Under Habitat Plan, Endangered Prairie Dogs Don't Have A Prayer

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has urged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reject a development plan by Iron County and the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources that would result in the death of hundreds of endangered Utah Prairie Dogs and the destruction of thousands of acres of their habitat. In a letter to the USFWS released today, EDF says the plan — a Habitat Conservation Plan required under the Endangered Species Act — would allow the county to destroy up to 9,507 acres of prairie dog habitat on private lands over the next 20 years in exchange for moving the prairie dogs onto adjacent federal lands.

“The problem with the Iron County Habitat Conservation Plan is that it won’t work. Years of experimentation have shown that the success rate for moving prairie dogs is only about 3 percent,” said Dr. David Wilcove, EDF senior ecologist. “Iron County seems to have one goal in mind: Get rid of the prairie dogs on private lands as quickly as possible and hope they can survive in exile on the federal lands. Endangered species should not be moved around like pawns on a chessboard.”

The vast majority of Utah Prairie Dogs live on privately owned land. Their presence in fast-growing areas like Iron County has brought them into conflict with developers and farmers. A “recovery plan” developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1991 actually called for moving the entire species onto federal lands. Thousands of prairie dogs have been forcibly moved onto land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, but with very little success.

“This is a habitat conservation plan without any meaningful conservation,” said EDF economist Robert Bonnie. “Rather than extinguishing the Utah Prairie Dog on private lands, we should be providing private landowners with incentives to protect and restore this species.” Bonnie believes there are a number of ways in which the presence of Utah Prairie Dogs could be turned into a bona fide asset for private landowners. He suggested Iron County consider creating transferable development rights for prairie dogs that would allow private landowners to market prairie dog habitat to developers who wish to modify such habitat elsewhere.

Once common over much of Southwestern Utah, the Utah Prairie Dog declined due to poisoning, drought, and habitat destruction due to agriculture and overgrazing. It was added to the endangered species list in 1973.