Some history: A developer went bankrupt right as he started developing the land during a real estate bust. It sat for a while with trails on it, and in the early to mid 90s, the city pitched making it park/preserve land through a city bond. They stated that current use cases would continue, and when it became public land, they bulldozed a 20' path around it and erected a chainlink fence then restricted biking altogether and restricted hiking during nesting season to permit only groups of three. They used several endangered species as the argument, but the golden-cheeked warlber became their super hero.
They also made an effort to acquire serveal thousand acres of endangered species habitat, whcih including allowing developers to pay a mitigation fee of (IIRC) $2,500 per acre to develop habitat if they also found a substitute parcel to sell to the city. One of the substitute parcels was DK Ranch, which also had trails on it. Really, the thing was about enabling development of endangered species habitat.
They claimed the bird species (also the black-capped vireo) were "harmed" under the Endangered Species Act, whcih has a very broad definition of harm to include when a bird is flushed. We, i.e the mountain biking community backed by ARR and Hill Abel, who I think was the president of IMBA at the time, tried to present a study conducted at Ft. Hood of the impact of having mountian bike trails near live and simulated weapons fire that showed no effect on the nesting habots. They representatives of the city, county, etc., would literally withdraw and try to hide their hands when you attempted to give them a copy of the study.
I'm sure others here have things to add to this, and I look forward to hearing from them.