Concern over the fate of greater sage grouse
EVAN Obercian says it is the highlight of his Colorado birding tours every spring, even though he has to wake his clients up before 5am to be in the sagebrush flats before the sun comes up. And there they wait in Obercian’s van, listening to strange whoops and popping sounds that float magically from the predawn darkness.
The first rays of a new day’s sun reveal what is making the noise: large brown birds that are more than twice the size of a barnyard chicken, strutting and shaking while thrusting their bulbous yellow air sacs out of their chests, and fanning a fantastic spread of pointy tail feathers. The bird is the greater sage grouse, and the sight is their spring mating ritual on their dancing grounds, called leks.
The van acts like a blind, so the sage grouse do not notice that people are nearby, watching. Sometimes the grouse will dance right up to the tyres. Birders are under strict orders not to get out, because as Obercian says, sage grouse “are very sensitive”.
That sensitivity means sage grouse are easily spooked – by people, or by oil and gas drilling operations. A revision to the wildlife management plans for sage grouse in the West recently announced by Inte- rior Secretary Ryan Zinke may mean more oil and gas drilling near sage grouse leks soon – and a new round of industryversus-conservationist skirmishes over an issue that many thought had been settled.
The greater sage grouse was almost listed under the Endangered Species Act two years ago. The bird has lost almost half of its sagebrush habitat across 11 western states, and its population has declined from many millions to a few hundred thousand. Audubon Rockies says the greater sage grouse population has declined 95 percent.
But on September 22, 2015, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced that the sage grouse would not be listed, because the US Fish and Wildlife Service was confident that threats to the bird were being effectively mitigated by a package of federal and state plans across the West that protected habitat while still allowing for energy development and livestock grazing.
“We had settled on the biggest landscape conservation deal ever made,” said Brian Rutledge, director of Audubon’s Sagebrush Ecosystem Initiative. Rutledge sat alongside energy industry representatives, ranchers and government officials to hammer out what he calls a compromise among all interests. For example, Rutledge points out that the deal still allowed for oil and gas drilling, just not in ways that would excessively disturb sage grouse breeding areas.
On August 7, Zinke issued the order to revise the sage grouse plans, including modifying the policy on fluid-mineral leasing and development.
Most concerning, said Holly Copeland, a landscape ecologist for the Nature Conservancy in Wyoming, is the prospect of allowing oil and gas drilling in core areas for sage grouse breeding habitat. Copeland has published research that showed the 2015 plan would significantly reduce future losses of sage grouse populations, while also benefiting other sagebrush wildlife such as mule deer.
But under the Trump administration, the Federal Bureau of Land Management has already restarted putting out oil and gas development leases in sage grouse habitat.
The lek where Obercian, the birding guide, takes his clients is on Bureau of Land Management land in Colorado. Now he’s worried the greater sage grouse may go the way of another springtime dancing bird, the lesser prairie chicken.
“They have always been part of our Colorado birding tours,” he says.
“But last year we had to go to Kansas to see a lesser prairie chicken.”