Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Final Rule to Designate the Whooping Cranes of the Rocky Mountains as Experimental Nonessential and to Remove Whooping Crane Critical Habitat Designations From Four Locations

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) determines that it will designate the whooping crane (Grus americana) population of the Rocky Mountains as an experimental nonessential population and will remove whooping crane critical habitat designations from four National Wildlife Refuges; Bosque del Apache in New Mexico, Monte Vista and Alamosa in Colorado, and Grays Lake in Idaho. The private lands involved are holdings inside refuge boundaries and a 1-mile buffer around Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The Service will use this population, and captive-reared sandhill cranes and whooping cranes, in experiments to evaluate methods for introducing whooping cranes into the wild where migration is required.