Quest to save birds conflicts with oil wells

DECKER, Mont. — An awkward industrial dance is playing out on the sage flats of the West, a lopsided coupling of billion-dollar energy companies and a skittish ground bird prone to flee at first sight of a drilling rig.

If the bird, the greater sage grouse, lands on the endangered species list as some propose, that could put the brakes on the oil and gas activity surging through Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Montana.

So during spring breeding, companies working some of the nation's richest gas fields let rigs go idle for months at a time rather than risk interrupting sage grouse mating rituals. Roads to oil and gas wells are rerouted to skirt the bird's territory. Power lines are buried to deny hunting perches to grouse-eating raptors. If those measures don't work, some companies are pledging tens of millions of dollars to re-create sage grouse habitat.

But as another breeding season ends this month and rigs again roll through the sage, a chorus of federal and university biologists and state officials say the companies' grouse conservation efforts are failing. With decades of drilling still planned, they say the industry must either redouble conservation or risk pushing sage grouse off the landscape.

Other forces also factor into the bird's decades-long decline — from cattle grazing and urban sprawl that pummeled once-vast sagebrush expanses to drought and West Nile virus outbreaks that hit the bird directly.

Grouse advocates single out oil and gas companies for criticism because they are pushing deeper into some of the bird's last strongholds: the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, the area surrounding the Roan Plateau in Colorado and the Green River Basin in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.

Industry executives acknowledge their future in those areas is wound tightly around the grouse, a chicken-sized bird confronted by BP Amoco, Shell, Fidelity Exploration, EnCana Oil and Gas and dozens of other companies.

Yet the industry also has its own scientists, with their own opinions about the sage grouse. And they say the effects of energy development are overstated.

"The reality with oil and gas is that we drill holes where the gas is and, unfortunately, that happens to be in sage grouse habitat," said Randy Teeuwen with Calgary-based EnCana, which has drilled 715 wells across western and central Wyoming and has hundreds more planned. "There is disturbance to sage grouse habitat. But we can manage that and stay ahead of that."