Sage Grouse
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This past week, Public Broadcasting’s Nature film series featured the Sagebrush Sea. The film’s main focus was on the Greater Sage Grouse which is the emblematic creature found in this vast landscape that covers the bulk of many western states including substantial parts of New Mexico Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, California, Montana and Idaho.…
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The Greater Sage Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is the largest grouse in North America. The grouse is found in sagebrush steppe from Alberta to New Mexico and throughout the Great Basin region of Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. The sage grouse is extirpated from much of its former range and is no longer found…
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With all of the horrible things happening in Idaho’s wolf management, it is hard to focus on other, perhaps more, important issues facing Idaho wildlife. With a deadline of 2015 bearing down for the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to make a decision about whether the greater sage grouse should receive protection under the…
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There is a lot in the news about the potential listing of sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Western politicians are using heated rhetoric about how a listing would destroy their economies, and the “western way of life” (read death and destruction to native wildlife). And in good western tradition, they blame the federal…
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In early June, Katie Fite and I visited southeast Nevada to examine the results of past vegetation treatments meant to “restore” sage grouse habitat in the Schell Field Office of the Ely District BLM. What we found was quite astonishing. Rather than restoring sage grouse habitat, the BLM targeted the best sage grouse habitat, near…
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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…
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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…
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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…
