“The door is slamming shut for the grouse,” Stiver said. “I don’t know if 13 million acres is a line in the sand, but we’re getting close to the loss of a functional ecosystem.” “What you’re looking at is a functional ecosystem, at some point in our lifetimes, that is no longer existing,” he said. If core habitat continues to decline at that annual rate, it will be cut down in half, to about 13 million acres, in the next 10 years, producing a dire situation where “it’s getting darn close to over” for the ecosystem, Stiver said. But that core habitat is disappearing at a rate of about 1.3 million acres a year, said San Stiver, sagebrush conservation initiative coordinator for the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. There’s currently only about 26 million acres of core sagebrush habitat left where the native sagebrush is healthy and sage grouse are thriving.
“The trends are going in the wrong direction for us to say we can somehow scientifically and legitimately support that ‘not warranted’ decision,” said Ed Arnett, a wildlife biologist and CEO of the Wildlife Society, a group of more than 11,000 wildlife professionals. State and federal agencies are focused on this possibility, scrambling to develop and implement strategies to preserve the sagebrush habitat and, hopefully, save the bird. That has once again raised concerns among wildlife biologists and land management agencies that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2015 decision that Endangered Species Act protections for sage grouse were “not warranted” could soon be reversed.
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