WASHINGTON (CN) – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Tuesday announced a draft plan to protect prairie dogs, corrected an action on leopards, and found that five petitions merit more study.
After recently determining that white-tailed prairie dogs found in Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Colorado did not merit further study in the Endangered Species Act listing process, the agency has now announced a draft plan to protect Utah prairie dogs.
The move is indicative of the agency’s recent efforts to rely on voluntary conservation agreements in an effort to avoid listing species under the ESA. According to the agency, this draft plan is to “create efficiency and certainty for developers.”
“Once again, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has bent over backwards to ensure Utah prairie dogs aren’t in the way of development, yet extreme private property rights groups are asking the Supreme Court to nullify protections,” Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “We hope this ridiculous ploy will be rejected by the court. The Endangered Species Act has worked to boost Utah prairie dog numbers without excessive burdens on landowners.”
Prairie dogs are the main prey of black-footed ferrets, an endangered species. The prairie dogs are threatened by eradication programs and diseases such as plague, in addition to habitat loss due to development.
The agency, under their new draft plan, proposed to issue ten-year permits under a General Conservation Plan to three Utah counties to allow a certain amount of “take,” meaning lethal or non-lethal harm, to prairie dogs during development activities. This “streamlined process” allows the counties to issue permits to individual developers to avoid the “time, resources and money, which could hinder economic growth,” required by the previous process where individual Habitat Conservation Plans were prepared and submitted by local developers or governments, according to the agency.
The service also announced a proposal to move five other species along in the ESA listing process, and tacked on corrections to a November 2016 determination that the leopard merited further study. 
It now says it made two errors in the action, and corrects them to clarify that the agency is evaluating the leopard’s status throughout its range, not just in countries where it is already listed as threatened, and secondly, that the leopard’s range extends to 62 countries in Africa and Asia, not just the four African countries previously noted.
The service determined that petitions to list five species under the ESA have merit and they now advance the species for further study. The Venus flytrap, tricolored bat, oblong rocksnail, sturgeon chub and sicklefin chub will now undergo a more rigorous 12-month review to determine if listing under the ESA is appropriate.
