Looming changes to CRP grim for wildlife

Prospects for upcoming bird hunting seasons are more than a bit unsettling, in my house and around the region.

The cold, soggy weather of early June was a death warrant for many pheasant and partridge chicks born in the peak of the first hatch.

In some areas, all hopes rest on a successful second nesting. Keep your fingers crossed.

Meantime, even though I buy cotton balls by the case to stuff in the ears of my English setters, I’ve already underwritten my veterinarian’s retirement by paying for cheat grass extraction and complications.

While gardens got a slow start this year, weeds are flourishing.

But these headaches are relatively insignificant to the potential wildlife and hunting setbacks from pressures on the Conservation Reserve Program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is on the verge of allowing farmers and ranchers to plow up, hay or graze CRP lands.

While offering “early outs” for landowners enrolled in the CRP could ultimately benefit wildlife in some instances, Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, recently told a National Association of Conservation Districts gathering that he was “extremely troubled about the option.”

Hall opposes the proposal because invading CRP lands before the contracts are up “would put important habitat at risk and inappropriately change the course of ongoing contracts with landowners.”

Agriculture officials say giving farmers the option to withdraw from CRP contracts could prematurely release millions of acres of potentially productive land for cropping in an effort to temper soaring grain prices.

However, the proposal was stalled last week after environmental groups filed a lawsuit on another proposal to allow haying and grazing of CRP lands to help farmers cope with rising costs to feed their livestock.

Decisions could be made any day as attorneys for Agriculture and the National Wildlife Federation negotiate.

CRP is the nation’s largest land retirement program. It pays farmers to pull the plows and cows off 30 million acres of erodible land so it can be planted with cover vegetation to conserve soils, protect water supplies and provide cover for wildlife.

Landowners who sign CRP contracts receive federal payments in exchange for idling their land for 10 to 15 years.

Contracts on 5.2 million acres already are set to expire in the next year and a half.

But offering penalty-free early outs on other CRP lands would deny taxpayers the full conservation payoff for their CRP investment.

Recreational hunting linked to CRP would be curtailed, affecting some rural economies.

Advances for some endangered species, such as sage grouse, would be set back.

Dale Humburg, chief biologist for Ducks Unlimited, said CRP alone has been responsible for more than 2.2 million additional ducks in the fall migration each year, while also providing grassland reserves for times of drought.

DU officials announced last week that they support allowing farmers in flood-ravaged areas of the country to tap CRP lands on an emergency basis. But the group says the nation should not overlook that CRP conserves more than 450 million tons of topsoil and even combats global warming by sequestering more than 48 million tons of carbon.

The nation’s top wildlife official has left no doubt about what’s at stake.

“This program is phenomenally important,” Hall said in an interview with Environment & Energy publishing. “We’re renting that land for wildlife.”

Time to howl: Wolves are bringing the extremists out of the woodwork.

Animal lovers who don’t want any wolves killed filed a lawsuit that was predictable after Wyoming officials unleashed kill-’em-on-sight hunting seasons as soon as the Endangered Species protections were lifted.

The lawsuit stalls the more rational hunting seasons planned for this fall in Idaho, while wolves continue their expansion in the West.

Oregon confirmed a wolf pack with pups on Friday in a forested area of northern Union County. This is the first evidence of multiple wolves and wolf reproduction in Oregon since wolves were extirpated from the state in the mid-1940s.

Washington last week documented its first functioning wolf pack since 1930. State biologists confirmed a litter of pups from that Okanogan pack on Wednesday.

Meantime, wolves were involved in at least four livestock killing sprees in southern Idaho earlier this month and two in Western Montana.

In a perfect world, we’d celebrate the return of wolves and then roll up our sleeves to manage them so we could all coexist.