Sage Grouse in Idaho, could lose “everything”

Oct. 15–ROGERSON — Interior Secretary Sally Jewell stood on a sagebrush-covered hill Tuesday and saw an unbroken sea of grass.

The grassland is what’s left after the Murphy Complex Fire, which burned 600,000 acres of prime sage grouse habitat south of Twin Falls in 2007. What was once unfragmented sagebrush steppe could take up to 50 years, if ever, to recover.

“What’s so stark is the amount of sage grouse habitat that was there in 2000 and is gone today,” Jewell said.

Jewell oversees two federal agencies that will decide the fate of the sage grouse, which lives in Idaho and 10 other states and touches the lives of millions in the West. The Bureau of Land Management is in charge of millions of acres of sage grouse habitat; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide by 2015 whether to list the bird as a threatened species, a step that could affect energy and residential development, grazing, recreation and more on the bird’s desert habitat.

Jewell visited the Brown’s Bench-China Mountain area about 10 miles north of the Nevada state line because it is some of the most important sage grouse habitat in Idaho. This 50,000-acre island is surrounded by range that has burned — some more than once — over the past 15 years. It’s one of the last sanctuaries of largely unbroken habitat that provides a critical genetic link between sage grouse populations in northern Nevada to healthy populations in the Shoshone Basin to the east, Owyhee County to the west and the rest of Idaho to the north.

“This is the core of the core habitat,” said Steve Ellis, BLM deputy director and the former Idaho state director.

As director in 2012, Ellis told developers who had planned to build as much as 200 miles of road and as many as 170 wind-generation towers that he would wait to make a decision until after the plan to protect the sage grouse was finished. That led the developers to scrap the project.

The project could have meant millions of dollars of investment, hundreds of jobs and economic bounty for a rural area. But it also could have made the listing of the grouse more likely.

“These are tough decisions,” Ellis said. “There will likely be more tough decisions if we are to prevent sage grouse listing.”

Jewell was in Idaho on Tuesday to meet with federal and state officials, Idaho ranchers, conservation groups, and Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch to talk about what’s happening to prevent fires and restore habitat already lost.

Idaho has developed its own plan for conserving sage grouse that BLM officials applauded. The plan would trigger additional protection in the event more habitat is destroyed or large numbers of birds die.

Idaho Department of Fish and Game Director Virgil Moore said it’s based in part on Ellis’ decision to stop wind development on China Mountain.

“It’s the kind of decision that’s integral to the state plan,” Moore told Jewell. He pointed to another decision to stop the siting of a new Wood River Valley airport in the prime sagebrush habitat there.

But much of the focus of Tuesday’s discussion was on stopping fire and the invasive cheatgrass, called primary threats in Idaho.

One of the state’s major recent steps is creating five rangeland fire protection associations that allow ranchers to act as first-attack firefighters. The ranchers form organizations that then buy liability insurance and require 40 hours of firefighting training, the same amount of training federal firefighters get.

“The key to this whole thing is rapid response,” said Mike Garry, a rancher who saw much of the federal land he used for grazing get burned in the Murphy Complex.

Sage grouse are particularly vulnerable as their key habitats have shrunk, experts said.

“We’re probably on the cusp of losing everything,” Jim Klott, a wildlife biologist with the BLM, told Jewell. “One more big fire, we’re there.”

Jared Brackett, who grazes his cattle on Brown’s Bench, told Jewell that quality sage grouse habitat has been maintained by his family, which has responsibly managed the area in conjunction with BLM for decades.

“This isn’t key habitat by chance,” Brackett said. “I understand it’s public ground, but it’s my backyard.

“We take it personal when it burns.”

Jewell applauded the work of the groups involved.

“Fires are burning longer, hotter and faster, and it’s one of the reasons that we’ve seen the range of sagebrush habitat cut by more than half,” said Jewell. “The partnerships in Idaho to bring this key American landscape back are models of what we need to conserve and restore sagebrush habitat that is so important to wildlife and the Western economy.”

She said she learned early on that there are no easy solutions in her job, something that was especially true of the potential listing of sage grouse.

“We need everybody to stay at the table, and if they do we think there’s a good shot at preserving the habitat necessary for this species,” Jewell said.

On Wednesday she is expected to join Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe to view sagebrush conservation efforts on a ranch in Wyoming, and sign nine sage grouse protection plans highlighting private and public conservation partnerships.

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The Associated Press contributed.

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Rocky Barker: 377-6484