The Sierra Forest Voice
Web Edition
Vol. 11, No. 1, March 14, 2018
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Initiates Status Review for the California Spotted Owl
On December 7, 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initiated a status review (a.k.a., 12-month finding) on the California spotted owl. The purpose of a status review is to outline the best available scientific and commercial data on the status of the species and threats to its continued existence and, based on this information, make a finding that listing the species as threatened or endangered is warranted or not warranted.
Image left: California spotted owls, adult with owlet Photo by Sheila Whitmore
SFL and Defenders of Wildlife recently submitted a letter to Fish and Wildlife Service to provide important information we believe the agency should consider in the status review. Although there is not a defined comment period and information may be submitted throughout the process, we recommend sharing any information you may have as soon as possible. It is not clear if Fish and Wildlife Service intends to complete the status review within 12 months (i.e., by December 6, 2018) or if the agency plans to publish their decision by September 30, 2019, as required by a settlement agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity.
NEPA Revision Update
In early January, the Forest Service announced a proposal to revise its regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) with the goal of “increasing efficiency” of environmental analysis. NEPA – one of America’s foundational environmental laws – is an integral safeguard for the environment in federal decision making. While opportunities exist for improving the Forest Service’s implementation of NEPA, this should not be done in a way that weakens key protections for species, ecosystems, or wild places.
SFL and partners at Western Environmental Law Center, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, Wild Earth Guardians, and Southern Environmental Law Center, responded quickly to the USFS’ announcement by crafting comments, which drew signatures from over 80 organizations around the country. These comments center on where/how we think NEPA regulations could be strengthened, as well as areas where the USFS already has the ability to streamline the NEPA process. In summary, we recommend that in any revision of NEPA regulations, the US Forest Service:
• Examine areas where operational hurdles and agency culture – rather than environmental safeguards – serve as barriers to efficient decision making
• Conduct landscape-scale analyses in appropriate situations that tier to shorter project-level analyses
• Continue investing in stakeholder collaboration early in the NEPA process to reduce conflicts
• Analyze areas where the Agency already has the authority to make environmental analysis and decision making more effective, rather than creating new authorities
• Not create new categorical exclusions without an adequate public analysis demonstrating that they are needed
• Keep NEPA safeguards for roadless and wilderness-eligible lands
Though the NEPA review comment period ended on February 2nd, this is just the beginning of an ongoing effort to defend our right to a thorough environmental review. The next step will be a series of unusual invitation-only roundtable discussions for stakeholders in each US Forest Service Region, including an event in Sacramento on March 27. SFL will be present at the meeting, working to ensure that Sierra Nevada ecosystems are not ignored by federal decision makers in years to come.
Fire on the Mountain: Rethinking Forest Management in the Sierra Nevada
Fire on the Mountain: Rethinking Forest Management in the Sierra Nevada. The Little Hoover Commission February 2018
The Little Hoover Commission is an independent, bipartisan state oversight agency established in 1962 to provide assistance to the government and legislature.
The commission is made up of thirteen appointees; five members of the public appointed by the governor, four members of the public appointed by the legislature, and two senators and two assemblymembers.
In response to growing awareness that fire policy must be informed by science and ecology, and in the face of unprecedented mega fires, tree mortality, and the impending effects of climate change, in 2017 the Little Hoover Commission set out to produce a set of findings and recommendations that would address the critical need for changes in forest management. This year-long endeavor by the Little Hoover Commission captured the depth, and the details, surrounding two centuries of fire exclusion and fire suppression in California, including the impacts that have resulted from this ecologically tragic mistake.
Sierra Forest Legacy provided support, collaboration, and documentation that contributed greatly to this effort. In addition to providing science based written testimony on the issues. SFL also provided testimony to the Commission during public hearings, and before the state Senate Budget and Fiscal Committee in support of the LHC's findings.
The report, published in February, includes a range of well supported recommendations for fixing the problem, including increased collaboration, expanded prescribed burn programs, increased use of wildland fire managed for resource objectives, and much more. The Little Hoover Commission got it right!
Stand By Your Lands
2017 was an unpredictable and sometimes nerve-wracking year for American conservationists. Events like the reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments, the slashing of agency budgets, and countless legislative attacks on our bedrock environmental laws, taught us that if we want to protect the places and species we care about, we need to build broader support for conservation now. With this in mind, SFL and California Wilderness Coalition are launching a new outreach campaign called Stand by Your Lands, aimed at mobilizing a new coalition of conservation activists.
