WASHINGTON— The Trump administration released final plans today that strip protections for the imperiled greater sage grouse on about 50 million acres of federal public lands across eight Western states. Previous proposals over the past decade were intended to prevent extinction of the iconic dancing bird.

Today’s final plans apply to greater sage grouse habitat on Bureau of Land Management lands in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming.

“Trump’s reckless actions will speed the extinction of greater sage grouse by allowing unfettered fossil fuel extraction and other destructive development across tens of millions of acres of public lands,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Every president starting with Obama has screwed over these iconic Western birds and the hundreds of other wildlife species that depend on the beautiful sagebrush sea. We’re not letting these dancing birds go without a fight, so we’ll see Trump in court.”

Protections lost in today’s gutted plans include eliminating the targeted annual warning system, designed to detect declines in local sage grouse populations before they became irreversible. They also remove protections from 4.3 million acres of prime sage-grouse habitat and reduce the amount of protected habitat in Utah.

Other changes include weakening habitat protections in Nevada to allow construction of the Greenlink North transmission line, which would destroy nesting and mating grounds. The plans also remove science-based grass-height standards for nesting habitat, a shift driven by livestock-industry pressure in Nevada, California and Idaho that further threatens the birds’ existence.

Because of precipitous population declines, greater sage grouse were deemed eligible for protection under the Endangered Species Act in the early 2010s. Instead of protecting the bird, however, federal officials adopted revised land management plans in 2015 that established protections from extractive uses across the bird’s range in 10 states.

These protections limited where mining, oil and gas, transmission lines and other heavy industry could operate within priority habitat areas. They specified limits on the amount of permittable disturbance within these habitat areas, which were designated to protect the sensitive birds and their mating grounds, called leks.

However, fossil fuel, energy transmission and mining industries continued to pressure the BLM to weaken these plans. Many protective measures from the 2015 plans were never implemented and the plans were again revised and further weakened in 2018 and in 2024. The birds’ populations continue to spiral downward, declining nearly 80% between 1968 and 2023.

Protecting the greater sage grouse and its habitat benefits hundreds of other species that depend on the sagebrush sea ecosystem, including pygmy rabbits, pronghorns, elk, mule deer, golden eagles, native trout, and migratory and resident birds.

“Greater sage grouse are teetering on the brink of extinction, and their fate is inextricably linked to hundreds of other animals who rely on the sagebrush sea,” said Spivak. “Americans don’t want the doors of our public lands thrown open for more mining and fossil fuel extraction. We’ll keep fighting until these beautiful dancing birds and the places they live get the protection they deserve.”