Destinies Intertwined
Saving Sage Grouse (and Helping Elk, Too)
By Hannah J. Ryan for the Bugle Magazine by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
Print issue September/October 2012
What do sage grouse and elk have in common? Forty million acres of crucial habitat and an innovative charge to conserve the best of it.
The weak beam from a flashlight outlines the sagebrush and prickly pear just in front of our stumbling feet. The sun is still 20 minutes below the horizon, and Chris Yarbrough holds the light to help us step quietly as we follow odd pops and ploinks up a prairie knoll. Just before we crest the hill, he clicks it off, crouches low and squints at the far bank. Fifty yards to our left a half dozen pronghorns spook and trot off, snorting. Then, from nearly the exact clumps of sagebrush the antelope had been browsing, a white chest billows, glowing in the low morning light. The creature convulses weirdly, emitting that strange plunking noise that is music to the females of its species yet sounds to us like a dripping faucet. We’ve arrived at the edge of a lek, or historic mating site, of the greater sage grouse.
Perhaps no other animal is more closely bound to the troubled sea of sage that stretches across the inland West. Weighing up to 7 pounds, standing 2 feet tall and spanning almost 3 feet from beak to tail, greater sage grouse are the largest of North America’s native grouse by a good measure. Small wonder that Lewis and Clark dubbed them the “Cock of the Plains.” Unfortunately, since the bountiful days when the good captains explored the home ground of sage grouse, the species has experienced a veritable free fall.
In the past 200 years, the range of the greater sage grouse has shrunk by half. That’s bad news, but looks rosy compared to their numbers. Population estimates for greater sage grouse in 1800 are speculative, but most biologists put the total somewhere between 10 and 16 million. By 1970, roughly 400,000 remained. Today’s population hovers around 200,000. That’s a decline of at least 98 percent in two centuries.
Sage grouse have fallen to their precarious state due to a brutal one-two punch: outright loss of sagebrush and fragmentation and degradation of their remaining habitat from roads, pipelines, power lines, noxious weeds and human activity. Chicks rely on the ants, beetles and other insects found in a healthy mix of sagebrush, forbs and grass for their initial burst of protein. Through the summer and fall, juvenile birds forage heavily on forbs. In winter, sage leaves account for 99 percent of the diet for all sage grouse. The big birds require large areas of contiguous sagebrush to thrive over the long haul. Their home ranges have been documented from 1.5 square miles to 237 square miles, but most lean toward the large end. Nesting success is directly linked to undisturbed ground. Even in good habitat and favorable conditions, sage grouse have fairly low clutch sizes (4-9 eggs), low chick survival and limited ability to re-nest if their eggs are destroyed by weather or predators.
As a result, in 2010 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) concluded this iconic bird warranted protection under the Endangered Species Act. The agency’s decision report was dire: in as little as 30 years sage grouse could be wiped out in large areas facing intensive energy development and increased wildfire frequency. The landscape, FWS wrote, “is likely to consist of scattered sage grouse populations across the species range with minimal, if any, connectivity—placing the species in danger of extinction.”
Nonetheless, the FWS determined that proposing greater sage grouse for listing as threatened or endangered was precluded by the need to take action on other species facing more immediate and severe risks. That decision opened a window of opportunity to save sage grouse through voluntary conservation. It triggered an extraordinary charge to help populations stabilize—and hopefully flourish once more. As part of that push, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), state and federal land and wildlife agencies, other nonprofit conservation groups, and the Intermountain West Joint Venture. Collectively, the effort is called the Sage Grouse Initiative.
Elk with Wings
You don’t see a lot of postcards or magazine covers showcasing the grandeur of sagebrush. Elk hunts featured on TV rarely take place on sage flats. So why should elk hunters care about an overgrown grouse and a bunch of scruffy sagebrush? Elk and sage grouse share 40 million acres of key habitat. Sagebrush serves as crucial winter range and calving grounds for elk, and year-round habitat for grouse. What’s bad for sage grouse is bad for elk. What’s good is good.
