The Fish & Wildlife Service has just announced that the sage grouse is a candidate for listing as an endangered species, but its listing will be precluded because its habitat overlaps with oil, gas, and wind development across the West.

As Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT-03) states, classily:

The only good place for a sage grouse to be listed is on the menu of a French bistro.

The sage grouse, also known as sagehen, is well known for its courtship rituals. Male birds strut, flex, preen, puff up their pecs, and grunt like Muscle Beach bodybuilders.

The sage grouse lives in cowboy country — the sagebrush, plains, and high deserts across the West, from California’s Owens Valley to the Dakotas. One bird needs a lot of territory — it’s sensitive to any activity within four miles of its nesting grounds. And its territory has been covered by an intricate spiderweb of humans and their accoutrements: roads, pipelines, cattle, sheep, prairie fires, invasive plants such as cheatgrass, oil derricks, and (mostly proposed) wind turbines. The grouse is considered a keystone species, meaning that its health indicates the health of an entire landscape. It’s almost no surprise that its numbers have dropped from 16 million to a few hundred thousand.

The bird is no stranger to litigation. The Bush administration refused to list the bird following a petition. The Western Watersheds Project won a lawsuit in which the judge held (this is a shocker!) that a senior political appointee illegally tampered with the scientific determination whether to list the species. The Bush administration then decided to -run out the clock- engage in further studies until Obama took office. The listing has been described as a litmus test for conservation in the Obama administration.

Today, the Obama administration announced a compromise in which the bird is listed as "warranted, but precluded" by higher priorities:

The Interior Department says it won’t list sage grouse as endangered or threatened but will classify the bird among species that are candidates for federal protection.

The finding is good news for the wind energy and oil and gas industries, which will still face scrutiny in grouse habitat but will have more leeway than if the bird were listed.

As the New York Times editorialized earlier this week, the "warranted-but-precluded" status holds out the promise, or threat, of more stringent regulations, and requires good faith efforts from affected state governments and the Bureau of Land Management.

The Fish & Wildlife Service press release spins it as "expanding common sense efforts" to preserve its habitat, hoping for voluntary conservation by private landowners "while ensuring that energy production, recreational access and other uses of federal lands continue as appropriate."

In other words, the sage grouse is likely to join the pika. Poor silly bird never had a chance, going up against our energy needs.