R ESOUR CE WATCH
SAVING SAGE GROUSE Efforts are underway to save the bird that won the West. BY TED WILLIAMS
I
n the first blush of a fine spring morning, Linda Baker, director of the Upper Green River Alliance, and I disembarked from her truck in Wyoming’s 7-million-acre Upper Green River Valley. “Hey, grouse droppings,” she said. “Neat,” I said, not sarcastically. They looked like the scat of my Yankee ruffed grouse, only white instead of gray-brown. “Wait,” she said. “There aren’t enough; this can’t be the lek.” The lek [a sage grouse courtship area] was farther west—toward the snow-streaked, moonlightwashed Wyoming Range. To our north rose the Hobacks and Gros Ventres, darker in their coats of lodgepole pine and subalpine fir. We’d gotten lost in the maze of dirt roads recently cut through this rolling, sagebrush steppe to accommodate the gas industry. The year was 2004. Lights on gas drilling rigs imparted a New York City ambience to what had recently been de facto wilderness. Ulcerating the surrounding flatlands were 8-acre rectangular well pads next to plastic-lined ponds that held scum-encrusted, hydrocarbon-fouled fracking water. It was oozing onto this parched landscape, killing wildlife forage and damaging the habitat of some the last pure strains of Colorado River cutthroat trout. Development has accelerated in the decade since my visit. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department reports that the number of sage grouse males observed on leks statewide fell from 44,500 in 2006 to 18,000 in 2013. More alarming is that, even with all the habitat damage, Wyoming still sustains the most sage grouse of any state or province—37 percent of the planet’s population. Threatened also by this gas binge are Canada lynx, pronghorns, mule deer, and gray wolves. “About 1,500 more wells have been drilled since you were here in 2004, and there are proposals for many more to the south and west, all the way over to the Green River,” Baker told me last spring. Wyoming is a microcosm of what’s happening to greater sage grouse elsewhere. In Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Utah, and Colorado the birds are down to a shad-
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RES O U RC E WATC H
NUMBERS RA N GE This sage grouse population map shows the current range.
ow of their historical numbers. Opportunities to hunt them in these states have been vastly diminished. The situation is even grimmer in Washington, California, the Dakotas, Alberta, and Saskatchewan—where the birds are barely hanging on and hunting them has been banned. They’ve been extirpated in Nebraska and Arizona. “It’s difficult to get hunters excited about sage grouse except for a handful of hardcore guys who like to pursue them,” says Dr. Ed Arnett, himself a hardcore sage grouse hunter and energy-development point man for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP). “But the fact that a once-abundant, widely distributed, and liberally harvested gamebird is now at a population so low the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering endangered status should be a major concern for sportsmen or any stakeholders.” Moreover, what hurts sage grouse also hurts at least 350 other species, many huntable, that depend on the same habitat. Sage grouse fed American Indians as they moved east and whites as they moved west. “When George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt sat at the base of the cliffs south of Douglas, Wyoming, and had their coffee at dawn they watched sage grouse gather,” says Audubon Wyoming director Brian Rutledge, one of the main architects of sage grouse recovery. “And
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as the sun came up the birds began to launch. From then until Grinnell and Roosevelt were ready for lunch, the sage grouse blacked out the sky.” In the Great Basin, the main sage grouse threats are conifer encroachment and wildfires fueled by invasive plants like cheatgrass. The bird requires sweeping, sagebrush seas; and the most common species, big sagebrush, can’t resprout from stumps. In the Rocky Mountain region the main threat is oil and gas development. Sod busting for row crops (particularly corn for ethanol production) is a threat in Montana and the Dakotas. Subdivision is a threat range-wide. In some of the range, especially Nevada and Wyoming, a plague of feral horses is denuding cover, depleting topsoil and degrading springs and wetlands. Meanwhile, feral-horse advocates, led by the Cloud Foundation and Friends of Animals, are trying to convince Congress that this alien species is “native” and requires protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In 2010 the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, and the Western Watersheds Project sued the Department of the Interior to list greater sage grouse as endangered. These outfits (especially the first two) have made a cottage industry of suing to provide ESA protection for just about every creature, studied or unstudied, that walked Noah’s gang-
plank. And in the process they frequently collect attorneys’ fees from U.S. taxpayers. The Fish and Wildlife Service had earlier proclaimed that listing was “warranted but precluded,” meaning that staff were bogged down with other priorities—among them responding to the litigious onslaught from these same plaintiffs. As settlement, the Service agreed to a September 2015 deadline by which it would either list the bird or approve recovery plans by the states, locals, U.S. Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management (BLM). “Environmentalists want the sage grouse protected under the ESA,” reports The Washington Post, demonstrating the general cluelessness of mainstream media when it comes to wildlife issues. Rational, effective environmentalists (a description that precludes the three plaintiffs) want no such thing. The act was designed by Congress to conserve ecosystems and recover species before they need listing. And the many state biologists who have grown up with the sage grouse know much more about its needs than a few Feds from away. “The states would have to say to Interior, ‘Okay; it’s your bird; you take care of it,’” declares Rutledge. “So we’d have three people out here in charge of sage grouse for the whole West. There would be tragic results not just for the local culture but also for other species. You tell 11 states to utterly change
