Nevada seems to have more than its share of idiots

Finally my lifelong lack of a college degree pays off! As it turns out,  college degrees are bad for living things. At least that’s according to sterling citizen Cliff Gardner of Ruby Valley in Nevada, who said this to the New York Times:

“I’m sure most of the people being considered for [the state's Department of Wildlife director] job graduated from a college. These people are the cause of the destruction of wildlife.”

At issue is the ongoing battle in the state of Nevada to keep sage grouse from being listed as an endangered species, without the state actually doing anything to protect the sage grouse.

Sage grouse are chicken-sized, chicken-shaped birds in the chicken family that inhabit the sagebrush high desert in the American west. Here’s a photo:

Sage grouse are in trouble: their habitat is increasingly altered by grazing, by wildfire and consequent invasion by invasive grasses, and by development for both fossil fuel extraction and renewable energy, especially wind. The problem is that sage grouse are about as tied to sagebrush habitat as they can possibly be. It’s a major food source for adults, making up about 60 percent of the food eaten by adult males. Females eat sagebrush-affiliated herbs when getting ready to lay eggs, and once those eggs hatch out the young spend their first few weeks eating sagebrush-affiliated beetles and ants, along with local herbaceous plants.

The geometry of sagebrush habitat is important to sage grouse too: sagebrush — Artemisia tridentata and allied species — tends to grow patchy, with some big clumps  and some big open areas, along with spots with intermediate cover.  Females generally nest under sagebrush. The clumps are good shelter for chicks.

Meanwhile the big open areas provide the mating habitat sage grouse prefer. Sage grouse mate using the lek strategy. In a sage grouse lek, the males gather around a big open area in spring and, like it says in the video, strut their stuff:

Female grouse will choose their mates from among the males. In a typical lek, no more than one or two males usually get a chance to breed. (The rest go off to post bitter screeds to A Voice For Grouse.)

The sage grouse’s population has dropped to something like one percent of its size a hundred years ago, and habitat destruction is the reason. In 2010, after considering whether to add the species to the Endangered Species list, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar decided on “warranted but precluded” status, which means “yes, it’s legally deserving of protection, but there’s only so much we can do.”  The species now comes up for annual review, and can be added to the Endangered Species list at any point if the Fish and Wildlife Service —  part of the Interior Department — concludes the species’ plight has worsened or FWS’ caseload has lightened.

One of the things that happens if a species makes it to the endangered list is that FWS maps out the species’ Critical Habitat. Though anti-wildlife types have done a whole lot of whining about Critical Habitat designations infringing on their freedom to develop their property, those complaints are mainly lies. If a developer wants to bulldoze his or her property, and isn’t getting federal funds to do so, that property being designated as Critical Habitat means exactly nothing. There has to be a “federal connection” to the project for the Critical Habitat provisions of the Endangered Species Act to kick in, meaning it’s got to be a project either on your public land or subsidized somehow by your tax dollars. And even before it gets to that point, FWS is obligated by law to consider economic impacts while drawing up Critical Habitat maps.

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