Weekly questions opponents' reactions to lesser prairie chicken being named threatened species

The move by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species and the subsequent release this week of a proposed plan to protect the chickens has sparked controversy among conservationists, as well as farmers and ranchers. How the proposed plan plays out, and whether or not rules can even be enforced, are some of the main concerns.

Laurie Ezzell Brown, editor and publisher of The Canadian Record in the Texas Panhandle, responded to the designation and the proposed plan in an editorial Thursday:

"We were unprepared for the hand-wringing, man-the-battle-stations reaction to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s announcement earlier this month that the chicken would be listed as 'threatened,' rather than the far more onerous designation of 'endangered'. In making its decision, the USFWS took into consideration a range-wide conservation plan developed over the last two years with input from representatives of industries that would be affected by the listing—among them oil and gas producers, farmers and ranchers, and wind farm developers.

"The ruling was accompanied by the federal agency’s promise to develop a timetable and criteria for eventual de-listing. Implicit in that decision was the understanding that the conservation plan should be given a chance to work, and that the stakeholders would be given a chance to show their commitment to making it work. What we expected would be a declaration of victory by those stake- holders who dodged the endangered-listing bullet was instead a call to battle.

"It was suddenly very clear that the only acceptable outcome to them would have been no listing at all—this, despite the fact that the prairie-chicken population is in rapid and precipitous decline. One of the most frequently-heard comments has been one questioning the civil and criminal penalties that can be assessed to those who willfully or knowingly harm either the chicken itself or its habitat. Those penalties are the muscle, without which any regulatory effort is ineffective."

But enforcing the rules are nearly impossible, unless someone goes so far to the extreme that their actions can't go unnoticed, Brown writes. Sean Kyle, a wildlife diversity specialist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, likened endangered species enforcement to the handing of speeding tickets. Lyle, who has been working for 22 years to keep the bird from getting listed, said that someone going a little over the speed limit won't get stopped, but "If you’re doing 118 mph in a 60 mph speed zone, the cops are going to stop you," Brown reports.

Participation in the program is voluntary, and "is intended to protect stakeholders from those 'take' provisions," Brown writes. "The threatened designation includes a 4(d) rule, which exempts all practices implemented by landowners, wind developers and oil and gas producers that fall under the auspicies of the rangewide plan. With the listing, the industry must continue to pay into the habitat exchange fund set up by the plan, and landowners who wish to conserve prairie-chicken habitat—using the same kind of beneficial land management practices that most of them already observe— can enroll in the plan and will profit from the exchange." (Read more)