Good for the Bird, Good for the Herd

Perennial bunch grasses, sagebrush, and a mix of succulent native plants characterize a healthy rangeland condition, which is critical to conserving sage-grouse and to sustaining ranch life in eastern Oregon. Photo by Tony Svejcar.

In the chilly light of an early April morning, bubbling sounds fill the air above Oregon’s high desert. A dozen sage-grouse roosters strut and puff across an open patch of short-cropped grasses, their tail feathers spread in spiky fans. Each bird looks like a dancing feather pillow, two yellow air sacs ballooning from their ample fluffy bosoms. They swish their wings and gurgle their air sacs, creating a bubbling pop.

Greater sage-grouse cut the rug in flamboyant courting rituals each spring in open areas of the sagebrush grassland across eleven Western states. The birds depend on sagebrush and the grasses growing among these shrubs to provide food and a safe haven to raise their young.

The Miller Homestead Fire, near Burns, Oregon, was part of a series of fires that scorched more than 870 square miles of rangeland in southeast Oregon in 2012. Photo by Devon Jones.

Much of the original sagebrush grassland was transformed generations ago into the West’s iconic amber fields of grain. Where sagebrush rangelands have persisted, in southeast Oregon and parts of the Snake River Plain and Great Basin, the ecosystem has been hard hit by previous decades of unmanaged grazing and altered fire patterns. In lowland areas, large swaths of cheatgrass, medusahead, and other noxious weeds have increased soil erosion, reduced rainfall infiltration, and displaced native plants.

Farther upland, western juniper has spread across the landscape, sucking up surface water and crowding out sagebrush, native grasses, and small plants. In places, juniper has become a dense woodland with no value for sage-grouse and little value for cattle or other wildlife, from mule deer to vesper sparrows.

Another symptom of an ecosystem out of balance is the change in the region’s wildfires. Encroaching juniper in the uplands has elbowed out undergrowth, making wildfire less frequent but more intense. In lower elevations, large swaths of invasive cheatgrass have fueled ever bigger, more frequent fires. There, annual weeds lead a fast life: sprout early, grow fast, set seeds, and wither to dry stems by midsummer, ready to burn. This cheatgrass-wildfire cycle has increased the frequency of wildfire in low elevation sagebrush communities from the historic 30 to 100 years to a vicious cycle of 1 to 5 years.

The 2012 fires across southeast Oregon, the most extensive fires in the state for almost 150 years, burned more than 870 square miles south of Burns. Although the fire cleared out some juniper in higher elevations, it left much of the lowlands scorched, killing hundreds of cattle and incinerating grazing land and sage-grouse habitat.

Juniper, cheatgrass, and out-of-control wildfire are bad for people, livestock, and ultimately bad for sage-grouse, too.

Eastern Oregon rancher Tom Sharp (left) and Dustin Johnson, the county leader for Oregon State University Extension Service in Harney County, survey sage-grouse habitat near Burns, Oregon. Photo by Lynn Ketchum.

The delayed decision on the sage-grouse listing gave agencies and landowners the time to develop conservation plans that could possibly preclude listing if they could demonstrate that the plans they draw up are effective. Rather than wait for the big stick of the Endangered Species Act, a group of ranchers in Harney County are developing strategies to protect habitat on both public and private lands, and in turn, sustain their ranches.

Harney County is the ninth largest county in the nation, larger than several eastern states. Its 71,000 cattle outnumber its people nearly ten to one. As head of the Harney County office of Oregon State University Extension, Dustin Johnson knows most of those people on a first-name basis. So when it came to bringing together a potentially contentious group of ranchers, resource managers, and environmental groups, Johnson had the relationships to do it.

“They wanted information about ‘Candidate (species) Conservation Agreements with Assurances’,” Johnson said. So-called CCAAs are voluntary agreements that private landowners make with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service before a candidate species is listed. CCAAs outline specific management practices and conservation measures the landowner agrees to undertake to conserve the species and its habitat on private land. The last “A” —Assurances—distinguishes these plans from conservation plans developed for public lands. Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances assure that the landowner will not be held to any higher standard if the species is listed under the ESA as long as the landowner continues to meet the terms of the original agreement.

