Game and Fish flying in the face of its own 'chicken' plan The New Mexican Karyn Stockdale 8/17/2008 Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the lesser prairie chicken, particularly after the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, through the Game Commission, passed a revised management plan in July that called for a special hunt of the lesser prairie chickens in New Mexico this fall. While Audubon New Mexico welcomes the news that the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has put a "hold" on the proposed fall hunt, we remain concerned that this proposal was brought to the commission at all. The lesser prairie chicken is a candidate species for listing under the Endangered Species Act. They have been extirpated from more than 90 percent of their historical range in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. In our state, they are gone from about 56 percent of their historical range and persist in reasonable abundance across only 16 percent of that range. The reasons for this situation are many, including livestock grazing, conversion of shinnery oak/grasslands to croplands and suburban development, herbicide use, and oil and gas development. Drought can also be a factor in short-term declines, but a few wet years can bring chicken numbers back quickly where there are established populations. The current "crisis" in their populations became apparent in 1989, when surveys began showing a dramatic decline. The situation was highlighted by a New Mexico Audubon Council meeting in Roswell in 1991 that also shined an unfavorable light on the Bureau of Land Management and their lack of attention to this species and to the precipitous decline. In 1996, Game and Fish finally closed the season on lesser prairie chickens, in part because so few could be found by hunters. This July, the New Mexico Game Commission voted down an amendment to the upland game seasons that would delete a proposed special hunt for the lesser prairie chicken. The U.S. Department of the Interior, through the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service, has opposed this hunt, and although the numbers to be taken are not great, the precedent would be set — namely that a few individuals can obtain what amounts to a private hunt of a threatened species. The department's actions to authorize a "harvest" of this species flew in the face of extensive efforts by the BLM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to recover the species and avoid listing under the Endangered Species Act through cooperative agreements and conservation plans with landowners. The good rains in the last few years have blessed the core area where the chickens are still found (mostly Roosevelt County) and populations have rebounded. However, a return to "normal" rainfall or a continued drought will again stress chicken populations; most of the other reasons for their decline are still major problems. One of the issues identified in the department's Long Range Plan for the Management of Lesser Prairie Chickens in New Mexico 2002-2006 is the fact that low numbers of chickens in some areas of suitable habitat may not provide sufficient numbers of birds or genetic diversity to sustain ecological functioning of the population. Strategy 16 of that document is to: "Evaluate trapping and transplanting of wild birds as a technique to re-establish lesser prairie chicken populations to viable levels." The department proposed the hunt when it has not yet fulfilled the potential for range expansion through translocation of wild birds called for its own long-range plan. We hope that the commission and the department will rededicate themselves to publicly open and science-based management of the state's wildlife resources. Karyn Stockdale is the vice-President and executive director of Audubon New Mexico, the state office of the National Audubon Society.