One year after PCA filed an administrative appeal challenging the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to close its prairie dog towns to recreational shooting, and three months after a letter from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) requesting the same, the BLM closed 15 northcentral Montana prairie dog towns to recreational shooting.
The Malta Field Office/Lewistown District of the BLM placed the mandatory shooting ban on these towns that constitute an important portion of lands crucial to the recovery of the endangered black-footed ferret. Wild ferrets live in only six areas in the entire U.S. (see related story, p. 10). Low prairie dog populations on these BLM lands are threatening the success of an adjacent FWS ferret reintroduction program, considered the second most important ferret recovery area in the nation.
PCA is pleased to see the BLM take a firm stand to protect these prairie dog towns for the prairie dog, the black-footed ferret and several other species that depend on prairie dogs. But the BLM is still far below its management plan requirement to maintain prairie dogs on 12,346 acres of BLM lands within its portion of the ferret reintroduction area. This was the acreage found here in 1988, and was used as a political "line in the sand:" a level considered tolerable to the agency and adjacent private landowners, but above which prairie dog towns would be poisoned. Today, due to plague and recreational shooting, prairie dogs remain on only 35% of these formerly occupied acres.
PCA began requesting greater protection for prairie dogs here in the summer of 1997. After months of excuses as to why it did not have the authority to protect prairie dogs, the BLM finally wrote a plan outlining methods it could use to increase prairie dog numbers, such as relocate and fully protect prairie dogs throughout the ferret recovery area. However, the agency did nothing more than maintain the ineffective voluntary shooting closure that was already in place, and even decreased the area under this closure to only 15 towns- the same towns now under a mandatory shooting ban. Because of this lack of action, PCA appealed this plan in August, 1998. Even with the recent shooting ban, PCA will continue our appeal as long as the BLM refuses to actively attempt to increase the acreage of prairie dogs to 1988 levels.
While we are very pleased to see an enforceable recreational shooting ban, we would like to see this step taken much further to include all prairie dog towns within the designated Montana black-footed ferret recovery area. We would also like to see this level of protection instituted on the public land portions of all 6 existing and any future ferret reintroduction sites. Allowing direct loss of habitat in endangered species reintroduction areas makes no sense, especially when it is as pointless as recreational prairie dog shooting.
