Endangered species recovery is especially challenging these days because of all the delays in securing protection – there’s that saying conservation delayed is conservation denied.  My white-tailed prairie dog experience is a good example of all the unnecessary roadblocks out there that keep species from getting the help they need.

One of my first tasks when I came on with Center for Native Ecosystems in 2001 was to research and write the petition to protect the white-tailed prairie dog under the Endangered Species Act.  It took a little over a year, and the petition we submitted July 11, 2002 ended up being over 300 pages long.  It was important to us to provide a strong, science-based assessment of the prairie dog’s status and the threats facing the species.  And, even though Congress set a relatively low bar for preliminary findings under the Act so that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be more inclined to investigate than to dismiss a citizen’s warning that a species was in trouble, the Service had slowly been ratcheting up the bar for positive findings, making them harder and harder to obtain.

The Act requires that the Service decide within 90 days of receiving a petition whether there is enough information to do their own investigation of the species’ status.  Unfortunately, these days they never meet this deadline, and a lawsuit is necessary to prompt the agency to review the petition at all.  In November 2002, four months after we submitted the petition, we gave the Service the 60 days’ warning that the Act requires before filing suit  In February 2003 they sent us a letter saying they did not have the funds to make the petition finding, so we filed our lawsuit.  Thirteen months later the Service settled the lawsuit and said they would finally review the petition by November 2004.

That was the negative finding that now the Service admits they were forced by Julie MacDonald to make.  We asked for the record of the Service’s decisionmaking right away, but were only given a few documents.  To get the full story we would need to file a Freedom of Information Act request.  But in the meantime my work had expanded to include many other species, including Pariette cactus which was immediately threatened by a big drilling proposal, which became a major focus for me.  The FOIA request went on the back burner until August 2006 when the Gunnison’s prairie dog petition met an almost identical fate.

Finally we got the documents via FOIA in late October (FOIA requires that agencies respond within 20 working days, but that is another deadline that is rarely met…).  The Washington Post broke the story, the Democrats took control of Congress, the Interior Department's Inspector General investigated MacDonald, and the House Natural Resources Committee started demanding answers about the white-tailed prairie dog and other Endangered Species Act decisions.  In May we filed another 60-day warning that we intended to sue the Service for illegally making the prairie dog finding based on politics rather than science, but did not hear anything back.

Finally, last week, the Service announced that the white-tailed prairie dog petition finding was wrong, and that they plan to move ahead to the next stage and do their own status review.  But, they said they would do this “when funds are available”.  With no deadline, this is another empty promise because species linger without protection for decades because of lack of available funds.  That means we probably will have to sue yet again just to get a date by which the Service will do the status review.

If we get lucky and the Service does an honest review that proposes Endangered Species Act protection for the prairie dog, there still will be another year of public comment before the Service would finalize protection.  So, the prairie dog’s long road to protected status is still far from over.  None of this is the fault of the Act itself – it is poor implementation that stands in the way of protection.

Nicole Rosmarino with Forest Guardians joked one time that she was celebrating the third anniversary of the black-tailed prairie dog’s Candidate status and was trying to come up with a good traditional anniversary present – something crystal.  I just looked up fifth year anniversary gifts (= years since the petition), and the choices are wood or silverware.  Let me know if you have any gift suggestions along these lines for the white-tailed prairie dog.