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December 15, 2004
ENDANGERED SPECIES Sage grouse the next spotted owl?
By EVAN McLAUGHLIN Lawmakers and businesses in 11 Western states, including Nevada, say they are looking to avoid the economic upheaval that affected the Pacific Northwest after the owl was declared a threatened species in 1990. They are holding their collective breath as U.S. Fish and Wildlife director Steve Williams decides this month whether to list the chicken-sized grouse as an endangered or threatened species. A decision to list the bird could affect the use of between 100 million to 150 million acres in the Great Basin. "We don't want this to turn into another spotted owl," Greg Schnacke, executive vice president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, told Congress at a hearing in September. After the spotted owl was put under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, 7.3 million acres of Washington, Oregon and Northern California habitat were put off-limits to wood products companies for logging. Experts say the impacts might be greater in the states where the sage grouse lives. Besides restricting swaths of land to mining, ranching and recreation, an endangered species declaration could require extensive land restoration. Environmentalists who petitioned the government to set aside land to preserve the bird and its sage brush habitat have argued that the sage grouse is just one component of the depleted Great Basin ecosystem that has lost much of its viability to drought, overgrazing, fires and invasive plant species. Rehabilitating the ecosystem will take more than setting aside the land for sage grouse, experts say. It would also require an aggressive campaign to restore the Great Basin through reseeding the soil with sage plants and eradicating invasive plants like cheatgrass and pinion juniper. Western officials say they are optimistic they might avoid economic harm after Fish and Wildlife biologists recommended in a Dec. 3 report against listing the sage grouse. Speaking to reporters that day, Williams said he couldn't remember a time when he has gone against the recommendations of his scientists. But he did not rule out such a decision. Possibly complicating the matter, the New York Times reported that the agency biologists were given two competing analyses of the sage grouse issue - one by a panel of scientists and the other an edited version that included an Interior Department appointee's instructions to not list the bird. Gov. Kenny Guinn said this week he was optimistic the bird would not be listed, based on the biologists' findings. The scientists credited the work of state and local officials, including a Nevada-Eastern California Sage Grouse Conservation Team that explored ways to repopulate sage grouse short of federal government action. "Nevada's effort, in particular, has served as a model for the rest of the nation," Guinn said in a statement. Shawn Espinosa, a sage grouse planner for the Nevada Department of Wildlife, estimated that between 76,000 and 98,000 birds reside in Nevada and California, about 10,000 more than a year ago. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated between 142,000 and 500,000 birds exist. Between 1965 and 1985, they were decreasing at a rate of 3.5 percent per year, but the population has remained stable since then, the agency said. Schnacke, a member of Partnership for the West, a coalition of industries from farming to snowmobiles that advocate the free use of land, said progress in sage grouse conservation has been made without the Endangered Species Act. "It is these locally led conservation strategies that will provide conservationists and wildlife managers the most effective tools to preserve this species," he said. Williams will finalize his decision about the sage grouse - a ground-dwelling, chicken-sized bird - within the next 10 days. If Williams proposes a listing, the sage grouse will undergo a 12-month review before restrictions on the bird and thousands of square miles of sagebrush habitat becomes permanent. Restricting the land under the Endangered Species Act would be "a detriment to Nevada and any other place." said Jim Geisinger, executive vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers. "When they did that up here, it drove the timber industry into the ground," Geisinger said. Geisinger estimated that more than 35,000 forest products jobs were lost in Oregon since the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted in 1994 as a way to deal with the timber industry's loss after the owl's listing. He noted that between the 1994 plan and lawsuits that followed, more than 90 percent of the timberlands in Washington, Oregon and northern California are unavailable to loggers. Overall, each spotted owl nest costs the timber industry about $90 million in lost harvesting, according to an estimate by Bill Pickell, executive director of the Washington Contract Loggers Association. A sage grouse listing could mean big changes in how Nevada land users conduct their businesses. Nevada Mining Association president Russ Fields said that restrictions on sagebrush lands in Nevada would harm the state's $3 billion-a-year mining industry. "A listing could seriously hurt exploration activities, and could potentially foreclose mining activities, particularly gold mining, in the state," Fields said. Nevada mining companies already are required to reclaim the land where they work by reshaping the rocks and soil in addition to reseeding with a government-approved seed mix that runs about $1,000 per acre, Fields estimated. Preston Wright, president of the Nevada Cattlemen's Association, said listing the grouse would hamper livestock grazing. For the sake of land protection, Wright said some ranchers are incurring extra costs by condensing their herds, "resting" segments of the range from grazing, and reseeding unused land in order to show that restoration can work without the government. Environmentalists said the Great Basin's restoration must be given more attention than the few cents per acre it receives now from the federal government. Craig Dremann, a sage grouse petitioner and co-owner of Reveg Edge, an environmental research group, calculated that restoring the Great Basin sagebrush lands will cost up to $2,000 per acre, but also said nobody is certain about how much money or time it would take. Dremann said the cattle industry would be smart to embrace restrictions on the sagebrush lands because "cattle and the grouse use the same part of the ecosystem." "Because the grouse covered all the Great Basin originally, it's an indicator of the same resources," Dremann said. "If the grouse goes extinct, the cattle owners are going to be the next to have problems if they're not having them already." University of Nevada at Reno plant ecology professor Robert Nowak didn't want to make a cost estimate. He is spearheading a four-university Great Basin restoration project that will help make that determination. Nowak estimated that growing "good-sized" sagebrush would take between five and 10 years. |
