In 1834, ornithologist John Townsend described
flushing hundreds of grouse from the sagebrush as he rode through
the Green River Valley, and in the 1880s, naturalist George
Grinnell reported flocks of the birds darkening the skies near
Casper. But by 1906, Wyoming’s sage grouse population was
declining, and, except for a few short-lived rebounds, it has
continued to slip. The greater sage grouse – the species
found in Wyoming – now occupies only about half of its
pre-settlement range, and in some areas of the state, its
population has declined by more than 80 percent.
Fossil
fuel development has shouldered much of the blame for interfering
with the grouse’s mating rituals and encroaching on its
habitat. But a new report from the Sage Grouse Implementation Team,
commissioned by Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, D, in July, suggests
that what ails the sage grouse depends on where it lives. Booming
oil and gas operations, while significant, are not the only
culprits in the sage grouse’s decline, according to the
report.
The team’s 21 recommendations reflect the
wide variety of threats to the bird, and aim to help Wyoming keep
it off the endangered species list. The group’s suggestions
range from minimizing the footprint of new housing developments to
aggressively controlling invasive species to educating the public
about the sage grouse’s predicament. The team estimates the
cost of implementation at $27.3 million over two years.
The group deliberately did not rank its recommendations but did say
that a statewide effort to map the bird’s distribution should
be a priority, according to Bob Budd, chairman of the team and
executive director of the Wyoming Natural Resources Trust.
“If we don’t know where the birds are and what habitat
they’re using,” he says, “it’s very hard to
plan for anything.”
Key to the bird’s
recovery will be figuring out which activities have the most impact
in which locations. “If you take the species and look at it
across its range, it may be that oil and gas is a major stressor
(in one location),” Budd explains. “In another area it
may not be. Likewise with housing.”
The state is
right not to single out oil and gas activities, according to David
Naugle, an associate professor of large-scale wildlife ecology at
the University of Montana. Naugle, who has studied the effects of
energy development on the birds, says, “Oil and gas is the
new kid on the block in terms of human footprint on the sage grouse
habitat.” But “if we only plan for oil and gas,
we’ll fail.”
With an eye toward avoiding an
official endangered species listing, the team recommended that the
state work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop
“candidate conservation agreements.” These agreements
would encourage local governments and individuals to voluntarily
protect grouse on their land; in exchange, the property owners
wouldn’t be subject to additional restrictions if the species
did eventually receive federal protection.
The sage
grouse narrowly missed being added to the endangered species list
in 2005, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a
controversial determination that it was not imperiled enough to
deserve federal protection. Julie MacDonald, then-deputy assistant
secretary of wildlife, fish, and parks, was suspected of
interfering with scientific findings that supported the listing of
several species up for review, including the grouse. MacDonald
resigned in May of this year, after the Interior Department’s
inspector general reported that she had broken federal rules and
inappropriately shared information with private groups, and the
sage grouse listing is still the subject of a pending court case.
Budd concedes that avoiding the federal regulation that
accompanies an official listing is part of the state’s motive
for conservation efforts. “If you are a realtor, (a listing)
will reach out and touch you. If you are a rancher, it will reach
out and touch you. If you are a conservationist, it will reach out
and touch you,” he says. But he also emphasizes that this is
not the primary reason the state got involved: “There is
– number one – a desire not to see a species that we
all grew up with endangered.”
If the state moves
forward with voluntary conservation agreements, the sage grouse
will become the first test of the program in Wyoming, according to
Pat Deibert, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in
Wyoming.
It’s unclear how effective voluntary
efforts would be at stabilizing the sage grouse population, Deibert
says. But she hopes the bird will benefit from the same type of
cooperation that’s helped the endangered Wyoming toad. In the
toad’s case, landowners have volunteered to have tadpoles and
adults released on their property with the promise that they
won’t be penalized for killing a few of the amphibians in the
process of normal business.
Now, the sage grouse’s
fate is in Gov. Freudenthal’s hands, as he decides how many
of the team’s suggestions to follow and how much funding to
request from the state’s legislature. “The devil is
going to be in the details of how (the recommendations) are
implemented,” Naugle says. “The key is to keep big,
healthy populations, spread them out and not put all the eggs in
one basket.”
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