The Jim Sage Mountain area is the largest unfragmented landscape in all of the Burley, Idaho BLM lands. Located just north of the Utah border It is a unique and beautiful wild area, cloaked in juniper with some of the only occurrences of pinyon pine in Idaho. It is rich in bird life, harboring some of Idaho's only occurrences of pinyon jay and juniper titmouse, as well as Virginia's warbler, Cooper's hawk, ferruginous hawk and many other important or declining birds.

Burley BLM, with the goading of local cattlemen, has long been hellbent on destroying the native juniper forests of the Jim Sage to produce livestock forage for the same cattlemen who have destroyed much of the surrounding area. Burley's mismanagement of livestock and past failed livestock forage seedings in the sagebrush and sage grouse habitat at lower elevations has resulted in extensive cheatgrass, halogeton and other weed invasions, depletion of native grasses, desertification as well as sage grouse habitat fragmentation.

Instead of focusing on restoring the weed wastelands in the lower elevations, BLM set in motion a plan to spend 6 million dollars or more of federal fire funds (your tax dollars!) to deforest the entire Jim Sage Hills destroying habitat of numerous native wildlife including Pinyon jay, Virginia's warbler and Cooper's hawk. The BLM proposal includes using a witches brew of herbicides; "prescribed" fire including likely use of bulldozers for fire lines and balls soaked in napalm -like substances lobbed from helicopters at patches of trees as well as chaining with bulldozers and other "mechanical" treatment.

Last year BLM prepared a programmatic deforestation Environmental Assessment and claimed it would conduct future site-specific environmental reviews.

In November 2004 WWP heard from a deer hunter that a massive chaining project had interrupted his trip to Cottonwood Canyon on the east side of the Jim Sage Hills, so I visited the site in late December, and was horrified to find over 1000 acres of Juniper forest had already been chained by the BLM. My visit occurred during the days right after the tsunami - if junipers were palm trees, the scene in the Jim Sage would have been indistinguishable from images flashed across TV screens; however, in this case the environmental devastation was planned.

Chaining is truly a Neanderthal practice. A ship's anchor chain is strung between two large bulldozers. The dozers drive cross-country parallel to each other, wrenching trees and everything else from the earth with the anchor chain.

In the area leveled by the chaining, a two year study of nesting birds conducted for Idaho Department of Fish and Game had documented several species including Cooper's hawk, gray flycatcher and Virginia's warbler. That area of the bird study has been entirely destroyed.

One of the justifications used by BLM for its deforestation/livestock forage projects in the Jim Sage Hills, is that killing and removing juniper trees will protect the small group of recently introduced bighorn sheep. Some bighorns have been killed by mountain lions. BLM claims predators use trees for screening, and that bighorns avoid areas with trees, so if it clears trees from the mountain, bighorns will do better. Ironically, natural predator kills are the least of the problems facing the Jim Sage bighorns. In a January visit to the site, we observed a band of 30 domestic sheep near the chained area. By chaining the juniper trees, BLM has likely doomed the Jim Sage bighorns. The chaining opening provides the bighorns a straight walk downslope to mingle with the domestic sheep from which the bighorns will contract an inevitably fatal lung disease.

In an effort to put a stop to this to this assault on our public lands, Western Watersheds Project has filed a lawsuit in Federal Court with the able help of our counsel Judi Brawer of Advocates for the West's Boise office.

Katie Fite is WWP's Biodiversity Director. She lives in Boise, Idaho.