The ouster of a Nevada wildlife official has fanned a continuing debate over whether the sage grouse can best be kept off the Endangered Species List by protecting its habitat or by killing more of its predators.
Kenneth Mayer, who had been the director of the Nevada Department of Wildlife and serves on regional and national committees that deal with sage grouse conservation, startled environmentalists and many Nevadans last week by announcing that Gov. Brian Sandoval had demanded his resignation.
The federal Fish and Wildlife Service is assessing sage brush populations throughout the country and is expected to decide by the end of 2015 whether the bird should be listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Mr. Mayer maintained that it was his top priority to keep sage grouse populations healthy enough not to need federal protection. Many Nevadans fear that endangered status for the bird could mean restrictions on agriculture, development and energy production.
Mr. Mayer?s supporters had praised his ability to navigate the often-conflicting interests of ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, miners, energy developers and hunters in seeking to keep the sage grouse off the list. But critics said that his steps to protect its habitat went too far and risked hurting the economy.
In one of his last acts, Mr. Mayer?s department mapped nine million acres of remaining sagebrush ecosystems in Nevada and identified core areas of the birds? most vital habitat, as well as places with sparse numbers of sage grouse that it considered better candidates for development.
?I just kept my nose down and tried to do the best thing for the State of Nevada and its wildlife because we need to keep the bird off the list and still provide many opportunities for energy developers,? Mr. Mayer said in a telephone interview. ?As the director of a state wildlife agency, if you try to do the right thing and base things in science, you?re going to have your detractors.?
In late 2011, the federal secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, gave Mr. Mayer an award for his sage grouse conservation work, and Governor Sandoval publicly praised him. Mary-Sarah Kinner, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Tuesday that the governor remains dedicated to sage grouse conservation.
?The governor created the Sagebrush Ecosystem Council by executive order and believes that preventing the listing of the sage grouse is critical for the state of Nevada,? she said. ?The governor thanks Ken Mayer for his service to Nevada and wishes him well.?
Tina Nappe, 72, a Reno resident who is a member of the state?s Sagebrush Ecosystem Council, said that Mr. Mayer?s ouster ?sends a terrible statement about the state?s commitment to science and habitat.?
But Cecil Fredi, 74, president of a sportsmans? group called Hunters Alert who lives in Las Vegas and lobbied for Mr. Mayer?s removal, said that the wildlife director should have focused more on killing the bird?s predators than on protecting its ecosystem.
?What did Ken Mayer do? Nothing. Just habitat, habitat, habitat, which is a terrible thing for a person in his position to do,? he said. ?You get instant results when you poison a raven or shoot a coyote.?
Biologists, however, say that destruction of sagebrush ecosystems, in which the sage grouse builds nests known as leks, is the direst threat to the bird.
The largest member of the grouse family, the greater sage grouse, once numbered in the millions across the shortgrass prairie of the Great Plains. Human predation widened as the west was settled: Theodore Roosevelt hunted them as a young man working cattle in the Dakotas in the late 1800s, and in the early 1900s the bird saved countless homesteaders from starving.
Biologists estimate that around 90,000 sage grouse are left in Nevada and northeastern California.
Since 1999, ferocious wildfires have scorched three million acres, approximately 15 percent, of the sage grouse?s remaining habitat in Nevada, biologists estimate. While sagebrush is returning to some of the burned areas, much of the land has been taken over by invasive weeds including cheatgrass and tansy mustard, neither of which provides refuge for the grouse. Meanwhile, agriculture, development and extractive industry continues to fragment sagebrush ecosystems.
David Bobzien, a state assemblyman, said that Mr. Mayer?s ouster just before the start of the legislative session was jarring. ?The suddenness of the director?s removal potentially sends a message to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that Nevada is less than committed to science-based conservation measures necessary to prevent a listing,? he said.
Mr. Mayer previously led the Nevada Department of Wildlife from 2007 until 2010, when Jim Gibbons, then governor, fired him under pressure from ranchers and hunters who said that the agency director had not killed enough coyotes and mountain lions to boost deer populations.
Governor Sandoval rehired Mr. Mayer, only to demand his resignation two years later amid similar predator control complaints.
State budget records show that Mr. Mayer spent $400,000 to kill predators last year and invested more in that effort in several regions of the state than his predecessor did.? He oversaw the killing of thousands of ravens in sage grouse habitat along with many hundreds of coyotes, dozens of raccoons, and a few bobcats and mountain lions.
He said that out of fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers, he opted to invest less on predator control in regions where studies showed that coyote exterminations had no correlating effect on deer populations.
Gerald Lent, 74, a former chairman of the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners, dismissed Mr. Mayer?s findings as ?voodoo science.?
?He was anti-predator control, and he says he?s dedicated to wildlife in Nevada,? said Mr. Lent, who had urged Governor Gibbons to dismiss Mr. Mayer. ?That just burns me.?
Jack Robb, 45, the new chairman of the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners, said that lobbying did not influence Governor Sandoval?s decision to ask Mr. Mayer to resign. There are some people taking credit for it and I can assure you they played no part in it,? he said. ?Science-based management is the highest priority of the governor, and I have no doubt that whoever Ken?s replacement is will be science-based.?
Cliff Gardner, 74, a rancher in Nevada?s remote Ruby Valley who wrote editorials in The Elko Daily Free Press accusing the Department of Wildlife of suppressing studies showing the efficacy of predator control, said he was not optimistic about Mr. Mayer?s replacement.
?I?m sure most of the people being considered for his job graduated from a college,? he said. ?These people are the cause of the destruction of wildlife.?
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