In 2011, the NRCS put up half the money to fund 24 biologists and range conservationists to serve as the point of the spear in the battle to help restore greater sage grouse. As a partner in this effort, the Elk Foundation is jointly funding Chris Yarbrough’s position as Sage Grouse Initiative conservationist for northwest Colorado. At 40,000-plus animals, the Flat Tops elk herd is the world’s largest migratory elk herd. As snows pile deep in the Flat Tops Wilderness, elk pour out onto the sprawling sagebrush west of Yarbrough’s home in Craig, one of America’s classic elk hunting towns.
This country remains a stronghold for greater sage grouse, too, and it is here that Yarbrough and I are on lek patrol on a crisp April morning. It’s hard not to like a creature that dances at dawn as a key ingredient of its courtship. Fanning spiky tails and puffi ng out bright yellow throat sacs, the “cocks of the plains” may strut for several hours each morning, and again in the evening, trying to impress hens. Counting the number of cocks on a lek is one of the simplest and best measures of the health of a local population. Having tallied the promenading males on the first lek, we clamber back into his pickup and head out in search of another. Watching this landscape roll past out the windshield, one could get the impression the West is carpeted with sagebrush. That’s an illusion Yarbrough hopes to dispel.
“We need to hold onto all the sage we have,” he said. “RMEF and its members fully understand the importance of enhancing and protecting landscapes that are critical not only to elk, but all wildlife. Without a healthy sagebrush ecosystem, winter elk habitat as well as sage grouse numbers will decline.”
Cresting a rise, Yarbrough puts the truck in park and we scan the hillsides. A movement catches my eye and I train my binoculars back to find the radar-eared profiles of three cow elk peering over the sage at us.
“There they are,” Yarbrough says, pointing to sage grouse strutting just a couple hundred yards from the elk. According to Tim Griffi ths, NRCS National Sage Grouse Initiative Coordinator, this is hardly a rare coincidence.
“Many sage grouse core areas overlap with crucial winter range for elk,” Griffiths says. “It’s an amazing correlation, and by focusing limited conservation resources to these areas, we can maximize benefits to elk and sage grouse for every dollar invested.”
Dave Naugle, University of Montana professor of wildlife biology and science advisor for the Sage Grouse Initiative, agrees that the challenges and solutions go hand-in-hand for elk and sage grouse. He likens sage grouse to elk with wings. Radio-collared sage grouse have been documented moving 120 miles in search of suitable winter forage, and elk can travel 90 miles between summer and winter range. This drives home not only their mutual tastes in country but their need for big unbroken expanses of sagebrush.
“Many elk rely on sagebrush in the harshest parts of winter,” says Tom Toman, RMEF director of conservation. “Sagebrush poking up through the snow on southwest slopes helps the sun melt out around sage long before it does around grasses, freeing up vital forage.” Toman says the value of sagebrush to elk and other wildlife lies as much in the rich mixture of grasses and forbs that live among it as in the sage itself.
“Those forbs and shrubs are also really important to elk in mid to late summer,” he says. “When the grasses begin to dry out, the browse and forbs are higher in nutritional value.”
Blake Henning, RMEF vice president of lands and conservation, says the Elk Foundation is fully committed to doing all it can to keep sagebrush abundant and healthy for elk and grouse.
“We’re all in on this because elk habitat overlaps with so many of these core sage grouse areas,” Henning said. “These are good places for us to pair our funding with the Sage Grouse Initiative. The loss of sage-steppe not only hurts sage grouse but elk and hunters too.”
The Core of It
Talk to anyone involved in the Sage Grouse Initiative and before long you’ll hear that word: core. Indeed, the Core Area Strategy lies at the heart of the initiative. Gone altogether from Arizona, New Mexico and Nebraska, sage grouse still inhabit 186 million acres across 11 western states. That sounds huge. But they are spread thinly across most of that range, clinging in small, haphazard pockets. Roughly two-thirds of remaining sage grouse habitat lies on public land: 52 percent Bureau of Land Management, 8 percent Forest Service, 5 percent state. As steward of more than half of all remaining sagebrush habitat in the United States—approximately 47 million acres— the BLM is playing a lead role in developing and applying strategies to conserve sage grouse on public lands. But as the NRCS’s Griffi ths points out, the privately owned third was originally homesteaded because it contains the best soil and most water.
