Commission opposes prairie chicken listing

By ROB LARSON
Daily Press Staff Writer
The names have changed, but the story remains the same.
Not long after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided not to include the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard on the Endangered Species List in June, the Eddy County Commission passed a resolution Tuesday opposing the listing of the Lesser Prairie Chicken. … For the rest of the story, subscribe in print and on the web.
The resolution, calling the listing of the prairie chicken “excessive and unbearably harmful,” was proposed to the commission by Commissioner Lewis Derrick of District 3.
“The biggest reason I proposed the resolution is to show that we’re not asleep down here in Southeast New Mexico, and we’re very much involved in this,” Derrick said. “We’re interested in saving the prairie chicken, but we’re also very interested in saving our economic stability, too.”
As the resolution states, the commission is opposed to the Lesser Prairie Chicken’s listing because of “several flaws” with the science being used by the FWS for the potentially endangered species. Specifically, the resolution talks about a “lack of factoring for drought, impact of changing weather patterns on the ‘range’, and the methodology for counting birds …”