"The Fish and Wildlife Service advised its fellow land management agencies to impose the most stringent protections on roughly 16.5 million acres of high-value sage grouse habitat in order to save the bird from the threat of extinction.

The recommendation came from FWS Director Dan Ashe in an Oct. 27 internal memo to the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service that was obtained by Greenwire. It will likely inform BLM as it finalizes land-use plans covering 67 million acres in the bird's 11-state Western range in hopes of preventing its demise.

The areas FWS mapped in the Great Basin, western Wyoming and north-central Montana are "a subset of priority habitat most vital to the species persistence, within which we recommend the strongest levels of protection," Ashe wrote in the memo to BLM Director Neil Kornze and Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell."

Phil Taylor reports for Greenwire February 10, 2015. [2]