After finally scoring a place on the endangered
species list, the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse may have to
hop back off it. Nine inches long, the Preble’s mouse
inhabits streamside meadows along the rapidly developing urban
corridor from Colorado Springs to Cheyenne (HCN, 8/30/99: Can the
Preble’s mouse trap growth on Colorado’s Front Range?).
In 1998, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the mouse as
threatened after environmentalists said they would sue. Then in
2003, the Wyoming Governor’s Office and a nonprofit group,
Coloradans for Water Conservation and Development, petitioned the
agency to delist the mouse. Citing concerns that Preble’s was
not a separate subspecies, they sought to relax federal
restrictions on land protected as mouse habitat.
Now,
encouraged by a 2003 report from the Denver Museum of Nature and
Science suggesting that Preble’s mouse is genetically
identical to the more common Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, the
Fish and Wildlife Service is working to delist it and remove
protection from 31,000 acres of critical habitat.
But
Jeremy Nichols of the Wyoming-based Biodiversity Conservation
Alliance says the mouse remains an important indicator of the
health of riparian habitat along the Front Range. He says that the
agency made its proposal to delist the mouse “based on paltry data
to cater to developers.”
Pete Plage, a biologist for the
agency’s Mountain-Prairie Region, says the proposal to delist
the mouse was based on the “best science available,” but he agrees
that delisting it would let developers build closer to streams.
Preble’s mouse will continue to be protected as a
threatened species until early 2006, when the agency makes its
final determination.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Is Preble’s just another meadow mouse?.
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