Sage Grouse Protection
Will Governor Freudenthal’s Core Area Strategy Save the Grouse in Wyoming?
Wyoming Governor Freudenthal stepped boldly into the sage grouse conservation debate in July of 2008 by issuing a sage grouse conservation policy based on designating core areas around some of the most populated breeding areas in the state. The Core Areas encompass about three-quarters of the state's breeding population, and the designation looks at first blush like an important victory for the sage grouse. But the new policy contains major loopholes that undercut its stated intent to conserve and recover this rare bird.
Under the plan, breeding and nesting habitats outside designated core areas would get accelerated industrial development including waivers of sage grouse protections. As a result, these populations are likely to disappear as oil and gas drilling moves into these habitats. Up to 25% of the population could be lost in the process, including some of the largest breeding populations in the Powder River Basin, which were gerrymandered out of the Core Area designations to allow more coalbed methane drilling.
Second, it is far from clear that the Core Areas themselves will maintain their grouse populations under the new plan. The new plan allows "current management and existing land uses," including, for example, a 2,000-well coalbed methane project in the Atlantic Rim Core Area, which the BLM expects to wipe out local grouse populations. And the plan calls for a "non-regulatory" approach to sage grouse protection in designated core areas, meaning that conservation measures are optional, not mandatory. But leaving sage grouse conservation – which is typically more expensive - up to voluntary efforts by the oil and gas industry has been an ecological disaster so far. And wintering habitats, just as important, don't receive added protection under the plan.
The Governor's Executive Order makes clear that his policy has been adopted to prevent the imminent protection of the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Oil and gas industry representatives are supporting the plan, since it cuts sage grouse conservation measures that reduce their profit margin, and accelerates oil and gas drilling outside Core Areas, and because the Core Areas were drawn to entirely exclude the areas they'd most like to drill as cheaply as possible.
If the Core Area plan is implemented, there exists a scenario in which the Core Area populations are able to hold their own or show slower declines, while the sage grouse outside Core Areas are decimated, resulting in an additional major decline in sage grouse over today's already precariously low populations. Thus, the plan could wind up presiding over further sage grouse declines, instead of fostering a much-needed population recovery. Endangered Species Act protections provide thekind of certainty needed to assure the recovery of the sage grouse, and to rein in oil and gas drilling to a reasonable and sustainable pace.
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Shedding Light on Groundbreaking Science
BCA publicized a groundbreaking study on sage grouse populations in the fall of 2005, known as the Holloran study. BCA widely broadcasted Holloran’s findings that protections for sage grouse are not currently sufficient to ensure the bird's survival, and we publicly demand greater protections be enacted that would allow the bird to thrive. Despite the Bureau of Land Management's knowledge of the study and its findings before the date of publication, the Bureau had not previously disclosed that its management practices were insufficient to protect the sage grouse, nor did it change them. Due to this media blitz, the public debate on sage grouse has changed, and in the 2005 decision on the Jonah Field Infill project in the Upper Green River Valley, the Bureau itself wrote that management practices are not protecting the bird.
Defending Sage Grouse Habitat from Coalbed Methane Threats in the Atlantic Rim
The Atlantic Rim area has one of the three biggest sage grouse breeding complexes left in the West. Despite BCA pressure to convince the agency to require No Surface Occupancy within 3 miles of sage grouse breeding sites, the BLM has approved 2,000 coalbed methane wells without workable sage grouse protection measures. BCA, together with other conservation groups represented by Natural Resources Defense Council, has filed a legal appeal to halt a devastating level of coalbed methane drilling across this quarter million acre uplift at the eastern edge of the Red Desert. In addition to sage grouse, the area holds prime habitat for mule deer, elk and pronghorn, a rich assemblage of nesting raptors and is home to rare Wyoming wildlife such as the pygmy rabbit and Wyoming pocket gopher. Even the BLM has admitted that the intensity of the development it approved will destroy wildlife and recreation values in the area. That is, unless our lawsuit proves successful.
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Watchdogging to Save Sage Grouse Habitat from Oil and Gas Lease Sales, Statewide
Over the years, the Wyoming BLM has offered acres of land up for oil and gas lease auctions every two months. BCA has filed multiple lease protests, adding up to hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine sage grouse habitat under threat. As promised, in January of 2010, the BLM issued a new sage grouse policy for Wyoming.
 Sage Grouse
Photo by David Menke, US Fish and Wildlife Service
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The BLM offered assurances that all leases under protest due to inadequate sage grouse protections will be withdrawn and re-issued with new requirements to reflect the new policy. Unfortunately, although the new policy creates some increases in protection for sage grouse, they are merely optional, and like the Core Area plan, the new BLM policy actually reduces protections outside the Core Area – where some of the most important habitat exists. BCA put more acres of Wyoming sage grouse habitat that have been leased for oil and gas under protest than any other group, and we will work to ensure any resolution of our protests will conclude in sage grouse protections backed by science, and we will continue to protest irresponsible oil and gas leases across the state of Wyoming to ensure the only leasing that goes forward is appropriate and in harmony with the needs of wildlife.