“Most habitats where sage grouse nest and raise their young are found on private lands, although these lands represent only a small fraction of the sage grouse range,” Griffiths says. The crux: three-quarters of the breeding population is concentrated in one quarter of the species’ occupied range. This is the core.
“It makes sense to spend your dollar conserving 500 birds instead of five birds,” Naugle says. Where once the NRCS assisted rural landowners in what Naugle calls “one thousand random acts of conservation kindness,” today the agency allocates dollars based on a vivid map of greater sage grouse range. Naugle created the map in partnership with the Nature Conservancy and the National Audubon Society, distilling data from boots-on-the-ground state wildlife biologists working shoulder to shoulder with ranchers.
“We’re taking a different approach from spending millions of dollars on declining populations that aren’t going to make it,” Naugle says. “We’re investing in the best landscapes for sage grouse and helping ranchers and farmers make a living.”
Fat Cattle, Happy Grouse
Gene Carrico lives on one of these landscapes in southern Wyoming. Owner of Dexter Peak Ranch near Rawlins, Carrico crosses many genres with his cattle operation, outfitting business and involvement with the local sage grouse working group. Part of his ranch holds a lek where the birds have been gathering every spring for as long as anyone can remember.
Carrico grew up on this ranch and he says it’s a big part of who he is to take care of his land and everything living on it. To prevent birds from being killed by flying into his fences or elk getting tangled up in them, he worked with the local NRCS to install a lay-down fence that he can have upright only when he has livestock in the area and down on the ground the rest of the time. Sage Grouse Initiative money was used to cost-share the price of that fence. He said he’s voluntarily involved with conservation like this not for any quick boost to his bottom line, but for the long-term investment.
“As land owners and managers, our interest in the land isn’t just for 30 days in the hunting season,” he says. “We’re committed 365 days a year.”
Bill Nation maintains the roads for Wyoming’s Carbon County. He’s been Carrico’s hunting buddy for years and is also involved with the local sage grouse working group. He pointed out that man is the only creature on a landscape that can manage an entire environment.
“The Sage Grouse Initiative gives landowners the means to take care of the entire ecosystem,” Nation says. “The funding it funnels is what makes those important projects like water dispersal tanks and grazing rotation plans happen. These are the tools to manage the land well.”
Rather than invoking the hammer of government restrictions that could loom if sage grouse land on the endangered species list, the NRCS mostly talks about healthier grass, fewer weeds, fatter cattle and keeping land intact. To enlist ranchers in the initiative, it offers financial support and technical expertise, and provides a blueprint for updating grazing and fencing strategies. One of the key goals is to give ranchers more flexibility so they can improve the quantity and quality of forage for livestock while protecting hiding cover for nests and chicks and cutting down on fence caused mortality. To date, nearly 500 ranchers across the West have enrolled in the Sage Grouse Initiative.
“Ranchers embrace the idea of enhancing their rangelands for cattle production while at the same time improving habitat for wildlife,” Naugle says. “They’re calling in record numbers to enroll.”
In addition to lay-down fences like the one Carrico installed, simply hanging white plastic markers off the top strand can make an enormous difference. Mortality spikes during breeding season when birds are flying in low to the lek in the dark. In a study conducted by the University of Idaho, graduate students walked fencelines and counted mortality near leks. After hanging the plastic tabs, they returned next spring and found a six-fold decline in collisions. Last year, fence-flagging projects across the West marked 180 miles of fences near crucial leks. Based on the Idaho study, that basic step likely saved a thousand sage grouse.
So far the Sage Grouse Initiative has invested $173 million in sagebrush country with $112 million from NRCS and $58 million from partners. Funding for the initiative comes from conservation programs within the federal Farm Bill as well as partner organizations like the Elk Foundation, Pheasants Forever, the Nature Conservancy and many others who are helping to fund 24 staff position across the west. This group effort serves to further leverage every dollar members donate to bring even more funding to conservation across elk country.
“A misconception of the Farm Bill is that it’s for farmers only, so it can’t possibly have anything to do with elk,” Griffiths said. “But the Sage Grouse Initiative clearly shows the importance of grazing ranch lands to wildlife.”