Helo 782 drops a load of water on the Long Draw Fire in southeastern Oregon, which burned across US 95 repeatedly during the course of the July 2012 fire. Above photo by Kevin S. Abel, BLM. Below photo courtesy of Oregon Dept. of Transportation.

“Ranchers and environmentalists came to realize that they wanted the same thing,” Sharp said. “Juniper and weeds hurt sage-grouse and cattle grazing. By approaching the problem as a land management problem, not a species problem, we could develop plans that would benefit grazing and sage-grouse. And ranchers are land managers, so the approach made sense. Cattle across the West stand to benefit from rangeland improvements. What’s good for the bird is good for the herd.”

The committee has met monthly for a year. Supported by state and federal funds managed by the Harney Soil and Water Conservation District, their goal is to achieve sage-grouse conservation through sustainable ranching: managing grazing, controlling weeds, and removing juniper. Tactics to protect sage-grouse include moving cattle at critical times away from leks and nesting areas and removing fences and trees where predators could perch.

In Harney County, where more than three-quarters of the land is state- or federally owned, most cattle ranchers rely on grazing public lands for part of the year. They move their herds from winter pastures to summer range, often onto allotments they lease from the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service. Sage-grouse, too, move across the landscape, using a mix of public and private land for mating, nesting, or wintering.

So, Johnson and Sharp are working with public land agencies to make sure the conservation plans and monitoring methods are consistent across a landscape of many ownerships and managements. Johnson developed inventory and monitoring guidelines for landowners based on criteria he developed for the BLM that focused on the overall health of the ecosystem over time. “The best single indicator of overall ecosystem health is the condition of the rangeland bunchgrasses,” Johnson said. Healthy bunchgrasses, moderately grazed, can reduce fire hazard and weed invasion and increase available water.

Despite decades of unmanaged grazing, rangelands in southeast Oregon contain more than 700 known mating grounds for sage-grouse. Conservation plans aim to protect those areas and restore others to create more resilient rangelands for both wildlife and ranching. Photo by OSU EESC.

Production of grasses and shrubs was similar in both grazed and ungrazed areas. But the ungrazed plots accumulated three times the amount of dead grass and had built up a huge fuel load by the 1990s when the ARS researchers burned both sides of the exclosures. Years following the burn, when the researchers inventoried these sites, they found the ungrazed areas had lower abundance of perennial grass and higher abundance of annual grass than the grazed areas. Apparently, the accumulated grasses in ungrazed areas burned hot enough to kill the perennial grasses, which opened the ground to cheatgrass invasion.

“Conservation is not fencing off land and never touching it,” said ARS scientist Boyd. “When you eliminate the small disturbance, the larger ones accumulate and become more threatening.”

Other studies suggest similar advantages of moderately grazed land to sustaining habitat critical to sage-grouse. A 2004 interagency report concluded that, beyond the open areas for mating displays, sage-grouse prefer to nest under a protective canopy of grasses (at 7 or more inches tall) and sagebrush (at 15 to 30 inches tall). They need a supply of small plants and associated insects when their chicks are young, and they need access to succulent streamside plants through the dry season. The researchers concluded that “these conditions can be enhanced by light to moderate grazing early in the season.”

OSU graduate students participate in a sage-grouse study at the Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge near Lakeview, Oregon. Photo by Lynn Ketchum.

But habitat is not static. Fires, drought, and floods can all affect the condition of rangelands. Big disturbances, like the 2012 fires, hurt ranchers and wildlife and open more land to weedy invasion.

The approach the Harney County ranchers are taking is community-based: keep the plant community functional, keep the ranching community functional, over the long haul. This kind of large-scale adaptive management could become a new model for the scientific management of sage-grouse. It also has the potential to create a new model for rallying unconventional allies in efforts to recover endangered species. Whereas some past efforts have been delayed and politicized by conflict and court battles, the future may involve more people working collaboratively—rather than at loggerheads—to come up with solutions.

And when the conversation comes to community, common ground is easy to find in Harney County. “Ranchers are land managers,” Sharp said. “If we can find a land-management approach to conserving sage-grouse, we have a community of people who understand how to do this.”