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Protecting Sage Grouse in the Bighorn Basin
The Bighorn Basin is the only area in Wyoming which has seen recent positive population trends, but the area is up for management changes for thousands of acres of land, and the mineral resources under the Basin have recently come under the sights of the oil and gas industry.
BCA headed up the drafting a comprehensive, science-based conservation alternative for the Bighorn Basin with specific sections drafted by partner groups according to their areas of expertise, and recommending sage grouse expert Clait Braun’s Blueprint for Sage Grouse Conservation and Recovery as the template for protections. This is a positive way to advocate for a science-based vision of solutions for the future. The resulting Community Alternative was presented to the BLM in June of 2009 in accordance with the agency’s request.
With the winnings from a 2007 settlement, BCA funded a 2009 scientific study by Matt Holloran showing that sagebrush habitat “improvement” projects have actually exerted a negative impact on sage grouse populations in the Bighorn Basin.
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Working to Protect Powder River Basin Sage Grouse
The Powder River Basin population of sage grouse has shown particularly precipitous declines linked to coalbed methane development, and its ability to persist is very much in doubt, fueling the possibility of Endangered Species Act protection. BCA and nature photographer George Wuerthner brought an appeal of the BLM's Powder River Basin Coalbed Methane Environmental Impact Statement to the 10th Circuit Appeals Court in Denver in 2009. The lawsuit is focused on the BLM's failure to consider protections for sage grouse and black-tailed prairie dogs in the Powder River Basin, while approving 51,000 coalbed methane wells. We won an identical challenge on the Montana side of the Powder River Basin in 2005 on the basis of the BLM's failure to consider phased development, in which only a limited area is available for drilling at any one time, as a means to reduce impacts to sage grouse. BCA is represented by the Western Environmental Law Center in the case.
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BCA Wins Protections for Grouse in Thunder Basin National Grassland
Because BCA achieved a settlement negotiated with the Bill Barrett Corporation in 2005, when 232 coalbed methane wells are developed in the Thunder Basin National Grassland, sage grouse will be better protected. Under Barrett’s Big Porcupine coalbed methane project, seasonal, gated closures will occur within 2 miles of sage grouse nesting and breeding sites. During the nesting season, access to wells within the closure areas will be allowed only by bicycle in emergency situations, reducing the grouse's risk of roadkill, and significantly reducing disturbance and stress the birds would otherwise endure. These are the strongest sage grouse protection measures to be applied in a Wyoming oil and gas project.
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Defending Sage Grouse Against Ultra High Density Drilling in the Jonah Field
There are four sage grouse nesting and breeding sites still within the infamous Jonah Field, already a poster child for environmental destruction caused by oil and gas development run amok. A tangled web of roads and wellpads surround one of the three largest concentrations of nesting and breeding habitat in the state, and erodes their ability to survive. Now, industry plans to further pulverize the landscape with 3,100 more wells, and BCA has filed an administrative challenge to prevent this awful precedent.
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Defending Habitat from Massive Continental Divide–Creston and Hiawatha Projects
In 2006, BLM proposed the Hiawatha and Continental Divide-Creston gas projects, which would drill 13,000 new wells over 1.5 million acres of the Red Desert. These projects threaten important sage grouse habitat and would seriously degrade roadless and primitive country. During initial stages, BCA submitted a total of 165 pages of technical and scientific analysis of these projects, and the resulting multi-year delay indicates that those comments have forced the BLM to acknowledge the substantial negative impacts of the proposed wells 
on habitats and wildlife. Now the change in Administrations has caused further delay, during which BCA has been working with state and local agencies and with the project proponents to influence the projects.
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Advancing Grouse Protection Through Management Changes in the Great Divide
During the revision process for the Bureau of Land Management's plan for the Great Divide area, BCA empowered the public to speak out for conservation. The plan covers 4.6 million acres of public land in Wyoming, and one of the last fully-functioning sage-steppe ecosystems in the West. Unfortunately, despite 85,000 citizen comments, almost all favoring conservation backed up by science, despite public criticism by Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal, despite scores of news stories and op-eds in local newspapers from Native Americans, petroleum geologists, religious leaders and history buffs, the BLM chose to open 98% of the area to oil and gas development. The Western Heritage Alternative, a citizens' conservation plan for the Great Divide drafted by BCA, would have implemented comprehensive guidelines in the Connelly sage grouse study of 2000, focusing around the conservation of breeding and nesting habitat, late summer chick rearing habitat, and wintering habitat. BCA also advocates in the Alternative for no surface-occupancy or disturbance within 3 miles of a sage grouse nesting and breeding site. BCA and our partners are currently weighing our options for a legal challenge of this irresponsible plan.
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