Issues
Administration won’t appeal Texas court’s decision on lesser prairie chicken. The Obama Administration said Wednesday that it would not appeal recent court rulings by a U.S. District Court that removed Endangered Species Act protections for the lesser prairie chicken. Critics of the agency’s 2014 decision to list the chicken as “threatened” had said the designation was unnecessary because of efforts by landowners, industry, and states to protect the bird and its habitat. The Fish and Wildlife Service said that it still “intends to reassess the status of the species based on the court’s ruling and the best available scientific data.”
In February, a U.S. District Court judge upheld his September 2015 ruling that overturned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to list the lesser prairie chicken as threatened, denying the Department of Interior and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s motion to amend his judgement. Federal attorneys had asked the judge to amend his ruling instead of vacating the listing decision so the Fish and Wildlife Service could make a new determination that appropriately considered a range-wide conservation plan the judge had cited in his decision to overturn the listing. The federal lawyers also asked the judge to limit his ruling to Texas and New Mexico, a request the judge denied.
Senator Jim Inhofe (OK), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called this week’s announcement “welcome and different news from this administration.” Kansas Senator Jerry Moran said the decision to drop the appeal “highlights administration’s flawed approach to listing the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species in the first place. Stakeholders in Kansas need certainty on the listing.” Representative Kevin Yoder (KS), who added an amendment to delist the chicken to the Interior appropriations bill last year, feared the fight is not yet over, stating “I’m skeptical this is the end of the road.”
IPAA and API submit comments on proposed Mitigation Policy revisions. Earlier this week, the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) submitted joint comments on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposed revisions to its Mitigation Policy. The Mitigation Policy provides guidelines to limitadverse impacts of land and water development on species and their habitats. The agency says the policy revisions are needed to bring the policy in line with changes in conservation practices since the policy was implemented in 1981.
“The Draft Policy improperly expands the Service’s authority beyond that delegated by Congress, and lacks statutory and regulatory justification,” IPAA and API wrote in their comments. “Its onerous requirements and ambiguous standards will lead to delays in federal approvals and authorizations, both by the Service and other federal agencies.” The groups specifically took issue with the Service’s ambiguous new standards and the expansion of its authority over unlisted species, among other changes. “The Service’s asserted authority is defined so broadly that it effectively would allow the Service to require mitigation of any impacts to the natural environment in the United States,” they explained.
Native American tribes work together to help monarch butterflies. At a news conference on Tuesday, seven Native American tribes in Oklahoma announced they will work together to create habitat and food on tribal lands for monarch butterflies, whose population has declined in recent years from a variety of factors. The tribes will plant milkweed and native nectar-producing plants on their land and will coordinate with the University of Kansas’ Monarch Watch program, which is supported by a $250,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
The new partnership is the continuation of tribes’ previous work to support pollinators, said Thalia Miller, director of the Chickasaw Nation Horticulture Department. “For the last several years, we have been raising bees and pollinators, so when this opportunity came along, it fit with what we were doing,” she told reporters. Monarch butterflies have faced an increasing number of threats in recent years, including the loss of milkweed and threats to their wintering habitat in Mexico. Researchers believe improved weather and the end of a severe drought in Texas were likely responsible for a recent bump in the monarch population this year.
In the News
Resources riders unlikely in Senate authorization markup. E&E News (sub req’d). The Senate Armed Services Committee is set to take up its version of the defense authorization bill this week. Unlike the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate committee has historically shied away from including natural resources language in its version of the bill. Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) is known for asking members to pass a clean bill, and has also expressed his distaste for attempting to address current hot-button issues like the endangered species listing of the greater sage grouse. “I hope it is not,” he said. “I have heard that is the case, but I hope that it will not be the result, because the sage grouse was removed from the prospect of being listed as endangered, and I thought that had taken off a lot of the pressure on that.”
Feds allow wind industry to kill more eagles. Washington Examiner. It’s open season for bald eagles under a new proposed federal plan to increase the number birds that can be killed by wind farms and other energy projects. The Fish and Wildlife Service is publishing a proposed rule Friday upping the number of eagles currently allowed to be incidentally killed by an energy project from 1,130 to 4,200. The agency says the bald eagle population is healthy enough to sustain added losses. “We estimate there are about 143,000 bald eagles in the United States, and that populations continue to increase,” according to a pre-publication copy of the proposed rule to be published Friday in the Federal Register. “Given their continued population growth above the 2009 baseline, there is considerable capacity to sustain take of bald eagles.”
Conservationists consider legal options to fight seismic testing for oil in Big Cypress National Preserve. Naples Daily News. Conservation groups are considering their legal options in the wake of a final sign-off by the National Park Service on a Texas company to look for oil in the Big Cypress National Preserve. Burnett Oil Co. wants to use specially designed off-road vehicles to drive through 70,000 acres of the 700,000-acre preserve in eastern Collier County, stopping at spots to vibrate steel plates against the ground and see whether seismic signals from underground indicate geologic formations that might contain oil or gas. After a nearly two-year review that triggered protests and political maneuvers, federal regulators issued a finding late Friday that the work would have “no significant impact” on the preserve’s forests and wet prairies or the wildlife that live there, including endangered Florida panthers.
