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SANTA FE — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will have to decide by October whether to list the white-tailed prairie dog as an officially "endangered" species. A court settlement last month ordered the FWS to provide a finding on the petition asking that the white-tailed prairie dog, one of five species of prairie dogs, be listed as "endangered." The petition was filed by the Center for Native Ecosystems, a coalition of environmental and animal rights groups. The petition seeks Endangered Species Act protection for the prairie dog, which would require the federal government to develop a long-term recovery plan for the species and its habitat. The Center for Native Ecosystems claims that white-tailed prairie dogs have vanished from at least 92 percent of their historical habitat and currently inhabit the so-called "Sagebrush Sea" of central and western Wyoming, northwestern Colorado, northeastern Utah, and south-central Montana, and are critical to the health of the sagebrush ecosystem. Officially "endangered" black-footed ferrets depend on prairie dogs for food and on their burrows for shelter. Prairie dogs also provide food for badgers, ferruginous hawks, and golden eagles as well as crucial habitat for many other native plants and animals, the environmental coalition says. Sylvatic plague has caused large-scale prairie dog population declines, the coalition says, but they claim that oil and gas drilling, suburban sprawl, target shooting, poisoning and conversion of land to agriculture also have devastated prairie dog habitat. Earlier this year, another coalition of activist groups petitioned the federal government to list the Gunnison's prairie dog as an endangered species. The Gunnison's prairie dog is found in the Four Corners region of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. The Utah prairie dog has been listed as "threatened" and the Mexican prairie dog as "endangered." The black-tailed prairie dog, the most widely dispersed, has been petitioned for listing. |
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