The Biden administration announced Thursday it has finalized new ways the federal government will manage sage grouse habitat in Oregon.

The announcements come just days before the start of the Trump administration, which is widely expected to promote extractive industries — like fossil fuels, ranching and mining — over conservation.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden embarked on updates to sage grouse habitat plans in the West in 2023. These plans outline where ranching, mining and other human developments are allowed to occur across 65 million acres spanning 10 western states — including 12.6 million acres in eastern Oregon.

But on Thursday, the agency published its decisions for Oregon and Colorado, leaving the remaining states up to the next Trump administration.

Environmental groups immediately criticized bureau leaders' piecemeal approach.

“The fact that we have these plans rolling out at the very end of the Biden administration, and in an incomplete fashion, without having a range-wide standardized plan, indicates that the agency really didn’t have its act together,” Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, said.

Molvar added that Oregon and Colorado are likely the only two states with governors who didn’t object to the plans. Staff at the bureau declined an interview request.

These new policies are meant to prevent continued dramatic decline of sage grouse, a desert-dwelling bird that often serves as an indicator of how healthy an ecosystem is. When sage grouse are able to thrive in a sagebrush-steppe habitat, then other animal and plant species do, too.

But Molvar and other conservationists criticized the habitat plan for lacking teeth to truly save the species.

“The Bureau had four years to establish meaningful, lasting protections for these imperiled birds, but instead it’s capitulated to extractive industries and left final decisions to the Trump administration’s ‘drill baby drill’ agenda,” Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote in a statement.

The groups particularly criticized the bureau for opening Oregon’s research areas to grazing. These areas were initially set aside to understand the effects livestock can have on the landscape.

“It makes it more difficult to answer some of those basic questions about how various uses affect sage grouse habitat,” said Ryan Houston, executive director at the Bend-base nonprofit, Oregon Natural Desert Association.

The bureau announced these new policies on the same day that it finalized another management plan update, which will impact sage grouse in eastern Oregon.

That plan assessed 3.2 million acres in Lake and Harney counties and determined that 1.1 million acres had wilderness characteristics — meaning they are large, mostly natural areas with few manmade objects in sight. It outlines ways to preserve that naturalness by enforcing limitations on off-roading and mining.

This Lakeview district plan — as well as a similar plan for the Owyhee Canyonlands and surrounding areas — came out of 20 years of work between conservationists and bureau staff following a 2010 lawsuit settlement.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/16/oregon-gets-new-sage-grouse-policies-in-final-days-of-biden-administration/