Feds Going Cuckoo for Unthreatened Birds

[Geee]

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Stop me if you've heard this one before. The federal government wants private landowners in arid western states to help identify and designate important habitat for a certain bird species, so the land can be protected against development, and thereby save the bird from some dire fate.

 

If that sounds familiar, it's because we have been there before. Or as Yogi Berra supposedly said, "It's like déjà vu all over again." However, this time it is not about sage grouse, but a less common (in Western Colorado) bird called the yellow-billed cuckoo – the original mascot of Cocoa Puffs cereal. Farmers, ranchers, and local officials are skeptical, because so many are frustrated with the notion that environmental protection always seems to require restricting human activity.

 

Many observers didn’t even notice when the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the bird as threatened last fall, because we are in the midst of four-year whirlwind of new endangered listings, the result of a lawsuit requiring decisions on more than 800 species. The yellow-billed cuckoo has been on the wish list of national environmental organizations for 30 years. Their first petition asking the government to put it on the endangered list was filed in the mid-1980s. At that time, the best scientific analyses concluded that an endangered finding was unwarranted, because the bird was commonly found across most of the continent, from southern Canada to northern Mexico and in nearly all the US states