The Mouse That Roared

By RICHARD WOODBURY/COLORADO SPRINGS

Up and down the front range of the Rockies, one of the nation's hottest growth zones, a tiny, obscure rodent named the Preble's meadow jumping mouse is upsetting land planning, forcing developers to alter construction schedules and snarling highway and utilities projects.

Not bad for a creature hardly anyone has seen.

All the fuss has come about not because the little mouse with the 5-in. tail is an officially endangered species--it isn't--but because it might soon be declared so. On that presumption, federal and local regulators are requiring developers to make elaborate surveys in wetland areas where the mouse allegedly thrives. Paul Banks, a bemused environmental consultant in Denver, says the elusive jumping mouse may be doing as much to curb Colorado's rampant development as all the slow-growth confabs and environmentalists' lawsuits put together.

If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moves ahead and formally lists Preble's as endangered, as it's expected to do shortly, the obstacles to building will be stronger. And if the government fails to act, mouse advocates vow legal action to force listing. At issue as much as the rodent are the shrub-lined meadows and grassy marshes that abut the streams and creeks lacing the 170 miles from Cheyenne, Wyo., to Colorado Springs. That stretch of land at the foothills of the Rockies is aswarm with housing and commercial development; three counties on the Front Range are among the Census Bureau's 10 fastest growing. "We're talking about critical habitat that's almost gone," says Jasper Carlton, director of the Biodiversity Legal Foundation. "We shouldn't be building in these areas anyway. Protecting the mouse saves the environment for all of us."

The little mouse is a reclusive character. Very few scientists have laid eyes on the buff-colored, black-striped mammal, which weighs less than 1 oz. and measures barely 2 in. Named for a Colorado naturalist who discovered the subspecies 103 years ago, the mouse hibernates for nine months. In summer it emerges only at night, when it commences to bound 4 ft. at a leap through the tall grass, aided by preternaturally long hind legs and an outsize tail that helps stabilize it in flight. "There could be thousands out there, and there could be far fewer; we just don't know," concedes Fish and Wildlife biologist Peter Plage, who has rarely seen the rodent in the wild.

That's precisely the problem, says Linda Lacy, developer of an 18,000-acre project in Jefferson County, where wildlife agents set traps last summer seeking jumping mice. They caught no Preble's but did get 218 other mice and one rattlesnake. "It's ridiculous to protect the animal when no one can even seem to find it," says Lacy. Tom Taylor, a Colorado Springs builder, concurs: "What's the population count? Are they really more endangered now than they used to be? Who is to say?" Taylor had to spend four months redesigning a construction project after four Preble's mice were found on his land.

Even government projects are feeling the mouse's bite; it has the potential to upset operations at the Air Force Academy and cleanup at the Rocky Flats former nuclear-weapons site. With the certainty of greater disruption if the animal wins federal protection, Colorado officials have organized a 200-member coalition to draft the state's own protection plan, which may include finding the mice and relocating some of them into sanctuaries. "It's in the interest of both mouse and man to avoid drastic measures," says Congressman David Skaggs of Boulder, a Democrat who secured a $400,000 appropriation to fund the project. "Nobody wants an endangered-species train wreck in the areas where Colorado's population is growing the most rapidly."

Environmentalist Carlton, whose lawsuit prodded the government to move on the mouse, says what the state may be scheming is "an end-run around the law to subvert restoring the ecosystem. You might have to move a golf course or road 100 ft. or so, but protection isn't going to do in anybody. There's a lot of fear-mongering going on." The Fish and Wildlife Service, apparently agreeing, contends that in 95% of cases only minimal disruption occurs when species are listed as endangered.

In Washington, Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell isn't waiting for studies. Denouncing the jumping mouse as a "killer" of jobs and economic growth, he says the Federal Government should be tossing animals and plants off the endangered list rather than putting them on. But the public feels otherwise. A Denver Post poll in March showed that 81% support protecting the little mouse that's seldom seen. "Their habitat is shrinking fast," warns Boulder mammalogist Carron Meaney. "We might find the mouse in 100 places now, but in 10 years 95 of those will be under concrete."