The Stand by Your Lands Campaign will begin in March with a series of interactive workshops intended to connect people with spectacular wild places in their area, and train them to protect these places from current political and environmental threats. The events should serve as a catalyst for creating a local movement to hold elected officials and land managers accountable for decisions that affect environmental health and sustainable access to public lands. We hope to build a new coalition of outdoor recreationists, nature lovers, and others who appreciate the clean water and clean air that these wild places provide.
Stands by Your Lands events are open to the public, and will be accessible to both newcomers and veterans of the conservation movement alike. Each event will be tailored towards specific areas and elected officials that are most relevant to the workshop’s location. SFL and CalWild will follow up with interested workshop attendees to keep them informed and to identify key actions that they can take in their area.
Event Calendar:
City: Redding, CA
Date: March 20, 2018
Venue: Shasta County Public Library
Time: 6-8 PM
City: Fresno, CA
Date: Tuesday, April 3
Venue: Center for Environmental & Social Justice, 4991 E. McKinley Ave., Fresno, CA 93727
Time: 6-8 PM
City: Bakersfield, CA – In Partnership with Kern CNPS
Date: April 4
Venue: First Congregational Church, 5 Real Road, Bakersfield, CA 93309
Time: 6-8 PM
Refreshments will be served. RSVP to Jamie Ervin jamie@sierraforestlegacy.org.
More events will be scheduled! If you’re interested in attending or helping host a SBYL workshop, please contact Jamie Ervin.
Announcements
Pollinator Webinars: March 7, March 21, April 4, and April 8, 2018
The Natural Areas Association is hosting a series of webinars, two in March and two in April, covering a wide range of topics having to do with best practices for managing natural areas, while ensuring pollinator health and resilience.
Image left: Western bumblebee, by Gary Zamzow
The series is available for free, with support from the U.S. Forest Service, and will feature presentations by seven different experts, including scientists, NGOs, the Forest Service, and industry.
Register and learn more about the series here.
Spotlight on Species: Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasinaus)
Image above: Greater sage-grouse male with females. Photo by U.S. Fish and WIldlife Service.
The greater sage-grouse, the largest native grouse in North America, once ranged across some 500,000 square miles in sixteen states, and in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, across the vast region sometimes called “the sagebrush sea.” It’s a bird that is exquisitely tied to the sagebrush ecosystems of the West. The destruction of sagebrush habitat resulting from the direct, indirect, and cumulative effects of livestock ranching and agriculture, oil and gas drilling, and other forms of human development have resulted in a steady decline in the population numbers of this iconic bird.
Natural History
This sagebrush obligate species utilizes all species of sagebrush in the genus Artemesia for food and habitat, as well as other plants associated with the sagebrush biome, such as Purshia tridentata (bitterbrush). Sagebrush is a long-lived species (living more than a hundred years) that is adapted to an infrequent fire return interval or frequency (30 to more than 100 years between fires). Disruption of the fire regime due to introduced grasses that the ecosystem did not evolve with, notably cheat grass and red brome, has resulted in recurring, catastrophic fires that are unnatural and pose a threat to continued viability for species associated with sagebrush, particularly for sage-grouse. Invasive annual grasses like cheat grass occupy the spaces between sagebrush and other perennial species, spreading fire from shrub to shrub. Cheat grass now occupies most of the sagebrush biome.
Sage-grouse are known best for their mating ritual, that includes male courtship displays and competition between males conducted in openings in the sagebrush called leks. The male fans his spiky tail and struts back and forth, puffing up his feathers and inflating sacs of bare, yellow skin on the neck. At the same time the male emits a unique, low popping sound that can be heard for long distances by the females.
Both sexes of the greater sage-grouse are dark grayish-brown with mottled gray and white speckles, fleshy yellow combs over the eyes, and a long, pointed tail. Adult males also have a white ruff around the neck and are considerably larger than the female, ranging in length from 26 to 30 inches and weighing between 4 and 7 pounds. Adult females range in length from 19 to 23 inches and weigh between 2 and 4 pounds. Sage-grouse are related to turkeys, pheasants and other gallinaceous birds.
Adults feed primarily on sagebrush and other green plants, and supplement their diet with insects, particularly grasshoppers. Young sage-grouse and females during reproduction must consume plants that are nutritionally richer than sagebrush. The leaves of sagebrush are the primary food for sage-grouse in the winter. The reliance on nutritious non-sagebrush forbs and grasses by reproductive females and juveniles indicates that grazing livestock are directly completing with sage-grouse for these plant foods when they share habitats.
