Colorado sees flurry of last-minute action on endangered species ahead of Trump administration

In the late innings of the Biden administration, with the Trump administration eager to take the field and shake up the rules, you’ll need a scorecard to track last-minute decisions affecting some of Colorado’s most challenged wildlife species.

Here’s the summary box score in this month’s Endangered Species Act contests: 

• Rio Grande cutthroat trout, wearing the home red-belly uniforms: not protected
• Monarch butterfly, sporting the popular black-on-orange unis: protected
• Pinyon jay, wearing Dodger-blue caps and road grays: protection decision goes to extra innings
• Greater sage-grouse, as always donning the inflated yellow breast patches at climactic moments: also in extra time
• Grizzlies, wearing any uniform they want: offense and defense are deadlocked, new ownership could change everything

Player and spectator reaction in Colorado is decidedly mixed after a week of close contests in wildlife. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials are ecstatic that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a final decision not to list the Rio Grande cutthroat as threatened or endangered. They say it validates years of hard work restoring hundreds of miles of the fish’s native habitat, from dozens of cooperating agencies and nonprofits. 

“It’s a big win,” said Estevan Vigil, an aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife who for years has helped lead efforts on cutthroat restoration in the high mountain streams pouring down to the Rio Grande in the San Luis Valley. “It doesn’t mean that we’re done and the species is saved by any means. It just means that we’re doing our job and we’re working with our partners to conserve the species, and without needing that extra level of federal protection, not only here in Colorado, but also in New Mexico.”

State wildlife officials and agricultural trade groups often resist federal listing under the Endangered Species Act, which adds new layers of land use reviews and environmental study for any human activity in the species’ threatened habitat. Listing can fence off U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management property from grazing, and can force developers to make extraordinary accommodations if they disturb wetlands or other crucial habitat. 

Colorado has fended off federal designation for the Rio Grande cutthroat and similar fish species such as the Rio Grande chub and sucker, arguing with federal reviewers that local coalitions were doing the best job to protect and restore habitats while accounting for landowner concerns. FWS also declined to add protections for the chub and sucker earlier this year. 

“When you’re looking at it, 2024 from our perspective has been a good win for the native fish of the Rio Grande basin as a whole,” CPW’s southwestern Colorado spokesperson John Livingston said. He said he looks forward to “chasing” important native fish as a fly fisherman and father of a 3-year-old. 

Not all the wildlife fans are happy with the results. The Center for Biological Diversity had been pushing for a federal listing for the Rio Grande cutthroat for more than 25 years. The final decision to not recommend a listing for the cutthroat has left CBD feeling defeated. 

“There’s no question that it’s endangered. It’s just that the threats are tremendous,” said Noah Greenwald, an endangered species advocate with CBD. While Colorado and New Mexico have worked hard on restoration, climate change is adding dangerous heat to the same high mountain streams, and will only get worse, Greenwald said. 

The Rio Grande cutthroat is a venerable native Colorado fish, and fighting for cutthroat habitat is great for the overall environment, Greenwald said. But if you want the feds to root harder for the Rio Grande cutthroat just because of the luminous red belly, that’s a good thing, too, he said. 

“Our world is becoming homogenized, and so the fact that it’s beautiful, to me, is not insubstantial,” Greenwald said. “Part of the magic of the world is disappearing.”

A federal designation is not just new layers of bureaucracy, CBD and other nonprofits argue. A listing often brings in more money for scientific studies and habitat restoration. Reviews required after listing would have put a brighter spotlight on CPW’s trophy fishing stock efforts, which push voracious brown trout into Rio Grande cutthroat habitat, Greenwald said. Stocked rainbow trout, meanwhile, breed with the cutthroats and mix up the genetic stock. 

“That essentially eliminates the species,” he said. 

Endangered Species Act activity is heating up because of long-pending decisions now reaching the very end of a relatively liberal Biden administration stance on environmental questions, more often favoring environmental group requests for listings. Conservative groups, meanwhile, are hoping to put off any final listing decisions until after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration and new Western lands oversight begins. In some cases, conservatives will also try to reverse past decisions, or seek delisting of animals they say have recovered. 

Here’s a partial check of the remaining scorecard for Western wildlife: 

Monarch butterfly

The Fish and Wildlife Service on Dec. 10 proposed listing the wide-ranging and much-loved monarch for threatened species protection. The Congressional Western Caucus, a conservative coalition that often opposes listings, immediately objected, and publicly signaled for a Trump administration intervention after January. 

Millions of Western monarchs used to make the annual migration to winter grounds in California, and many millions more than that went from the Eastern U.S. to Mexico. FWS now says the Western migratory population is down more than 95% since the 1980s, with a 99% chance of extinction by 2080. 

Grizzlies

Wyoming, Idaho and Montana want the U.S. to delist the grizzly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Environmental groups not only want to continue listing, they want the Biden administration to help set up corridors between Yellowstone and Glacier, crossing Idaho and Montana, to expand and link the bears’ natural territories.

A federal judge has ordered FWS to issue a decision by Jan. 20, inauguration day. The federal agency is a year beyond its own deadline for making a decision. 

“The previous Trump administration briefly removed federal protections for grizzly bears but was blocked by courts. Wyoming, Montana and Idaho all still seek to have federal protections for grizzlies removed in favor of state management. That would likely lead to new plans for grizzly hunting, similar to how the three states now allow the hunting of wolves that were reintroduced to the region,” The Associated Press wrote. 

Pinyon jay

Juniper hikers and mountain bikers will want to watch what happens next with the blue-and-gray pinyon jay, which Defenders of Wildlife and other nonprofits think is in danger from a “mass tree mortality” pushed by climate change heat and drought. The group on Dec. 11 filed a lawsuit saying FWS and the Interior Department violated the Endangered Species Act with long delays to its required decision over a potential listing for the pinyon jay. 

Defenders of Wildlife, calling the bird a keystone species for the West, first petitioned for a listing in April 2022. Under steps required by the act, FWS should have issued a finding one year later, but still has not, the group says in its lawsuit. 

“The service has the data it needs to move forward, and instead is purposely stalling its decision,” Peggy Darr, Defenders of Wildlife New Mexico representative, said in a news release. “They have solid, scientific evidence showing the Pinyon jay’s precipitous decline and dire need for federal intervention.”

Greater sage-grouse

The contest over the sage-grouse has been a monumental competition for decades, in part because a listing or new land use restrictions could impose changes on the 70 million Western acres where the showy, chest-puffing bird used to thrive. 

It’s been a back-and-forth saga. Environmental groups thought they had a decent BLM land use plan during the second Obama administration, with many hoping a good plan would avoid the much more contentious listing of the bird under the Endangered Species Act. But the first Trump administration sought revisions to the plan in 2019. 

The BLM tried again in 2022 under the Biden administration, according to a Dec. 12 letter from 18 wildlife biologists asking the Interior Department for a final boost to the new land use plans. 

“The sagebrush biome is at the critical juncture with its fate of whether or not it continues to be a functional ecosystem hanging in the balance,” the scientists wrote. “Active management is critical and the time to arrest the decline of the system is short. It bears repeating that we’re experiencing a sustained loss of high-quality sagebrush of about 1.3 million acres per year.”

The Congressional Western Caucus again spoke out on the other side, urging the current Interior Department to avoid any decisions on sage-grouse habitat. The caucus called the land-use plans “clearly a last-ditch effort by a lame-duck administration,” and vowed to repeal any new sage-grouse regulations in the incoming GOP-controlled Congress.