Oklahoma joins lawsuit against Biden administration over lesser prairie chicken

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond joined a Texas lawsuit this week in the long-running dispute with the federal government over protecting the habitat of the lesser prairie chicken.

Oklahoma and Kansas joined a federal suit filed last month by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The complaint was amended this week to add the two states. The lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Interior Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their leaders.

“The ability to manage wildlife resources at the state level is especially important in states like Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, where most land is privately owned,” the new complaint states.

“The Plaintiffs’ collaboration with private landowners to achieve conservation while enabling economic development is crucial to the success of lesser prairie-chicken conservation.”

Earlier: Drummond threatens lawsuit over prairie chicken listing

What's at the heart of the lesser prairie chicken lawsuit?

The lawsuit is aimed at overturning a new rule published late last year by the Fish and Wildlife Service. That rule lists the bird’s population as threatened in the northern portion of the range, which includes parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and Texas, and endangered in the southern part, which includes part of Texas and New Mexico.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said the primary threat to both population segments was “the ongoing loss of large, connected blocks of grassland and shrubland habitat.”

The agency said it expected the loss and fragmentation of habitat to continue into the foreseeable future, reducing the bird’s resilience and putting it at risk of extinction in the northern part of the bird’s range.

A spokesperson for the agency said Friday the service does not comment on pending litigation.

The prairie chicken habitat history: Obama administration drops effort to list lesser prairie chicken as threatened

Drummond said in a news release this week that the rule, which took effect in late March, “places burdensome restrictions on Oklahoma ranchers who graze livestock and unnecessarily impedes the development of energy pipelines, oil drilling, wind farms and roads.

“I will not allow the Biden administration to punish Oklahoma farmers, ranchers and energy producers with this blatant overreach of the federal government.”

Struggles over how best to protect the lesser prairie chicken date back over a decade. Private landowners and the agriculture and energy industries worked for years on voluntary range plans to protect habitat, but the Obama administration listed the bird as threatened. A federal judge ruled in 2016 that the Obama administration had not properly considered the range plans and effectively canceled the listing.

Environmental groups sued the Trump administration in 2019 to push it towards a new action to protect the bird. That suit said the species “once numbered around a million birds, but today there are fewer than 38,000 lesser prairie chickens remaining.”

The lawsuit filed by the states this week said voluntary conservation efforts are succeeding, allowing the population to stabilize, and that the new rule would derail those efforts. The suit also claims that the new rule is too vague in regard to what activities would still be allowed in the protected areas.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma joins lawsuit challenging Biden's lesser prairie chicken rule