... the Great American Chicken evidently still exists in significant numbers.
When human society puts into positions of immense power individuals that envision elimination of tens of millions of other humans to save the earth, then humans are the ones that are the endangered species.
First, the Lesser Prairie Chicken is not your Colonel Sanders variety of chicken.
Second, this situation just drips with irony that is completely missing from this article. The LPC nests in the open in the prairie grasses which are actually on the increase as family farms disappear across the heartland. But, the LPC is a squirrely little bird and the oddest of things can disrupt their nesting patterns. It turns out that the greatest threat to the LPC is the wind turbine. They just don’t like the things and won’t nest anywhere near them. Bye bye prairie chicken as well as large numbers of raptors who are knocked senseless running into spinning turbine blades.
The enviro wackos are killing all these wild critters. Members of Congress are on the side of the enviro wackos on this one. Their constituents are making big bucks leasing prairie lands to wind turbine farms, so the fact that both the ranchers and the politicians are Republicans gets conveniently forgotten since money is involved.
Repeal the ESA!!!
The “Lesser” Prairie Chicken? Don’t you listen to the haters! You’re not lesser! You are special! We love you just the way you are!
I read last week that the anti-nuke people and the tree huggers are trying to stop construction of a third nuclear plant at the Enrico Fermi nuclear facility on the shore of Lake Erie in Newport, MI (south of Detroit).
They claim it will destroy the habitat of the locally threatened fox snake.
At the risk of being mean, am I the only one who finds humor in hearings being held in a hanger in Roswell, New Mexico? Concerning a species of poultry that is paranoid about where it nests and barely competes with a cornish game hen as a decent meal...
There's a balance in here somewhere. Jobs and economic development are certainly important. But if we don't conserve the species we have, our children and grandchildren will only be able to see pictures of them in the history books.
Like the dodo. And like the passenger pigeon, which once thundered across American skies in great flocks but which perished forever when Martha died in 1914.
They are actually quite tasty, but the process is incredibly difficult and requires a highly-unlikely confluence of luck and skill.
This is an effort to control land use, period. That bird doesn't need any protection from humans.
It might need protection from coyotes, wolves, eagles, hawks and somesuch animals (themselves "protected"), but we humans couldn't inflict any damage on that thing's survival prospects, even if we wanted to.
For every human that walks this earth, there are 2.71 chickens. Does that mean humans are endangered too?
Ping
From Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_Prairie_Chicken
The United States Department of the Interior has proposed creating a Lesser Prairie Chicken Preserve as a National Monument, but it remains controversial, and President Barack Obama has not taken action on the proposal under the Antiquities Act of 1906 as of February 2012.[4]