Boom & Bust
The litany of factors that led to the fall of sage grouse is familiar. The first wave of sodbusting brought on by the Homestead Act of 1862 began an assault on sagebrush that continues today. (Unlike non-native pheasants and partridges that prosper among rowcrops, sage grouse can’t digest hard seeds like wheat and barley.) Settlers and market gunners alike hunted sage grouse year-round throughout the latter half of the 19th century. Heavy-handed grazing practices have taken a toll as well. Subdividing and building homes has usurped prime former sage grouse range. And there have been a series of energy booms, punctuated by current unprecedented levels of gas and oil drilling across the heart of sage grouse habitat.
Depending on which census method is used, Wyoming is home to between a third and half of the world’s remaining sage grouse. As sage grouse coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, much of Tom Christiansen’s job focuses on understanding the impacts of energy development on the birds and fi nding ways to soften the blow.
“Energy development and sage grouse don’t work well together when well densities exceed about one well per 640 acres,” Christiansen says. As an example, in the decision on whether to list greater sage grouse, the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote, “12 years of coal-bed methane gas development in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming has coincided with a 79 percent decline in the greater sage grouse population.”
Impacts are not confined to fossil fuels, either. The FWS report goes on to note that over 30 percent of greater sage grouse habitat has high potential for wind power. “The effects of renewable energy development are likely to be similar to those of nonrenewable energy as similar types of infrastructure are required.” Anyone who has witnessed the densities of wind turbines at many wind farms can imagine the web of roads required to install and maintain such devices.
Young birds will fl ee the accumulation of noise and activity from rigs, roads and traffic. All too often, though, they wind up in places where both nutrition and security cover are in short supply. Meanwhile adult birds have very high fidelity to their mating and nesting sites, stubbornly clinging to historic leks even when habitat quality is bankrupt. Where leks once held hundreds of birds, many have dwindled to a handful of birds or faded away all together.
The best solution? It comes back to the Sage Grouse Initiative’s Core Area Strategy, striving to protect the most valuable habitat while encouraging energy development in non-core areas. “If we can proactively spend pennies on the dollar protecting the healthy populations of remaining sage grouse it will save billions,” Naugle said.
Foe to Friend
The Natural Resources Conservation Service will be the fi rst to admit not all of its past practices have been beneficial to sagebrush habitat. Driving across sections of the West there are skeletal expanses of dead sagebrush, killed with herbicide. The agency itself once funded widespread poisoning with defoliants, as well as burning and tilling former sage-grasslands to plant crops. Griffi ths acknowledges that conservation practices are inherently a product of their time. The key is to continually update those practices to reflect new discoveries and understandings.
“It is important to recognize the context when massive native rangeland conversion occurred in our history,” he said. “This was a time in the early to mid-20th century where our primary goal was providing food to feed a growing nation. Fast forward to the 21st century, we have learned a great deal about the other values large native sage steppe landscapes provide—clean air and water, wildlife habitat, livestock forage—and we have updated our approach to conserve these important natural resources in addition to providing food.”
Rigorous science is fundamental to advancing knowledge and stewardship of this unique landscape, and the NRCS is actively funding research across the sage grouse range. In eastern Montana, Joe Smith, a Ph.D. student from the University of Montana and fellow graduate students spend their summer nights chasing sage grouse with ATVs, spotlights and nets to get radio collars on them and track what these birds do. Much of his research explores how livestock grazing methods can be neutral or even beneficial
to sage grouse, as well as other species. The results of Smith’s five years of research will potentially be a guide for natural resource managers. While Smith’s research focuses on grazing, having radio collars out on a significant number of birds could help provide answers as large-scale energy development and the cobwebs of roads it brings spread across eastern Montana.
“The research is good, but the threats are new,” Smith says. “Energy development is exploding and often in some of the best remaining sage grouse habitat. With this development there are things that need to be understood that we never expected we would need to know.”