Current Distribution
Between 1988 and 2012, the Canadian population declined by 98 percent. By 2012, they were no longer extant in British Columbia, and only 40 to 60 adult birds remained in Alberta; and in Saskatchewan, only 55 to 80 adult birds remained. By 2013, sage grouse were no longer extant in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico. Today they are limited to California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Washington. In 2004, the FWS estimated that the population had declined approximately 86 percent from historic times. An estimated 271,604 square miles of sage-grouse habitat remain; and of this total, the BLM manages forty-five percent and the Forest Service manages six percent.
In California, greater sage-grouse distribution historically included portions of eastern Siskiyou, Shasta, Plumas, Sierra, and Alpine counties; and portions of the Modoc Plateau and Great Basin regions of northeastern California including Lassen, Modoc, and Inyo counties as far south as the Owens Valley near Big Pine. Elevation ranged from 3500 to 12,000 ft. They are no longer extant in Siskiyou and Shasta counties, and have significantly declined in numbers in Modoc County. The species is currently most abundant in the Surprise Valley in northeastern Modoc County, eastern Lassen County north of Honey Lake and east of Eagle Lake, and in the Bodie Hills and Long Valley areas of Mono County.
The Mono and Inyo county populations are now considered to be a genetically distinct population, called the Bi-State Distinct Population Segment (Bi-State DPS). The range of the Bi-State DPS occurs over an area approximately 170 miles long and up to 60 miles wide and includes portions of five counties in western Nevada: Douglas, Lyon, Carson City, Mineral, and Esmeralda; and three counties in eastern California: Alpine, Mono, and Inyo.
Conservation status
From 1999 to 2005, there have eight petitions to list greater sage-grouse for protection under the Endangered Species Act, and ultimately, all have been denied. In 2010 the agency again reviewed the status of greater sage-grouse and decided that listing the bird under the Act was “warranted,” but that such listing was “precluded” by more pressing listings, for which the agency lacked the time and staff to complete.
In 2015, the agency reversed itself and proclaimed that listing was not necessary, because of an unprecedented conservation effort. A multi-state, multi-agency collaboration with private and public landowners completed 98 sage-grouse/sagebrush management plans in 10 states. The plans did not withdraw lands from grazing or oil and natural gas development, but did call for establishment of Sagebrush Focal Areas (SFAs) that withdrew approximately 10 million acres of federal lands from new hard mineral extraction claims. However, in June 2017 the Trump administration’s Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke ordered revision of all 98 sage-grouse management plans, explicitly to make them less of a “burden” to oil and gas development as well as livestock grazing. The interagency task force appointed to respond to the order issued a report in October 2017 that recommended eliminating or modifying SFAs, modifying or eliminating “hard triggers” that would result in changing management course when impacts to sage-grouse are identified, and other industry-friendly measures that will result in weakened conservation for the greater sage-grouse. In response to the report, the BLM issued a cancellation notice in October for the Sagebrush Focal Area mineral withdrawal.
Although environmentalists did not believe the 2015 revised management plans went far enough to protect the bird, this latest assault goes far beyond the failures of past administrations and is proof of the importance of timely federal listing for threatened and endangered species.
The Bi-State Distinct Population Segment
In 2013, the FWS prepared to move ahead with listing the Bi-State DPS as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. However, in 2015 the agency also withdrew that decision. As with the greater sage-grouse, listing would not be required because a new management plan and collaborative effort to protect the Bi-State DPS would be implemented through a series of inter-agency, bi-state, multi-stakeholder actions, outlined in the Bi-State Action Plan. Unlike the other greater sage-grouse management plans, the Bi-State Action Plan has not been targeted for revision by the Trump administration.
In 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was sued in federal court for its decision to reverse the determination that the bi-state sage grouse should be listed. Citing a number of legal violations, the suit was brought by the Center for BIological Diversity, Desert Survivors, WildEarth Guardians, and Western Watersheds Project.
There are six Population Management Units (PMUs) in the Bi-State region, and four of the six are at risk of extirpation. The two PMUs with the largest and relatively stable numbers are the Bodie and South Mono PMUs, both located in the Inyo National Forest.
