by Bruce Finley, The Denver Post
Federal lawyers have backed away from fighting a federal judge’s ruling that favors lynx, clearing the way for possible broader protection of the quick-pawed predators in Colorado and other Western states.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists are now required to recalculate how much “critical habitat” they have designated to ensure long-term survival of the Canada lynx, a threatened species. Previously, federal biologists called all of Colorado, and parts of Montana and Idaho, nonessential habitat.
“They have to look at everywhere there are lynx as possible ‘critical habitat.’ That includes a big part of southwestern Colorado,” said Michael Garrity, director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, lauding this week’s ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“You cannot have a species survive over the long run if you don’t have connected habitat that is protected,” Garrity said.
Tuft-eared wildcats that hunt primarily snowshoe hares, lynx were practically extinct in Colorado a decade ago. Federal authorities in 2006 granted the species 1,841 square miles of habitat in Minnesota, Montana and Washington — until an Interior Department deputy secretary appointed by President George W. Bush was found to have manipulated scientific findings.
Federal authorities then expanded the designated habitat to 39,000 square miles in Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington.
Last summer, federal Judge Donald Molloy in Montana ordered federal biologists to reconsider, again, whether lynx need habitat in Colorado to survive. The Sierra Club and other conservation groups had filed suit arguing more designated habitat is needed.
“I’m not going to rule it in, or rule it out. We’ll evaluate what we need to do to comply with the judge’s opinion,” said Bridget Fahey, chief of endangered species for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Mountain-Prairie Region.
Colorado Division of Wildlife biologists, meanwhile, have pursued what they see as a more practical approach: simply reintroducing lynx without a federal habitat designation.
“Critical habitat” requires extra government scrutiny whenever logging and forest health projects, ski-area expansions and other developments are proposed on federal public land.
Tree-cutting and traffic can hinder lynx and their prey.
Since 1999, Colorado wildlife biologists have released 218 Canada lynx around the mountains. Monitoring has indicated that vehicles, poachers and bullets killed at least 35. Last spring, state biologists counted 15 kittens.
They’ve declared their lynx reintroduction a success, and on Friday regarded continued legal wrangling over “critical habitat” as a potentially draining distraction.
“We’ve been working with the ski industry and Forest Service over the past several years to streamline consultations over lynx protections that we don’t feel are necessary,” wildlife division director Tom Remington said.
“A ‘critical habitat’ designation would take things in the wrong direction while adding little in the way of new safeguards,” Remington said. “We’d rather see the Fish and Wildlife Service spend their limited resources on a recovery plan, so everyone knows what needs to be done to get lynx off the endangered species list.”
