DENVER – One hundred years of conservation are being celebrated this week at a major wildlife conference in Nebraska, and Colorado successes are among the topics.

Preserving sage-grouse habitat, both on working ranch lands and public land, means the bird might not require protection under the Endangered Species Act. It’s a major topic at the event, as Colorado and the U.S. Interior Department continue their plans to protect habitat on privately owned land as well as public land.

Pat O’Toole, a rancher on the Colorado-Wyoming border, said he’s a big fan of the bird.

“It’s a great investment for the American people because what it’s doing is holding together these landscapes where the bird is,” he said. “I think if you’ve never seen birds dance, it’s been described as one of the great wildlife events that there is.”

He was referring to the elaborate mating dance ritual of the greater sage-grouse.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service and partner agencies have worked with private landowners to restore almost 4.5 million acres of sage-grouse habitat. O’Toole said more people are seeing the ties between food production and preserving wildlife.

NRCS Chief Jason Weller addressed the conference about his agency’s headway with its Sage Grouse Initiative.

“Over the last four or five years,” he said, “you have thousands of ranchers across 11 Western states willingly making investments – in all cases, out of their own pockets – that will, yes, help their management of their rangelands and pastures, but also have positive impacts for sage-grouse and over 350 other species.”

The Sage-Grouse Initiative, part of the U.S. Farm Bill, is made up of several programs that provide expertise and some funding to conserve and restore lands where habitats are intact and sage-grouse numbers are highest. It covers 78 million acres, including Colorado.

Details of the initiative are online at nrcs.usda.gov. Details of the wildlife conference are at wildlifemanagementinstitute.org.