steep decline for years. It is now getting to the point where hunting has declined to a one-week season where hunters are limited to one bird a day. It seems a bit odd to me that there isn’t more outrage by the hunting community over this…
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Western Watersheds Project wins initial court victory Western Watersheds Project (WWP) has won a federal court order overturning the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Resource Management Plans (RMPs) for the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho and the Pinedale Field Office in Wyoming. These two plans affect management on over 2.5…