Lawsuit brews in fight over game bird in Sierra Nevada
RJNO, NJV. >> Conservationists are headed back to court to try to force the Trump administration to protect a rare game bird along the California-Nevada border as the government keeps changing its mind about whether to list the cousin of the greater sage grouse as threatened or endangered.
Three groups have filed formal notice of their intent to sue after the Fish and Wildlife Service reversed course in March and abandoned its 2018 proposal to list the bi-state grouse under the Endangered Species Act.
The hen-sized bird is similar but separate from the greater sage grouse, which lives in a dozen Western states and is at the center of a dispute over the government’s efforts to roll back protections adopted under President Barack Obama.
The service estimates the bi-state grouse population is half what it was 150 years ago along the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada. Anywhere from 330 to 3,305 are believed to remain across 7,000 square miles of high desert sagebrush stretching from Carson City to Yosemite National Park.
The bird is threatened by urbanization, livestock grazing and wildfires.
The Fish and Wildlife Service rejected listing petitions in 2001 and 2005. It formally proposed threatened status for the first time in 2013 but abandoned that proposal two years later.
In 2018, a U.S. judge in San Francisco found the agency had illegally denied protection to the bistate grouse and ordered it to reevaluate the bird’s status.
The bird was again proposed for protection, but in March the administration withdrew that proposal. The service said its latest review indicates the population has improved, thanks in large part to voluntary protection measures adopted by state agencies, local ranchers and other interested third parties.
Conservationists say voluntary efforts fall short of what’s necessary to comply with the law.
“We’ve watched for more than a decade as voluntary measures failed to do enough to help these birds survive,” said Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the notice of intent to sue last week with WildEarth Guardians and the Western Watersheds Project.
“Without the legal protection of the Endangered Species Act, multiple threats will just keep pushing these unique grouse toward extinction,” she said.