Energy companies understand the value of good science as well, and few people want to see the sage grouse placed on the endangered species list. In the past two years, ConocoPhillips has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund Sage Grouse Initiative biologists. Another arena in which the NRCS is constantly looking for new knowledge, tools and strategies is the battle with noxious weeds. An estimated 50 to 60 percent of native sagebrush steppe across the West has either been infiltrated with noxious weeds or has been converted to non-native grassland. Cheatgrass is a leading villain. The plant is one of the first up in the spring and cures out early, creating excellent fuel for fire, and dramatically shortening the fire cycle from as much as once every 150 years to as little as every 3 to 5 years. In the wake of large wildfires in once-classic sage (and elk) country across Idaho and Nevada, there’s nothing but cheatgrass as far as the eye can see. Keeping weeds out of the ecosystem in the first place is always the best defense, but it’s often too late for that. NRCS is actively working with landowners to help in the ongoing battle with cheat and many other noxious weeds.
Should Sage Grouse Still Be Hunted?
Nine of 11 states inhabited by sage grouse still allow limited hunting, but every state has tightened its regulations over the past decade. Seasons now range from two days to two months; bag limits run from two birds per season to two birds per day. With the birds in peril, some question why they are still hunted at all.
Tom Christiansen, Wyoming Game and Fish department’s sage grouse coordinator, says he makes time every year to carry on the tradition of hunting sage grouse himself and hopes others will, too. “Eliminating hunting would eliminate the sage grouse’s greatest ally: the hunter-conservationist,” Christiansen says. “Hunting creates a constituency of advocates who are interested in seeing that the needs of sage grouse are met.”
That means the needs of elk, mule deer, antelope and all the other wildlife that rely on this unique landscape will be met as well. In 2004, the Fish & Wildlife Service convened an expert panel to identify and prioritize the greatest threats facing sage grouse. Out of 19 threats, hunting ranked 17th.
“We are not impinging on the overall population by hunting,” Christiansen says. “Habitat loss is the issue.”
Can We Save the Sage Grouse?
Since the Sage Grouse Initiative launched two years ago, it has led to the conservation of 2 million acres in the core area: including 208,000 acres placed into new conservations easements, 115,000 acres of encroaching conifer removal to open up the sagegrassland and reduce raptor predation, 1.3 million acres impacted through improved grazing systems, and 350 miles of fences flagged near sage grouse leks. Griffiths, national coordinator for the Sage Grouse Initiative, says he expects another 4 million acres to benefit in the next three years. In that time the Bureau of Land Management will also have amended more than 90 resource management plans to help sage grouse on the 52 percent of the bird’s habitat they control. Working in partnership with its sister agencies and the western states, the BLM is busy evaluating current resource conditions and science-based management strategies in an effort to develop new approaches to sage grouse conservation. Any changes to resource management on BLM lands would first be fully considered through a public-involvement process. BLM officials say they aim to strike the right balance of resource uses and resource conservation to ensure the long-term sustainability of greater sage grouse habitat and populations.
“We need all the brains we can get on this or we won’t reach our goal,” says Mitch Snow, BLM public affairs specialist in Washington DC. “State wildlife agencies have done huge amounts of work and have been invaluable. The concerns are different in different states, and sage grouse don’t pay attention to human borders. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and other groups have been very supportive and encouraging, helping us get on-the-ground information that we can use.”
Snow says he’s energized by the level of cooperation he’s seeing across the board in this effort. SGI director Griffi ths agrees.
“I’m bullish about it,” Griffi ths says. “Bullish that we can not only solve this pending crisis but also demonstrate the effectiveness of achieving world-class wildlife through sustainable ranching.”
It’s well after quitting time when Chris Yarbrough and I return to the office. The day began at 4 a.m. with the lek counts. Evening is now coming on and the building is empty.
“I want to do so much, but there’s still a lot of learning to do,” he says. “Being able to work together with landowners on range improvement projects that benefit their operation as well as wildlife is a unique privilege that not many other people get to experience. I’m excited to combine different backgrounds and viewpoints to create projects that will be a win-win for ranches, sage grouse and elk.”
The phone on his desk blinks with voicemails. Yarbrough picks up the receiver and makes his way through. After jotting down notes, he says he’s okay with working long hours.
“There are 24 of us now in positions like mine,” Yarbrough said. “Our possibility, the impact we can make, is so big and exciting. And with partners like the Elk Foundation backing us, it can happen. ”
Hannah J. Ryan is a graduate of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana. A Wyoming native, she is fascinated by natural resource management, unbroken expanses of sagebrush prairie and any issues that are fragmenting them.
