St. George • An iconic bird species known for dramatically puffing up “bulbous yellow air sacs” on its chest and producing “weird pops and whistles” to attract mates across western sagebrush landscapes is now puffing up drama and noise on the political landscape as the focus of a series of amendments to its management plan published late last week that open up 51 million acres of habitat to oil, gas and mineral leasing.
Environmental groups responded to the development with outrage, labeling these Trump administration rollbacks on protections for the greater sage grouse bird as “dangerous” and anti-science. But some scientists who study greater sage grouse conservation stand behind the changes, claiming the issue is more nuanced than it appears, The Spectrum newspaper in St. George reported.
The greater sage grouse land bird is considered an important indicator species for the vast “sagebrush sea” ecosystem that dominates the Intermountain West, meaning that the wellbeing of this bird species has been scientifically associated with the proper functioning of landscapes that make up much of Wyoming as well as large swaths of Utah, Oregon, Nevada, Montana, California, Idaho and Colorado. Protecting the greater sage grouse species, which has been on the decline since at least the 1990s, has been viewed as a means of preserving the whole array of plants and animals that coexist as part of this habitat type.
Now, with the greater sage grouse still in peril, the publication of these final supplementary environmental impact statements by the Bureau of Land Management unlocks mineral leases on millions of acres of land that were designated in the 2015 plan as important for the bird’s recovery. The move also marks the end to a series of attempts by the Trump administration to unravel these Obama-era protections, pushing through changes very similar to those that were struck down by a judge last October pending further scientific review.
Conservation organizations like Defenders of Wildlife, Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity are now protesting the changes and threatening legal action, pointing to the 2019 court decision that determined that “the weakening of protections is contrary to the science.”
“Once again, the Trump administration is circumventing sound science and years of collaborative work in their last-ditch effort to issue inadequate plans for protecting the imperiled greater sage-grouse,” said the Defenders of Wildlife’s vice president for landscape conservation, Jim Lyons, in a statement released Friday. “This administration has continued to prioritize oil and gas leasing over habitat conservation... It’s time to...let science, not politics, dictate the best way to protect this iconic bird and the Sagebrush ecosystems on which it — and hundreds of other species — depends.”
“These guys are hellbent on turning over the last refuges of the vanishing greater sage grouse to drilling, mining and grazing,” added Michael Saul, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement from that organization. “It’s disgusting, transparent and illegal. The Trump administration isn’t even trying to repair the scientific and legal failings of its 2019 cuts to sage-grouse habitat protections.”
But — perhaps surprising given the Trump administration’s record for attacking science — in this case, the scientists behind the science on greater sage grouse conservation management weren’t as quick to label the amendments as anti-science.
Terry Messmer, a professor of wildland resources at Utah State University who specializes in studying the effects of land management on the greater sage grouse, explained that species management plans can change over time while still being thoroughly science-based throughout the process. He said he views reactions like those from quoted conservation activists as “value-laden and emotional,” and that he believes the Trump administration’s changes do actually reflect the most current, sound science.
“In 2015 when the BLM went out and did this plan, it represented the best available science, the best knowledge that we had about sage grouse. But the problem is that the science is never done,” Messmer explained. “Between 2015 and 2019, when the additional amendments were made, there has been a lot of science that has been published and, in fact, some earlier science has been debunked.”
Some of that debunked science, Messmer said, was conducted by his own team and led to the 2015 management plan encompassing a broader area for greater sage grouse protections than is necessary or scientifically warranted. When they discovered they had made a mistake in how they measured one of the habitat features important for sage grouse nesting success, they went back and recalculated how sage grouse select habitat patches and determined that some of the leasing restrictions introduced by the 2015 plan may have been overkill.
He views the new changes, therefore, as simply remedying earlier mistakes that locked up millions of acres of land not actually as critical for this bird species as was previously thought. As far as the 2019 court ruling on these amendments the first time around, he said he believes the judge was not made aware of the updates to the best available science at the time.
“This is a clear-cut example of how new science was used to better inform and create a plan that was more reasonable,” Messmer said. “My goal in this process is to find the truth and provide the best information that can be assumed to be the truth as we know it at the time.”
Messmer confirmed that his research at Utah State University is funded by a variety of state, federal and private sources and that he acts as an independent scientist not beholden to the interests of any particular industry.
The merits of the amendments were also defended by Casey Hammond, the principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, who told the Associated Press that the new plans “better align the BLM’s management of sage-grouse habitat while addressing the circumstances and needs of each individual state.”
In Utah, the change will result in land-use restrictions adopted in 2015 being peeled back on 1.8 million acres of “sagebrush sea” in regions that had been federally designated as General Habitat Management Areas (GHMAs), which are considered less important than their counterparts, the Priority Habitat Management Areas (PHMAs).
Protections will largely stay the same in PHMAs, where the majority of the birds reside. And, of the 1.8 million acres in Utah GHMAs opened up to other uses, only a third of that area, approximately 600,000 acres, is actually under the control of the Bureau of Land Management and thus subject to changes in mineral leasing.
Drilling activity has been shown to negatively impact greater sage grouse, who are made vulnerable to perching predators by the introduction of taller objects in their habitat and can experience stress from equipment noise. But Messmer noted that there are mechanisms in place to evaluate these impacts and adjust future plan iterations based on the findings. He thinks that species management in the west works best when it accommodates the interests of a variety of stakeholders while balancing environmental hazards of development.
“If it’s not good for the community it’s not going to be good for wildlife, so you have to find a way to work those two things together,” Messmer said.
As the Upland Game Project Leader at Utah’s Division of Wildlife, Avery Cook agreed that the changes could potentially benefit the greater sage grouse by better aligning federal and state management areas and streamlining the resources available at different agencies for the protection of the species.
“From the state perspective, a lot of these areas weren’t sage grouse management areas already,” Cook said. “So this change is more of an alignment between state and federal management areas, which can help us direct resources to the best habitat in the state that we feel we have the best chance of preserving long term.”
Without referring to any specific areas where land use restrictions would change due to the amendments, Cook gave the example of the state’s struggle to protect greater sage grouse on land near Park City, where the rapid pace of urban development is necessitating more and more effort on behalf of fewer and fewer birds. He thinks that focusing on regions with the best habitat prognosis for sage grouse might yield the greatest rewards.
“It’s kind of a mesh of the scientific understanding of what’s best for sage grouse and what we can reasonably do as managers to keep the population going in perpetuity,” Cook said.
Joan Meiners is an environment reporter for The Spectrum & Daily News through the Report for America initiative by The Ground Truth Project.