Meet the Army guy who fights for the sage grouse. E&E News (sub req’d). As the Air Force’s deputy director of logistics, Eugene Collins looked after pilots, making sure they had what they needed to soar. Now the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety and occupational health, Collins is looking out for a feathery squadron. “My new pilots are endangered species,” the retired colonel said. “I’ve gone from worrying about pilots and missiles and bombs to being concerned about tortoises, northern long-eared bats and greater sage grouse, making sure that we can respect and live in harmony with the environment.”
Big Cypress OKs oil exploration in panther habitat. E&E News (sub req’d). Trucks may soon be crisscrossing wetlands in the Big Cypress National Preserve as part of a Texas company’s bid to find underground oil and gas reserves in the vast South Florida swamp. The National Park Service approved the plan last week, saying the effort would have “no significant impact” on wildlife and environment in the 70,000-acre exploration area. The decision will open Big Cypress to oil exploration for the first time in 17 years — and could potentially kick off a new period of litigation at a preserve whose conflicting mission seems to always lead it to court. In its environmental assessment, NPS reasons that vegetation will grow back and trucks will avoid sensitive habitat and endangered species with the help of NPS staff and field observers.
Trump’s son woos sportsmen, covets top job at Interior. E&E News (sub req’d). As Donald Trump seeks to win over skeptical Republicans on Capitol Hill and fence-sitting voters, he seems to have wooed one important voting bloc: sportsmen. The Trump campaign has pledged to nominate a hunter to lead the Fish and Wildlife Service, aggressively fight lawsuits by anti-hunting groups, make wildlife habitat more productive, and control predators like wolves that prey on game species like elk. Would Trump roll back Obama administration oil and gas leasing reforms designed to keep drilling farther from national parks and backcountry areas while tightening regulations on hydraulic fracturing? Would he dismantle Obama’s sage grouse plan by loosening restrictions on drilling, mining and grazing? What kind of influence would Trump exert on Endangered Species Act decisions that can affect hunters and energy companies?
Counties, state decry ‘D.C. down’ land management changes. Deseret News. The nation’s largest landlord wants to change how it manages public lands, hoping for what it says is more flexibility to institute plans that encompass sweeping landscapes not beholden to artificial boundaries. Sage grouse, wildlife and winding rivers don’t recognize man-carved field office boundaries within the Bureau of Land Management’s inventory of public lands, so the BLM wants greater latitude to manage for those large-scale issues. County leaders in Western states with vast amount of public lands, however, said the proposed BLM Planning 2.0 rule diminishes the role of local input by giving those closest to the land less deference at the planning table.
Expert says habitat loss to blame for rapid decline of the monarch butterfly population. Orlando Sentinel. With the population of monarch butterflies only making marginal advances in growth, botanist Scott Davis wants you to know there’s something you can do. “If every yard in the state had milkweed, preferably native, the monarch butterfly population would explode,” he said. Certainly it’s not as simple as that, but small steps can make huge advances in a butterfly population that is dying off from a severe shortage of essential native milkweed, an overuse of pesticides and the proliferation of a protozoan parasite. Davis said the leading factor that has led to the rapid decline in Florida is habitat loss, which has significantly reduced native milkweed. Another factor is the Ophryocystis elektroscirrha protozoan parasite that can build up on non-native milkweed plants and kill the insects.
Butterfly recovery receives blow from winter storm kill. Detroit Free Press. An unusually cold, fierce winter storm in Mexico over a few days last March could mean seeing less of a once-regular summertime sight in Michigan — monarch butterflies. The storm hit around March 10 with snow, high winds and freezing temperatures in some of the prime over-wintering grounds for the migrating monarchs, the high mountain oyamel fir forests in southern Mexico, places where they congregate in the tens of millions for winter. Monarchs are essentially tropical insects, but can tolerate cooler temperatures. However, they can freeze to death in sub-freezing temps over prolonged periods. “The mortality was really high; I would say in the millions,” said David Mota-Sanchez, a Michigan State University entomologist who is helping research the impact of the winter storm on the butterflies.
Push to start pipeline construction meets firm opposition. Associated Press. Opponents of a proposed oil pipeline slated to run through four Midwestern states pressed Iowa regulators Thursday to keep a Texas-based petroleum company from starting construction before all federal permits are approved. Dakota Access planned on beginning construction by now on the 1,150-mile pipeline that’s designed to carry a half-million barrels of oil a day from the Bakken oil fields in northwest North Dakota to a tank storage facility in south-central Illinois. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was notified by the federal Interior Department earlier this month that its responsibilities under the federal Endangered Species Act have not been met and further study is required into the project’s impact on the endangered Dakota skipper butterfly — an assessment that could take as long as 90 days.
