Flat-tailed horned lizard gets boost from Arizona judge [Updated]

In the latest chapter in a 16-year legal battle to keep the flat-tailed horned lizard safe from urban encroachment, a federal court judge in Arizona has reinstated a 1993 proposal to list the creature as a threatened species.

U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake’s ruling follows a recent U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reconsider its earlier decision to deny the lizard protection under the Endangered Species Act. That decision rejected a Bush administration policy that environmentalists complained favored development at the expense of the lizard and many plants and animals across the nation.

Since 1993, the agency has withdrawn three proposals to list the lizard on the grounds it was hard to find and, therefore, difficult to classify as threatened. Each withdrawal was successfully challenged in court by conservation groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the Horned Lizard Conservation Society.

In the meantime, the lizard’s population has continued to decline in Arizona, California and Baja California largely because its habitats of gravel pans and dunes have been taken over by farming, housing, off-road vehicles, geothermal leases, gravel pits, golf courses, military exercises and border fences between the United States and Mexico.

The Department of the Interior is expected to make a final decision about the status of the flat-tailed horned lizard by November 2010.

“The lizard is certainly as deserving of federal protection today as it was 16 years ago,” said attorney Bill Snape, who represented the Center for Biological Diversity in the matter. “Hopefully this is the final chapter in the lizard’s long and tortured legal history.”

The lizard — 3 1/2 inches long and a voracious consumer of harvester ants — once inhabited wide swaths of the Colorado and Sonoran deserts.

Listing the lizard as threatened could potentially affect the ongoing rush to build huge solar energy facilities across the desert flatlands of Southern California, said Allan Muth, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and director of the Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center, south of Palm Desert.

“Amid all the applications being submitted to develop solar energy plants, it doesn’t look like things will get any better for the flat-tailed horned lizard,” Muth said. “If listing the lizard as a threatened species means people will take a little more time to think these things through, that’s a good thing.”

Anticipating a protection declaration, Stirling Energy Systems plans to mitigate the environmental impacts of its proposed Solar II facility on 6,500 acres of flat-tailed horned lizard habitat near the Imperial County city of El Centro by purchasing prime lizard habitat elsewhere and then donating it for conservation. [Updated at 7:51 p.m.: The name of that proposed facility was recently renamed Tessera Solar's Imperial Valley Solar Two by Stirling to reflect the name of its sister company.]

-- Louis Sahagun

Comments

[Rocco]

Tom - It says you need to be over 13 to participate in the message board.

The Solar II Project referenced in the article is actually on PUBLIC land (administered by the BLM), as are most of the remaining lands that are occupied by the lizard. Regardless, all wildlife are defined as a public resource, meaning Tessera (a private company) is proposing to destroy a resource that belongs to you and me so they can profit. What do you and I get out of the deal? How about more of our tax dollars going to support all the extra work BLM now has to do to deal with this mess. And you accuse the Sierra Club (which I might add is a non-profit organization) of taking land?

Never once has a group bred an endangered species? You should educate yourself a little more. You might start by reading about the California Condor, which was saved from extinction through captive breeding. Let me know when you're done with that and I can tell you some other captive bred species to read about.

[tom Bates]

This is about taking of private property without compensation period. This has been the major abuse by the Taliban (aka Sierra Club)and the environmental movement for many years.

Never once in history has any environmental group put forth a proposal to create and enity to breed any endangered species thus removing them from the endangered status.

They prefer them to remain endangered or simple no longer exist as this serves their purpose...

If I have a piece of land on which I want to build a home, but am precluded by the existance of an endangered species. I will guarntee it will become extinct. How ever if you require me to feed or breed the little sucker, I also guarntee it will no longer be endangered. You will have so many you won't beleve it. Thus nature will live happly ever after.

[Steven James Scott]

Um...a photo???

[Aj]

Lizards are important for our eco-system

[save the deserts!]

Great - the more people learn about desert biodiversity, functionality and ecological importance, the less likely they are to write deserts off as "throwaway" ecosystems. Deserts are just as critical to environmental balance as oceans and cannot be destroyed any more than rainforests, mountain ranges, watersheds, coral reefs or other ecosystems, so trying to destroy them SOLELY to create Big Energy profits (aka Big Solar), when the faster, cheaper, democratic solution of rooftop solar is shovel-ready is criminal.

Please do not assume that because you are ignorant of the desert's value that it has no value. We do NOT need massive, destructive, wasteful power plants in our wilderness areas, far from demand. The Big Energy propagandists are lying to us, so we need to think for ourselves for once and recognize that they are panicking, because we are finally able to break their monopolies and become (for the moment, partially) independent of the Chevron chokehold.

Let's push for democratic, point of use energy production, efficiency and storage solutions, and push back against these expensive, destructive Big Solar boondoggles!

[Dave]

Is this one of the species of horned lizards that has been impacted by the invasion of Argentine ants, the latter having displaced so many of the harvester ants favored by horned lizards? If there are no harvester ants, then unfortunately no amount of legal wrangling, or anything else, can do a lot to save this species in the long run.