Your weekly roundup of wildlife news from across the country

LESSER PRAIRIE CHICKEN: In response to a petition from WildEarth Guardians, Center of Biological Diversity and Defenders, on Tuesday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) found that the rare and declining lesser prairie chicken may warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It’s more important than ever that the lesser prairie chicken receive protection under the ESA. The bird once numbered in the millions but has declined to just roughly 25,000 birds across less than 17 percent of its original range. The same threats that warranted listing years ago like climate change are even more severe today, and there is little evidence that voluntary conservation programs are sufficient to recover the species. FWS should promptly relist the species and develop a far better strategy to conserve it on state and private lands. The agency should release its final decision on lesser prairie chicken protection by end of next summer.

SOUTHERN RESIDENT KILLER WHALES: The newly approved Kinder Morgan Pipeline threatens to drive the endangered orcas that swim in the waters around British Columbia and Washington State to extinction. According to recent counts, there are only about 80 Southern Resident Killer whales left. Lack of food, shipping traffic and pollution are already taking their toll on the once-thriving whale population, and this pipeline could further harm their chance at recovery. Defenders of Wildlife is fighting to protect Southern Resident orcas through stateside efforts to remove dams that trap their main food source, salmon, in the Columbia and Snake rivers of the Pacific Northwest.

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NEW PLANNING RULE RELEASED FOR NATIONAL SYSTEM OF PUBLIC LANDS: Yesterday, the Bureau of Land Management, the nation’s largest land management agency, released new regulations that modernize their planning process on 245 million acres of public lands (referred to as “Planning 2.0”). Defenders of Wildlife has been engaged on these regulations from the beginning and provided BLM significant comments on the draft released earlier this year. While these regulations contain notable improvements to BLM’s land use planning process, we have some concerns that the final rule does not incorporate adequate requirements for endangered species recovery or climate change adaptation. Defenders analyzes rules like these to ensure they protect our national wildlife heritage on public lands. Wildlife need a place to live, and out West in particular, many species’ habitats can be found on our public lands. We stand ready to defend the values of our nation’s vast public lands. They provide homes to wildlife, jobs to local economies and innumerable recreational opportunities for all. These values must be defended at all costs!

MARBLED MURRELET: A strategy proposed this week by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to protect marbled murrelets that depend on mature forests falls short, according to a coalition of conservation groups. Marbled murrelets are small, plump seabirds that nest in old-growth forests along coastal areas of Washington, Oregon and California. Unlike other seabirds, they raise their young on wide branches of large old trees, flying daily up to 55 miles from their inland nests to forage in nearshore marine areas. Murrelets were federally listed as a threatened species in 1993 due to significant loss of old forest nesting habitat. Since then, their population has declined an additional 44 percent as logging on state and private lands continued largely unabated. Defenders of Wildlife is working in coalition with other conservation groups to ensure that marbled murrelets get the protection they need.

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