their economic practices for the sake of a bird, and watch what happens to the ESA in this Congress. That’s the biggest danger.” The plaintiffs have it right when they argue that their litigation has spurred frantic recovery work. But most of that work had been in progress; and when it comes to long-term benefits, the frantic aspect is likely to hurt more than help. In any case, the largest landscape planning in the history of wildlife management is under way by local, state, and federal groups and agencies. If the Wyoming microcosm illustrates range-wide mistakes, it also illustrates range-wide solutions made possible by this alliance of sometimes antagonistic stakeholders who have agreed to check ideologies at the door. A lot of great stuff is happening. In 2008 Wyoming implemented a “core area policy” that sharply limits development in the best habitat—helping inspire a similar strategy hatched 4 years later by the BLM, which controls half the bird’s remaining range. A recent study found that the Wyoming approach, combined with $250 million worth of conservation easements, could reduce sage grouse losses by two-thirds. At this writing, the state has already purchased $100 million worth of conservation easements. A year ago Rutledge showed me around a once-wild and beautiful section of the Shirley Basin south of Casper, Wyoming. It had been a sage grouse honey hole where much of the early
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research on the species had been conducted. It had also been a stronghold for other sagebrush dependents such as elk, mule deer, pronghorns, black-footed ferrets, sagebrush lizards, sagebrush sparrows, and sage thrashers, to mention just a few. What we found was an industrial sacrifice area. Marching to the horizons were 262-foot-high wind turbines that radiated poles and power lines—ideal perches for raptors, the leading cause of sage grouse deaths. All the disturbed earth on the new access roads had attracted rodents, which, in turn, had attracted more raptors. This is precisely the kind of habitat destruction that the stakeholders are now preventing. “At one point there were more than 1,100 wind farm proposals in western and central Wyoming,” says Rutledge. “When I first saw that map I thought they’d preempted our map of sage grouse core areas because the two were identical. We had a huge battle to get the core areas protected—a collaborative effort with all the stakeholders. We built a regulatory framework for managing 25 percent of the State of Wyoming for sagebrush obligates. We’ve protected 15 million acres to no more than 5 percent disturbance. We’ve reduced overhead drilling by over 60 percent everywhere in the Wyoming core. And we’ve increased directional drilling [multiple, diagonal borings from one wellhead] by 1,369 percent. That’s much less surface disturbance.” Management plans are being amended across all BLM lands and 20 national forests, with the goal of preventing an ESA listing for sage grouse. Most of these plans exclude wind farms from priority grouse habitat. Some of these plans, however, and some of the state plans (especially Utah’s and Colorado’s) could offer better protection, especially from oil and gas production. “I don’t think we’re going to get all the states into regulatory mode, and it may not be necessary,” says the TRCP’s Arnett. “What the Service is going to look at is a track record of implementation. You don’t just have paper birds; you have real birds on the ground via habitat conservation.” Despite some wheel spinning, range-wide stakeholders (or the Sage Grouse Initiative as they call themselves) have made the bird’s future far more secure. From 2010 to 2013, the initiative protected 6,000 square miles of habitat (nearly equivalent to two Yellowstone National Parks) on 950 ranches with $247 million invested by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and $107 million in partners’ matching funds. A strong 2014 Farm Bill provides funds for conifer removal, conservation easements, grazing reform, escape ramps for birds that get trapped in cattle watering tanks, and marking fences near leks so birds won’t crash into them in the spring. So far, partners have marked or moved 540 miles of fences, resulting in an estimated 2,800 fewer collisions. The ESA also provides protection for “distinct population segments” of a species that may not be listed in its primary range. Such a sage grouse segment exists on 1.8 million acres that straddle California and Nevada. The Fish and Wildlife Service was set to list this as threatened, but sweeping conservation measures by a state-local-federal “action team” have
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convinced the agency to hold off. On-the-ground implementation is happening as I write this. The Forest Service will provide $13.9 million in funds, NRCS $12 million, the BLM $6.5 million, and California, Nevada, California’s Mono County, NGOs, private citizens, and other federal agencies will kick in another $12.8 million. Recovery of the bi-state population is a model for how sage grouse recovery can and should work in all 11 states and without an ESA listing. This kind of proactive effort is unprecedented and exciting. Minutes before sunrise, Linda Baker and I found the lek we were looking for. At least 20 male greater sage grouse, almost the size of wild turkeys, fanned their spiked tails, puffed their white breast feathers, and inflated their yellow air sacs. They boomed and strutted and rammed each other with their chests. Then, when the first sliver of sun lit the Wind River Mountains, they vanished into the high sage. The image of those vanishing birds haunted me. Would the species also vanish—not for a day but for eternity? For the better part of a decade I thought it probably would. Now I think it probably won’t.
Reprinted by permission of Covey Rise Magazine, 1-866-905-1235
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