Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in federal district court in New Mexico to compel the FWS to issue final rules for two distinct population segments (DPSs) of the lesser prairie chicken under the Endangered Species Act. The complaint alleged that the lesser prairie chicken had a “rapidly diminishing number of places to live” because it avoided “increasingly common manmade structures” utilized by birds of prey as perches, and that other threats included degradation and fragmentation of the southern Great Plains, including by “drought and high temperatures linked to global warming.”