In December Western Watersheds Project and 19 other conservation groups submitted a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the Greater Sage Grouse as "threatened" or "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act.

The species has suffered declines up to 80 percent over the past 20 years due to habitat loss. Today, the total sage grouse population is estimated at 8 percent of historic numbers.

Sage grouse dependence on vast areas of healthy sagebrush habitat makes them proverbial "canaries in a coal mine." Wherever sage grouse struggle to survive, the landscape has suffered serious ecological damage.

The species' historic range conforms to the distribution of sagebrush on the prairie sagebrush steppe (the "Sagebrush Sea") covering parts of 16 western states and three Canadian provinces. Since 1900, however, the distribution of sage grouse has been greatly reduced. Sage grouse no longer occur in Arizona, British Columbia, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Remaining sage grouse populations suffer from habitat degradation caused by unsustainable livestock grazing and other causes. New threats such as increased energy development on the Rocky Mountain Front, persistent drought and the West Nile virus found in sage grouse in Montana and Wyoming threaten to reduce populations even more.

"The Bush Administration has prioritized resource extraction over conservation on public lands, which has increased the pressure on sage grouse populations now contending with West Nile disease, drought and all the hardships associated with degraded habitat," said Mark Salvo, Grasslands and Deserts Advocate for American Lands Alliance.