State sharpies threatened
On the heels of a severe Wisconsin winter, spring was late in arriving in 2014.
To add insult to injury, in late April a light snow fell across the northwestern portion of the state.
As the calendar flipped to May, however, a hallmark of the season of renewal made a triumphant appearance and set an example for anyone in need of hope.
The sea change occurred shortly after dawn May 1 courtesy of a local flock of residents – sharptailed grouse – at the Namekagon Barrens Wildlife Area.
I was there to witness it.
As I wrote then:
“With a rustle of wings and soft cooing, a dozen birds flew into a clearing on the barrens. Within seconds, several spread their wings and thrust white butts in the air. Purple throat sacs bulged, yellow eyebrows stiffened.
The gloomy morning was punctuated with clucks and machinegun-like bursts of “Gr-gr-gr-gr-gr.”
The birds faced off in pairs, stomped their feet and pirouetted in the gathering light. With uncanny precision, the activity started and stopped every few seconds.
The dance of the sharp-tailed grouse was on.
If you are a wildlife supporter and haven’t seen sharpies perform their spring mating ritual, you must put it on your bucket list.
And it would be wise to do it as soon as possible.
Sharp-tailed grouse are not doing well in Wisconsin.
This week the Department of Natural Resources announced there will be no sharptail hunt in the state this year.
The decision was not a surprise; it’s the fifth time the season has been canceled in eight years.
The real issue, of course, is a lack of habitat.
Sharp-tailed grouse are native to Wisconsin and once were found in most of the state, according research published in 1949.
The birds flourished when the state was covered in grassland.
As natural grasslands were developed for human use and wildfires were suppressed, the number of sharp-tailed grouse has dwindled in the state.
In the 2019 DNR survey, 161 male sharpies were counted on eight managed properties, about average over the last dozen years.
Compounding concern over the species future is habitat fragmentation and lack of connectivity of the remaining pockets of birds.
Management for the birds began in northern Wisconsin during the late 1940s and early 1950s in response to concerns of diminishing habitat.
In 1952 Frederick Hamerstrom, Frances Hamerstrom and Oswald Mattson wrote “Sharptails into the Shadows,” a portrayal of a species in trouble.
In 1977, the DNR’s Larry Gregg in a 1977 also issued a technical bulletin on sharptails.
The Natural Resources Board in 2011 approved an updated Wisconsin Sharp-tailed Grouse Management Plan. It focuses on maintaining adequate habitat to “ensure a self-supporting population of sharp-tailed grouse with sufficient numbers and genetic diversity to ensure the species will not become extirpated from the state.”
Today sharptails are found mostly in specific areas of northwestern Wisconsin.
The biggest problem is scale. Sharptails, much like their cousin the prairie chicken, need much larger blocks of habitat to thrive.
How much? In 2001 Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin-Madison published an analysis that put a number on it.
His work suggested Wisconsin sharptails required spring breeding populations of at least 280 birds in each of five separate subpopulations occupying habitat patches of at least 9,800 acres to achieve a 95% probability of persistence for 50 years.
As I read the DNR’s decision to cancel the 2020 sharp-tail hunt, I realized it was a wise call.
The thought that the species is dangerously close to being silenced also reignited memories of 2014 when the birds transformed a dim morning with their dazzling colors and dancing.
State officials must go beyond good intentions and ensure that, as Gregg wrote in 1977, the “music of the dancing ground on a fresh spring morning will never be completely stilled.”