According to data collected by the USFWS, in 2014 there were estimated to be 2,497–9,828 sage-grouse within the Bi-State region. Actual lek counts of males ranged between 427 at the lowest year count (2008) to 1,404 males in 2012, the highest count, with data collected between 2004 and 2014. In 2017 California DFW did not issue any tags to allow sage-grouse hunting in these zones due to continued low lek population numbers. Sage-grouse hunting is still allowed in California in the greater sage-grouse area as well as within the Bi-State DPS. Sage-grouse hunting of the Bi-State DPS has not been allowed in Nevada since 1998.
The greatest threats to sage-grouse, as determined by the FWS, are due to the past, present, and future destruction and modification of sagebrush habitat. These threats result from infrastructure (for example, fences, power lines, and roads); urbanization and human disturbance; grazing livestock and wild horses; mining of minerals and fossil fuel drilling and extraction; nonnative, invasive cheatgrass and other introduced and planted non-native grasses; pinyon-juniper encroachment in occupied sagebrush habitat, wildfires that are out of the range of natural variability (due to cheat grass and altered fire regime); renewable energy development, and climate change.
As noted by the FWS, sagebrush habitat cannot easily be restored, if at all. According to scientists, there is no longer any pristine sagebrush steppe habitat left anywhere on the continent. There are no Research Natural Areas or other reserves set aside specifically for protection of this ecosystem. Over 350 species of plants and animals are also dependent upon sagebrush habitat, and at least 50 animals are considered sagebrush obligate species, which means they are so closely evolved with sagebrush that they cannot survive without it.
It is thus essential to maintain vast areas of the most intact sagebrush habitat, and to remove all sources of threats to the ecosystem wherever possible—and on publicly owned land, this should be doable. In the Bi-State region, eighty-nine percent of the region is under federal land ownership. At the same time, within the range of the Bi-State, there are at least thirty-five grazing allotments on federal land covering more than one-million acres permitted by the USFS and BLM. In the South Mono PMU within the Inyo National Forest, seventeen grazing allotments permit a total of 6,347 cow-calf pair Animal Unit Months (AUMs) and 8,996 AUMs for sheep. In the White Mountain PMU within the Inyo NF, 3,560 AUMs of cattle are currently permitted. (Read here for definition of Animal Unit Months). No proposals are currently in play to limit or reduce grazing in these alloments.
In the Bi-State area, sage-grouse home range is 1,502 acres to greater than 61,000 acres. This variation is just one of the several complexities involved with managing and monitoring sagebrush habitats for sage-grouse. Research and science play a big role in the Bi-State Action Plan. Radio telemetry studies are on-going and are providing new information about home ranges and habitat preferences.
Other threats, while less significant, also contribute to the overall endangerment of the species’ viability in combination with more serious threats. Examples of less severe threats include West Nile virus, predation, and hunting. Threats can work synergistically, creating a significant challenge to sage-grouse viability. The decision not to list the Bi-State DPS will be reviewed again by the FWS in 2020.
The Inyo National Forest Plan Revision
This brings us to the Inyo National Forest Plan Revision. The largest numbers of the Bi-State DPS occur within the Mono Basin. The Inyo NF lists the Bi-State DPS sage-grouse as a species of conservation concern in the draft forest plan revision. According to Forest Service staff, the final plan will be virtually identical to the draft plan in regards to the sage-grouse, and is expected to be released soon, perhaps in March 2018.
The most significant difference between the alternatives in the draft plan, for sage-grouse, is an increase in acres that would be treated for restoration of sage-grouse habitat in Alternatives C and D. However, these treatments appear to be limited to increases in projects to remove juniper and pinyon pine. Such efforts have yielded inconsistent results when applied to sagebrush restoration. The direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts to sage-grouse from grazing are not explicitly identified in the DEIS.
The new forest plan has many good recommendations that, if implemented, will certainly help to conserve the bird’s habitat, particularly in known leks and nesting areas. Common-sense provisions will aid not only the sage-grouse, but the many other unique plants and animals that are endemic to the (now fragmented) Sagebrush Sea.
Links:
The Sagebrush Sea NATURE documentary on PBS
SFL and coalition comments on draft forest plan, and species of conservation concern
The Sagebrush Bird Conservation Plan PRBO, 2005
Bi-State Species Report (FWS 2015)
Bi-State Action Plan (2012)
Bi-State Action Plan Report (2016, the most current as of this writing)
USFS film on bi-state, from Humboldt-Toiyabe NF
Chronology of the Endangered Species Act listing petitions
USGS most current report on research for sage-grouse, 2017
USFS Forest Plan Revisions for the Inyo, Sequoia, Sierra National Forests
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