Colorado's draft plan (called the Colorado Greater Sage-Grouse Conservation Plan, or the CCP for short) is huge.  Seven major sections and almost 500 pages, it includes a full review of the biology and life history of the bird, an assessment of all the threats impacting its current status, and hundreds of specific recommended "conservation strategies" addressing everything from the need to keep oil and gas well pads off sage-grouse lek sites to the need to protect populations from West Nile Virus.

The Division of Wildlife says the plan is designed to act as "a bridge between local plans and national sage-grouse conservation strategy."  The plan calls for cooperation from federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and from local entities like county governments and even private landowners in sagebrush country.

The draft will likely be revised to some degree before being issued in its final form, but if fully implemented in its current form, it could go a long way toward truly conserving greater sage-grouse in Colorado.  The problem, however, is that it is unlikely to be fully implemented, given the pressures that industry will put on agencies like the BLM and the state to allow the maximum amount of oil and gas drilling activity with the minimum restrictions.  Even though there is more and more new scientific evidence that sage-grouse need a significant buffer between their leks (mating grounds) and the nearest disruptive activity like oil and gas drilling or road building, oil and gas industry representatives already cry foul about the meager buffers currently in use on public lands.  These insufficient protections for sage-grouse, grouped under the rubric of "mitigations" for habitat disturbances, do not go far enough to protect sage-grouse from population declines, and new data is emerging from around the West that corroborates this.  The Colorado Conservation Plan (the CCP) even examines the history of the currently used buffer size and finds no scientific evidence that supports its use as an effective protection for sage-grouse.

The issue of whether or not the Colorado Conservation Plan is followed as much as it needs to be is vital:  the true test of this plan will be whether it changes management practices on the ground and leads to a reversal of the current trends of population decline and habitat loss in Colorado.  But in the meantime, the draft of the plan now available contains some incredibly valuable support for the most basic and important facts about greater sage-grouse conservation.

For example, the plan acknowledges that conserving greater sage-grouse is about conserving sagebrush habitat.  That may sound obvious, but it has been ignored for far too long in previous efforts to save the sage-grouse from extinction.  We simply cannot conserve a species like greater sage-grouse, which is so completely dependent on healthy sagebrush country, without protecting its habitat.  The plan also acknolwedges that sage-grouse will need large, intact segments of sagebrush habitat free from disturbances like oil and gas drilling in order to survive and thrive.  That too may seem obvious, but many mitigations and conservation strategies before now have relied on simply moving well pads or roads or powerlines a short way off from the most sensitive habitat (the leks) while ignoring the need to conserve other types of sagebrush habitat (like winter habitat, which is different from lekking grounds and even more rare) and ignoring the effects of chopping up the landscape into fragmented bits by allowing development in every part of it.  As described already, the plan also acknowledges how insufficient the current, most commonly used mitigation measures for sage-grouse are, and that sage-grouse are going to need buffers around their most sensitive habitat of at least 4 miles to avoid being pushed further toward extinction.  The oil and gas industry in particular is likely to rail again that bald admission of the truth of the sage-grouse's current situation, but just because it's difficult for some to accept doesn't make it untrue.

With these truths held in mind, not as self-evident but as positions backed by the best available science, the Colorado Conservation Plan could be a giant step forward for the greater sage-grouse.  If the plan does nothing else, it will have set the starting point for all our future conversations, as a state and as a region, about how to conserve a native of the Sagebrush Sea and one of the most iconic and loved wildlife species of the West.

Center for Native Ecosystems and many other conservation organizations submitted extensive comments to the Division of Wildlife on their draft of the plan.