Sage Grouse
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With much fanfare, as reported in the Great Falls Tribune, the Montana Sage Grouse Oversight Team announced that it will bequeath more than $1.5 million for a 18,033-acre conservation easement on the 44 Ranch west of Winnett in Fergus and Petroleum Counties. Ostensibly, the state money, as well as additional private and federal government…
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The Department of Interior recently released its Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy whose goal is to reduce range fires in sagebrush ecosystems critical to sage grouse. The plan correctly identifies that cheatgrass is a major threat to the bird, as well as the sagebrush ecosystems. Cheatgrass is an exotic annual plant that greens up early,…
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An important study released today concludes that the presence of cattle in important sage grouse habitats increases the number of ravens that prey on sage grouse and their nests by 45.8% in the Curlew Valley of southeast Idaho. The study found that anthropogenic subsidies were increased in areas where livestock grazing occurred and raven populations increased…
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Conservation Groups seek to restore science-based habitat protections on public lands BOISE, Idaho— Conservation groups today filed a lawsuit over more than a dozen greater sage- grouse plans produced by federal agencies that fail to protect this iconic western bird from a series of threats, including fossil fuel development, grazing and mining. The plans cover about 70 million…
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When President Obama signs the 2016 Omnibus budget bill as he’s expected to do later this week, he’ll be signing off on a lot more than hard-fought spending agreements. In what appears as a victory for conservation, he’ll be approving funding for the new west-wide management plans for sage-grouse habitat, approved by the Bureau of…
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Land and Water Conservation Fund reauthorized- Wildlife and Earth-trashing riders were deleted- There is some good news in the massive spending bill to fund the government. A months long battle to prevent a rider that would delist wolves in the Great Lakes and Wyoming was successful. The wolves will remain on the endangered species list…
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BLM Plans to Turn Landscape into a Cattle Forage Zone. The highly vaunted, but meaningless, land management plans to save sage grouse are being put to the test with the recovery plan for the Soda Fire which burned 225,953 acres along highway 95 on the Oregon/Idaho border in August. Instead of focussing on reestablishing native…
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The decision by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) not to list the Greater Sage Grouse under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was an adroit dance of politics. The plan to “save’ the sage grouse has no clothes. The government proposed solution to the bird’s decline includes 14 new sage-grouse recovery plans—consolidated from 98…
