Feds sign protection of Sage Grouse

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Feds ink pact to conserve sage grouse habitat
April 13, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Natural Resources Conservation Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
to provide unprecedented support for Sage-Grouse and Sagebrush Ecosystems
WASHINGTON, April 13, 2010—Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar today announced a far-reaching agreement to support
the conservation of greater sage-grouse and sagebrush ecosystems in parts
of 11 Western states.
“Today’s agreement enables us to help this rare species in a
comprehensive, integrated way,� said Vilsack. “By working cooperatively
toward the same goal, we can build on the progress states have made
protecting the sage-grouse and the sagebrush ecosystem it depends on.�
“The greater sage-grouse has historically inhabited millions of acres in
the West, and if we are going to conserve the species we must work across
political and administrative boundaries at a landscape scale to protect
and restore its sagebrush habitat,� Salazar said. “This agreement gives us
a framework to prevent further habitat fragmentation and undertake other
conservation efforts in partnership with states, tribes, private
landowners and other stakeholders.�
USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service Chief Dave White and Rowan
Gould, acting director of Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
signed the partnership agreement to promote and preserve greater
sage-grouse habitat and sagebrush ecosystems.
The agreement ensures beneficial and consistent actions for conservation
of greater sage-grouse habitat and provides a collaborative framework for
states and private landowners. For its part, the Fish and Wildlife Service
is committing to work with NRCS to use the authorities of the Endangered
Species Act to provide participating landowners with reasonable assurances
that their activities will be consistent with the act should the
sage-grouse later be listed as a threatened or endangered species.
In March Vilsack announced a new initiative to protect sage-grouse
population and habitat using two popular USDA conservation
programs—Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQQIP) and Wildlife
Habitat Incentive Program (WHIP). USDA will provide up to $16 million
this fiscal year to provide financial assistance for producers to reduce
threats to the birds such as disease and invasive species and improve
sage-grouse habitat. Producers can sign up through April 23 to participate
in the first round of rankings for this initiative.
In recent years the greater sage-grouse has lost 44 percent of its habitat
due to agriculture; urban development; energy extraction, generation and
transmission; invasive weeds, pinion-juniper tree encroachment, and
wildfire. The human footprint across the area where greater sage-grouse
live is large and becoming larger as the country strives for energy
independence, agriculture, development and other, often competing uses.
Also in March, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that, based on
accumulated scientific data and new peer-reviewed information and
analysis, the greater sage-grouse warrants the protection of the
Endangered Species Act. However, the service determined that adding the
species to the federal list of threatened and endangered species at this
time is precluded by the need to address higher priority species first. As
a result, the greater sage-grouse will be placed on the list of candidate
species and will be proposed for protection under the Act as funding and
priorities dictate.
Greater sage-grouse currently occupy 258,000 square miles of the sagebrush
ecosystem, and are found in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North
Dakota, eastern California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado, South Dakota
and Wyoming and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. For
more information on the NRCS and US Fish and Wildlife Service greater
sage-grouse agreement or other conservation issues please visit:
www.nrcs.usda.gov or www.fws.gov.