Is the federal government about to undermine a two-decades, highly successful effort by Colorado to coax private landowners in the Gunnison Basin to cooperate in saving habitat for the Gunnison sage grouse?
John Swartout fears that’s the case, and he should know: His own work on behalf of wildlife habitat also spans decades.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service faces a Wednesday deadline to decide whether to list the Gunnison sage grouse as threatened or endangered. If it lists the bird, Swartout worries, the action not only will demoralize the many landowners and public officials in Gunnison County who’ve worked so hard to preserve bird habitat, it could also unravel progress to save habitat in other counties where a different species, the greater sage grouse, lives.
A hefty majority of Gunnison sage grouse are found in Gunnison County, and yet “97 percent of the private lands there offer some form of protection,” says Swartout, who was hand-picked by Gov. John Hickenlooper to coordinate state efforts on the bird. As former executive director of Great Outdoors Colorado and the Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts, not to mention point man on environmental issues for former Gov. Bill Owens, Swartout’s credentials as an advocate for habitat are nearly unrivaled.
“If they list the Gunnison sage grouse after all we’ve done,” Swartout told me, “what private landowner in Moffat or Jackson or Rio Blanco counties [home to the greater sage grouse] is going to step up to work with us? That’s really what the bird needs — right? — to change the culture so that private landowners preserve the land and manage it in a way that’s beneficial to the grouse.”
“We can’t do better than what we’ve done,” he insists.
Swartout credits former Gov. Roy Romer with initiating efforts to preserve habitat for the Gunnison sage grouse and says later governors from both parties sustained the effort. The state has invested tens of millions of dollars, while the county revamped zoning and land use rules to the point that you can’t build so much as a driveway without taking into account the impact on the birds.
Back in the Owens administration, Swartout says, federal officials assured the state that “if you protected the Gunnison Basin, you’re done. Well, we’ve done that and they admit we’ve done that but they’re concerned about much smaller satellite populations” in Dolores, Rio Grande and San Miguel counties.
In effect, the federal government moved the goal posts.
So now the state and other counties are working together to preserve habitat as well, but Fish & Wildlife may not be sufficiently impressed.
Swartout reports that state scientists agree that “we’ve stabilized the population” of the Gunnison sage grouse and a listing isn’t needed. And state biologists, not their federal counterparts, are the best experts on the bird because of all the field work they’ve done in the past 20 years.
If Fish & Wildlife does list the bird, the Hickenlooper administration has promised to contest it in court, claiming the service’s scientific assumptions are wrong and a listing is not best for the sage grouse.
Meanwhile, Swartout says, he’s got dozens of landowners in counties where the greater sage grouse resides lined up to take action to preserve habitat. For the time being, though, they’re “waiting to see what happens in Gunnison” — waiting to see if all this voluntary wildlife stewardship actually will persuade the federal government to stand down.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP
