Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Sage Grouse

One of my favorite birds on the planet, a species that I fell in love with the first time I saw it pictured in a field guide, is in big trouble, and the Bush administration is doing everything in its power to keep it that way. The Sage Grouse is a splendid bird of sage country in the American West. Males gather in spring to display, in a ritual that makes me imagine a gay bar on Mae West Impersonator’s Night, the males inflating air sacs in improbably suggestive places and erecting what looks like a feather boa as they strut their stuff in a hilarious and exuberant display of testosterone gone awry. When not displaying, the males look like oversized, dully colored pheasants. As one of the more appropriately named birds, they’re particularly dependent on sage brush, especially from late autumn through early spring. Invasive cheatgrass is taking over the open range now, and habitat alteration has precipitated a steady and alarming decline of the species during the 20th Century. Sage Grouse were first described in the ornithological literature by Meriwether Lewis after the Lewis and Clark expedition, and were abundant for a long time. Market hunting took a serious toll, but overall the species has been hurt far more by habitat losses and alterations in the past 100 years. The population was in a tailspin until about 1985, and since then has been barely holding its own. Most unbiased ornithologists and conservationists who look at the numbers believe it is urgent for something to be done now, before the numbers dwindle to such a disastrous level that recovery becomes far less likely. So for many years ornithologists and conservationists have been asking that the species be listed as endangered, or at least threatened.

But the oil and gas industries and the ranchers and farmers who are destroying the habitat have a vested interest in keeping the species unprotected. And since they have many friends in the Bush Administration, it isn’t surprising that the administration is recommending that the species not be listed. Mark Salvo, director of the Sagebrush Sea Project, an Arizona conservation group that had petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to grant federal protection, said to The New York times, “By not listing the species, damaging activities will be allowed to continue on much of the sagebrush steppe, to the detriment of sage grouse and scores of other species.” He noted that “the only science that the Bush administration has based this decision on is political science. It would appear they are paying back their political base in the grazing and oil and gas industries.”

This past summer, several of the leading wildlife biologists who study the sage grouse and its habitat produced a 610-page “conservation assessment,” reviewing the available scientific evidence about the bird. While the populations have been relatively stable since two decades of steep and steady decline ended in 1985, they wrote, “we are not optimistic about the future of the sage grouse because of long-term population declines coupled with continued loss and degradation of habitat.”

But in the same way that corporations with vested interests are attacking unbiased science in so many areas nowadays, The Partnership for the West, a coalition of industry and property-rights groups, called the report a biased document based on “unreliable and inaccurate data.”

Ironically, rich people and corporations try very hard to ensure that their financial holdings increase at ever greater rates while squandering the very capital, our natural resources, that their wealth depends on. A great many people claim to have voted for the Bush administration because of moral issues. The God in my bible specifically instructed Noah to save every species, and notes the fall of a sparrow. Nowhere in that bible is there a single word about putting corporate or financial interests above protecting the abundant gifts we’ve been given. I trust that people who read that bible will speak up about this egregiously immoral policy.