An obscure, chicken-sized bird best known for its mating dance could help determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the US Senate in elections in November.
The US federal government is considering listing the greater sage grouse as an endangered species next year. Doing so could limit development, energy exploration, hunting and ranching on the 67 million hectares of the bird’s habitat across 11 western states.
Apart from the potential economic disruption, the specter of the bird’s listing is reviving a centuries-old debate in the US about local versus federal control and whether to develop or conserve the region’s vast expanses of land.
It has become a key issue in Senate races, which are of interest because Republicans need to gain six seats in November to capture majority control. That scenario would allow the Republicans, who are virtually certain to maintain control of the US House of Representatives, to essentially shut down US President Barack Obama’s legislative agenda.
Two Republican representatives running for the Senate in Montana and Colorado, Steve Daines and Cory Gardner, are cosponsoring legislation that would prevent the federal government from listing the bird for a decade as long as states try to protect it.
“Montanans want locally driven solutions,” Daines said in an interview. “They don’t want bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Washington DC dictating what should happen.”
Environmentalists and the two Democratic senators being challenged, John Walsh in Montana and Mark Udall in Colorado, oppose the idea. They say they do not want a listing either, but that the threat of one is needed to push states to protect the bird.
The greater sage grouse is described in the journals of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who were dispatched in the early 19th century by then-US president Thomas Jefferson to lead an expedition to the Pacific coast. The bird once roamed widely across the massive sagebrush plateaus of the US west’s interior.
The bird is perhaps best known for its unusual springtime mating dance, during which it puffs its bulbous chest and emits odd warbles. Livestock grazing eroded the bristly plant that the bird depends upon, development chopped up its habitat and energy exploration erected towers that chased it away from its home range.
Three environmental groups sued to force the federal government to protect the bird after the government declined to list it as endangered in 2005. In a 2010 settlement, the US Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to decide on listing by September next year.
A major factor will be whether the federal, state and local landowners whose land it inhabits protect the grouse. Many environmental groups say the bird is a stand-in for a vanishing western ecosystem that needs preserving.
Industry groups and state governments worry about the costs.
A study by the Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade organization of independent oil and gas producers, estimates that from 5,000 to 31,000 jobs could be lost should the federal government take steps to protect the grouse.
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