Parks and Wildlife biologists have long-term concerns
By Joe Lewandowski
Conservation biologists at Colorado Parks and Wildlife are charged with keeping a close eye on sensitive wildlife – animals that sometimes are classified as “species of greatest conservation need” by the agency. One of those species is the Southern White-tailed Ptarmigan.
CPW biologists become alerted when a conservation organization asks the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to place an animal on the federal endangered species list. If that animal’s range includes Colorado, a team of CPW biologists put together a plan to study the species to determine how it’s doing here and to present the research to the federal agency for review. The process can take several years.
Recently, a Colorado study of the Southern White-tailed Ptarmigan was used by the USFWS to decide that the iconic bird does not need special protections under the federal Endangered Species Act. The study showed that populations of ptarmigan are holding steady throughout the mountains of Colorado.
“We have widespread distribution of ptarmigan across the state in suitable habitat,” said Amy Seglund, a conservation biologist based in Montrose who coordinated the study. “Not much has changed in their distribution across the alpine ecosystem since they were first studied in the 1960s and 1970s by CPW agency biologists.”
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