It doesn't seem possible that 2020 is just around the corner. "What is the problem with that?", you might ask. Well just when you thought the sage grouse would follow the spotted owl into oblivion, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) plans to review the sage grouse status in 2020 to determine whether it should be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). I just heard on the Montana radio news the Montana Sage Grouse group will shortly present an update on the status of sage grouse in Montana to the legislature. According to the report, they have documented a three year population decline. Apparently, all we got for the 10 million dollars we spent over the past 5 years was a number of land-use restrictive conservation easements and bureaucratically enforced stifling regulations. Nationwide we have spent over a BILLION dollars on sage grouse in the last 20 or 30 years and we are still discussing whether they should be listed! Something is wrong!
Travelers through the northern great plains in the early 1800's did not record many encounters with sage grouse in their journals and reports. Even Lewis and Clark noted very few sage grouse as they traveled through Montana in 1805. This evidence suggests they were not numerous on the northern great plains prior to the European invasion. References to them were also scarce in the journals and reminiscences of trappers, buffalo hunters, and open range cattle ranchers in the mid to late 1800's. Apparently, during the 1920's, 30's and 40's sage grouse populations exploded. Interviews I conducted with a few old timers in the 1980's confirmed that sage grouse were very numerous in northeast Montana in the 1940's and 50's. They all claimed they dined on young 'sage chickens' during the month of August.
You would think the logical starting point to a study of why sage grouse populations are declining would be to try and figure out why their populations exploded in the early 1900's. It could not have been the vegetation since the area was being hammered by domestic livestock. Nor could it have been an abundance of ephemeral wet areas, particularly during the drought of the 1930's. The obvious answer is the extensive predator control carried out by the homesteaders. The ranchers, who live with sage grouse, have continually pointed out the negative impact of predation on the grouse populations to the researchers and bureaucrats. Subsequent studies proved that losses to grouse populations were mainly due to predation and disease (the recently arrived West Nile Virus). But strangely no attempt was made to mitigate or address the predation problem. This would be like a rancher losing cattle to predators figuring he could solve the problem by improving his rangeland and/or purchasing more pasture. In both cases the vegetation aspect of the habitat is not the problem.
I recently came across an interesting article in a British publication (Farmers Guardian) titled, "Ground-nesting birds up thanks to predator control". In a decade long study where predators, such as foxes, crows, and weasels were managed, they found, "In sites where predation control was implemented, there was an increase in pairs that fledged young of several key species: ground-nesting raptors were up 57 per cent, curlew up 51 per cent, golden plover 75 per cent and lapwing 57 per cent." The science is out there, predator control will benefit prey populations! The problem is, in this day and age, we will never be able to fully implement effective predator control like they did in the early 1900's. Therefore, we may have to accept the fact we may be going back to what it looked like in the early 1800's when there were fewer sage grouse on the landscape.
Since it is obvious the efforts to improve sage grouse populations have not worked in spite of employing hundreds of top-notch researchers and spending untold amounts of money, perhaps it is time to step back and reevaluate the program. We should shift gears and study the causes of mortality. It may be different in different areas and the money and effort could be focused on the specific problem. For example, a nest predation study in Saskatchewan found ground squirrels were the main culprit. Therefore, money and effort could be expended to control the ground squirrel only in the sage grouse nesting areas. We have to shift our emphasis from gaining land use control to addressing the causes of mortality if we want to stem population declines.
Ron Stoneberg
Hinsdale, MT.
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