Wyoming officials on Tuesday recommended adding more state land as protected habitat for sage grouse, which the team’s chairman said was paramount to maintaining a vibrant economy for the state.

The recommendations, which came three years after the group was convened by Gov. Dave Freudenthal in 2007, followed a lawsuit filed Monday by the Western Watersheds Project, the Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians, which claim that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has delayed Endangered Species Act (ESA) protection for the greater sage grouse.

“They’re suing while we’re doing the work,” said Freudenthal. “We’re doing what they should be doing — conserving — but they’d rather litigate than fix anything.”

Bob Budd, who chaired the state’s Sage Grouse Implementation Team, said if the grouse is declared an endangered species, the impact of its listing would reach across the entire state.

“If the sage grouse is listed, roughly 80% of the state’s surface area is in its historic range and it will have an impact on everything from ranching, to oil and gas, to uranium,” Budd said.

Freudenthal, who is stepping down as governor following elections later this year, noted that the recommendations came from “an effort and an policy that is particularly dependent on whoever is governor, in that it is underlain by an executive order by the governor. We hope that these recommendations will be the guide for the next five years, which is what they figure it’s going to take to get things stabilized in the core areas as well as get some other research done…”

The team worked to develop a strategy that was fair and one that worked for the grouse and the state’s economy, the governor said.

“We’re going to be sued over and over and over again, so you have to have a strategy that lasts and is sufficient to withstand litigation,” he said.

Wyoming’s strategy includes three priorities:

The report, which Budd said “consistently” relied upon current science, adds birds inside the core area and identifies an additional 300,000 acres for protection.

“If you’re looking at conservation and you can actually identify and conserve 83.1% of a species in your area, in roughly 25% of the state’s land mass, that is a good sign,” Budd said. “That basically says we got it right and we’re doing things where it needs to be done.”

The lawsuit filed by the three environmental groups asks for protection of two distinct grouse populations: the bi-state population found in Nevada and California and the Columbia Basin population found in Washington.

“The sage grouse needs protection under the Endangered Species Act to have any chance at survival,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “More bureaucratic delay places sage grouse at increased risk of extinction from further habitat destruction and other factors.”

In April the departments of Interior and Agriculture unveiled a joint agreement to give “unprecedented support” for the greater sage grouse and sagebrush ecosystems across 11 states (see Daily GPI, April 14).

The move by the two federal agencies came one month after Interior said it had determined that the greater sage grouse would not be designated as an endangered species (see Daily GPI, March 8). Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at the time that the bird deserved to be included on the ESA but said other species faced more imminent threats. Instead the bird was assigned a status as “warranted but precluded” and placed on a list of “candidate species” for future inclusion on the ESA. The status is to be reviewed annually.

Under the ESA, federal officials “can only delay protection of species if it is making ‘expeditious progress’ in listing the other priority species,” the environmental group’s lawsuit claims. “This is not the case. Under the Bush administration, listing of new species ground to a near halt, with only a total of 62 species listed in eight years compared to 522 listed under President Clinton and 231 listed under the senior Bush.

“Unfortunately, the Obama administration has not substantially increased the pace of species listings. It did finalize a proposal from the previous administration to protect 48 species from the island of Kauai [in Hawaii], but has to date only finalized protection for two plants in the conterminous United States.”

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