In what seems to be a mostly unnoticed breath of fresh air, a sage-grouse recovery plan was release and it didn’t blame grazing for everything and set a tangible delisting protocol.
On Nov. 1, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a draft recovery plan for the Gunnison sage-grouse. The plan—drafted in August and signed in mid-September, but only recently released to the public—recommends increasing the resiliency of existing populations to help bolster the overall numbers of the threatened subspecies of sage-grouse.
A detail that may surprise cattle producers is that the draft recovery plan does not recommend broad-brush reductions in grazing. Instead, it mentions only the need to minimize habitat disturbance caused by—among many other things—“improper livestock grazing.”
The Gunnison sage-grouse exists in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. It was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2014. The draft plan’s background information describes the birds’ initial population decline as the fault of “the conversion of sagebrush habitats to agriculture and residential and commercial development.”
The draft recovery plan lists several other pressing threats to the bird, including loss or conversion of habitat through development; disruption of active leks through things like roads, oil and gas exploration and extraction, improper livestock grazing, renewable energy efforts, recreation, and noise; the effects of climate change, including drought; encroachment of invasive plants, including piсon-juniper, into the sagebrush ecosystem; disease; predation; and the genetic effects of small and scattered populations.
The recommended recovery actions that touch on ranching include:
• Conserve existing habitats, including minimizing and mitigating degradation and disturbances to active habitats, with special attention paid to areas within four miles of an active lek; and
• Improving habitat quality and quantity, which includes removing encroaching invasive plant species, planting sagebrush and developing water features, modifying existing improper grazing practices in the habitat, and controlling noxious weeds.
The recovery plan also listed recovery targets for delisting. These targets were as follows for the high male count (HMC)—the highest count of observed males strutting at leks during breeding season, tracked over several years—and estimated overall populations for five of the eight population of Gunnison sage-grouse:
• Gunnison Basin—748 HMC, 3,669 total;
• San Miguel—57 HMC, 280 total;
• Piсon Mesa—28 HMC, 137 total;
• Crawford—41 HMC, 201 total; and
• Monticello—31 HMC, 152 total. — WLJ
