But the bird will remain eligible for candidate conservation agreements and candidate conservation agreements with assurances, two FWS programs that reward habitat protections efforts on public and private lands.
Renowned for its elaborate spring mating dance, the brown-and-white-striped prairie chicken was a candidate species for more than a decade before it was declared threatened in 2014.
Since that time, an annual survey of prairie chickens across their range in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas revealed that the population of the birds in the wild has dropped over 13 percent — a troubling outcome that the administration warned of when defending its threatened listing (Greenwire, July 1).
Some conservationists were quick to criticize the agency today for removing protections from the species without having a new listing proposal ready.
But Republican opponents of the listing celebrated the FWS rule.
Inhofe and GOP Reps. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma and Steve Pearce of New Mexico have tried for years to legislatively delist the bird. Federal protections made it harder to drill for oil and natural gas or pursue other development in areas where the prairie chicken was known to live or breed.