Senate majority could rest on grouse

DENVER -- An obscure, chicken-sized bird best known for its mating dance could help determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the U.S. Senate in November.

The federal government is considering listing the greater sage grouse as an endangered species next year. Doing so could limit development, energy exploration, hunting and ranching on the 165 million acres of the bird's habitat across 11 Western states.

Apart from the potential economic disruption, which some officials in Western states discuss in tones usually reserved for natural disasters, the specter of the bird's listing is reviving the centuries-old debates about local vs. federal control and whether to develop or conserve the region's vast expanses of land.

Two Republican congressmen running for the U.S. Senate in Montana and Colorado, Steve Daines and Cory Gardner, are co-sponsoring legislation that would prevent the federal government from listing the bird for a decade as long as states try to protect it.

"Montanans want locally driven solutions," Daines said. "They don't want bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., dictating what should happen."

Environmentalists and the two Democratic senators being challenged, John Walsh in Montana and Mark Udall in Colorado, oppose the idea. They say they don't want a listing, either, but that the threat of one is needed to push states to protect the bird.

"A bill like what some in the House are proposing that would delay listing the bird would actually undermine locally driven efforts," said Udall spokesman Mike Saccone.

The greater sage grouse is described in the journals of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and it once roamed widely across the massive sagebrush plateaus of the West's interior.

The bird is perhaps best known for its unusual springtime mating dance, during which it puffs its bulbous chest and emits odd warbles. But livestock grazing eroded the bristly plant that the bird depends upon, development chopped up its habitat and energy exploration erected towers that chased it away from its home range.

Rachel Carson warned in 1962 of the bird's possible demise in "Silent Spring," her classic environmental book.

Three environmental groups sued to force the federal government to protect the bird after the government declined to list it as endangered in 2005. In a 2010 settlement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to decide on listing by September 2015.

A major factor will be whether the federal, state and local landowners whose land it inhabits protect the grouse. Many environmental groups say the bird is a stand-in for a vanishing Western ecosystem that needs preserving.

"This is the great landscape of America, when you travel west and see open spaces. This is all the stuff you grew up watching on television," said Randi Spivak of the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, one of the groups that sued to force grouse protection. "And that land has been drilled, subdivided."

Industry groups and state governments worry about the cost.

A study by the Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade organization of independent oil and gas producers, estimates that from 5,000 to 31,000 jobs could be lost should the federal government take steps to protect the grouse.