Down But Not Out
Loss of sagebrush has dealt sage grouse a hard blow. Now biologists and ranchers have begun working together to conserve habitat and get this great prairie bird back on its feet. By Dave Carty
This story is featured in Montana Outdoors
September–October 2006
Craig Fager, a Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks biologist, frowns as he watches a pickup creep along a ridge several hundred yards in the distance. They’re birders watching sage grouse display on an open expanse of Bureau of Land Management sagebrush-grasslands. Below their truck in a grassy meadow, sage grouse strut on leks—open areas in the sage where the birds conduct their mating ritual. The sounds of poik, poik—made by the males rapidly deflating large yellow air sacs on their breast—float up like the soft pop of distant balloons. Some birds are just a few feet from the truck’s open window, the driver a black shadow in the gray morning light.
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“Those guys are way too close,” Fager says. “We’d prefer if people would watch sage grouse from a distance using binoculars or spotting scopes. In some cases, people are actually loving these birds to death.”
The biologist lets his binoculars dangle from his neck and watches the truck for a few more minutes, then turns and strides back to his pickup. The ground here is littered with whitened grouse droppings, and Fager stops to point out caecum, an oily, tarlike deposit that roosting sage grouse occasionally pass to rid their digestive systems of sagebrush residue and other by-products.
A sea of sagebrush stretches for miles in every direction from nearby Dillon, where Fager is based. This arid region contains some of the best sage grouse habitat in Montana. Yet today Fager has counted only about half the number of grouse he saw on this site earlier this year. He suspects the difference is due to the offending truck. The wildlife biologist considers giving the occupants a talking to, then reconsiders. He has several other leks to visit and a full schedule planned for the rest of the day.
Back in his truck, Fager hunches over the wheel, sipping coffee through a few day’s growth of sandy beard. Stacks of notes, empty cups, scattered clothing, and notebooks litter the seats. He aims the pickup down a dirt road, then turns in to a ranch. Thick clusters of blue bunch, Indian rice grass, and needle-and-thread grass grow between clumps of blue-gray sagebrush. Fager says private land like this is essential to the future of sage grouse—a bird that recently was almost listed as a federally protected species.
“You hear a lot about the need to protect sagebrush on public land, but just as crucial are ranches like this adjacent to the public land,” he explains. “Sage grouse mate and nest on the sagebrush flats, but then they raise their broods in riparian bottoms and irrigated alfalfa where the chicks find insects and succulent forbs [broad-leafed plants].
“Without all this,” Fager says, indicating the ranchland around us, “sage grouse could be in real trouble in this part of the state.”
Nearly listed
Such a decline would mirror a trend across the bird’s range elsewhere in the western United States. From 1965 to 1985, sage grouse numbers plummeted by more than 50 percent, due mostly to the loss of half of the species’ historic sagebrush habitat, which has been degraded or converted to other uses. In 2003, nearly two dozen environmental and conservation groups, including the American Land Alliance and the Institute for Wildlife Protection, petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to list the sage grouse as a threatened or endangered species.
During the next year, under Endangered Species Act (ESA) requirements for petitioned species, the USFWS assessed risks to sage grouse based on factors such as habitat loss and predation. In late 2004, the agency concluded that the species “does not currently warrant federal protection.”
“Even though there’s been a decline in the species’ range, the decrease wasn’t enough to merit our definition of endangered under the Endangered Species Act,” says Pat Diebert, a USFWS biologist in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who was part of the agency team that advised against listing the grouse. “Despite falling sage grouse populations in some states, large enough tracts of good habitat exist in Montana and elsewhere to preclude listing. The birds are still well distributed in their historic range, and some of those numbers are actually increasing.”
Problems loom
Though Montana dodged the ESA bullet, that doesn’t mean sage grouse are thriving here. “We’ve lost birds in peripheral areas where, slowly but surely, sagebrush is being converted to crops,” says Rick Northrup, FWP Upland Game Bird Program coordinator.
Other threats include some types of en-ergy development, such as coal-bed natural gas (methane). Energy development increases the number of roads that chop up sagebrush habitat and adds power lines, which provide convenient roosts for raptors. Invasive plants add to the problem. Cheatgrass, for example, is an annual that dies off early in the season, increasing the frequency of fires that destroy sagebrush.
Glenn Hockett has seen firsthand how habitat loss has reduced sage grouse numbers. “I remember seeing sage grouse north of Malta, north of Loring, and around Three Forks, Manhattan, Helena, and the Tobacco Roots,” he says. “They’re virtually gone from those areas because their habitat is gone.”
Hockett is president of the Gallatin Wildlife Association, a hunting and conservation organization in Bozeman that joined the coalition of groups petitioning to list the sage grouse. Protecting the birds under the ESA, says Hockett, is the best way to protect both sage grouse and Montana’s tradition of sage grouse hunting. He points out that in some years during the 1960s, hunters harvested nearly 100,000 sage grouse. But as sage grouse numbers dropped, Montana’s upland bird hunters turned their attention to pheasants and sharp-tailed grouse. In recent years, Montana’s annual sage grouse harvest has averaged only 7,000 birds.
Jay Bodner disagrees that listing sage grouse would be in the bird’s best interest. Natural resources coordinator for the Montana Stockgrowers Association, Bodner believes that habitat loss has been overblown. He says other causes, such as increased predation by raptors, may be greater factors contributing to sage grouse population declines. Bodner is especially concerned that federal listing would harm livestock operations. And that, he adds, could threaten sage grouse conservation.
“Listing would mean an increase in regulations on BLM [Bureau of Land Management] land, where a lot of grazing takes place,” Bodner says. “If BLM grazing allotments are cut back, that could affect the entire operation of a livestock producer. When you look at the big picture, if livestock growers have to start selling out because of overregulation, and then their land gets developed and chopped up with new housing, that doesn’t help sage grouse one bit.”
