Focus on Sage Grouse

As the sage grouse threatens to become a national issue, the local Sage Grouse Working Group is studying the game bird to learn more about what factors are critical in the local area to maintain a healthy population.

"Basically, we want to identify where the birds are, how many birds there are and do whatever we can to increase the numbers of Sage grouse," said Neil Hillesland, who along with Jeff Lord are helping lead the local working group. Hillesland is a Fish and Game Reservist. Lord in a local rancher. The working group represents a wide variety of interests concerned about the future of the sage grouse.

"In 2010, we were given a grant to collar sage grouse," Hillesland said, noting that he's been studying the birds since 2005 when he started doing volunteer work for Fish and Game. F&G has been doing sage grouse studies "for a long time," he said.

With the grant, after capturing and collaring the birds, then throughout the year the group tries to track them using radio-direction finding to triangulate where the collars are on each bird, he said.

Usually, the working group volunteers go out once a week for ground surveys and once a month, taking advantage of a Fish and Game aircraft doing deer mortality studies in the area, they try to find the birds from the air, which offers better chances to pick up the line-of-sight collar transmitters.

The group also obtained a grant to do sage grouse habitat studies, and have begun to identify the birds' Elmore County nesting areas, known as leks. "Sometimes, you learn about them (the leks) just by talking to people. But some people don't want anyone to know they have leks on their land, for fear of what might happen if the bird is listed," Hillesland said, especially if the land they use is leased from the federal government.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering an endangered species listing for the sage grouse, a move that has raised concerns by ranchers and oil and gas developers in the western United States.

Sage grouse numbers have dropped dramatically in recent years across the west.

In this area, Hillesland said, the main cause in the decline of sage grouse numbers is loss of habitat, most of it due to fire.

In Elmore County, between 2011 and 2014, more than half a million acres of land burned. Even worse was the 2007 Murphy Complex Fire that roared through Owyhee County and burned 650,000 acres, including some of the densest lek areas in southern Idaho. The sage grouse population took a massive hit and Fish and Game began to sharply curtail hunting opportunities, waiting for the populations to recover.

Many landowners or leaseholders also are concerned about the declining population. During one fire last year, "somebody bulldozed a fire line around a lek," Hillesland said. In addition, more than 1,000 ranchers across the western United States have signed up with the Sage Grouse Initiative to find ways to save the birds.

The Paradigm Project, a BLM proposal to reseed the local area with fire-resistant grasses and create more fire breaks to stop large fires in the area, has the potential to be "very important" to sage grouse habitat restoration, he said.

But populations across the western United States have been falling, in part due to habitat destruction due to fires and development, in particular energy development, in part due to disease and in part due to declining sagebrush populations.

Most people think there's plenty of sagebrush, around but large, thick stands of sagebrush, 4-6 feet tall and closely clumped together over several acres, are increasingly rare. That density was common 100 years ago, however.

The long-term droughts have also had an effect, because the two things sage grouse need for a good lek area are a nearby water source and a lot of sagebrush, Hillesland said.

"Adult sage grouse feed predominantly on sagebrush, and they use it for protection," he said.

Hillesland also noted that the West Nile virus had a major impact on sage grouse populations. Chicks, he said, rely heavily on insects, including mosquitoes, for the food supply, and in the last 15 years, it has become pandemic in North America. It has taken a heavy toll on chicks.

Wildlife predation also has a major impact, but it's not the coyotes, skunks, fox or gophers getting to the chicks or eggs that most people assume are the leading culprits. Instead, cameras set up by Idaho State University biologists to watch nests have discovered that ravens, a bird protected by both federal and international law (the North American Migratory Bird Act Treaty), are the leading predator of sage grouse eggs.

In their efforts to track their collared sage grouse, the local working group also has discovered that a significant cause of adult sage grouse mortality is simply flying into barbed wire fences.

"They fly low, and run into the fences," Hillesland said. In order to cut down on that cause of death, the U.S. Forest Service and some ranchers and farmers in the area have allowed the local working group to place pieces of plastic that stand out against the background terrain colors, on some of their fence lines. The working group is studying if that will make a difference.

Birds of prey, such as falcons and eagles, may also have an impact on the mortality rate of adult sage grouse, although it's not known right now how much. At least one of the local group's collared birds, however, was found in a Golden Eagle nest.

Once they grow to adulthood, sage grouse suffer about a 10 percent mortality every year, Hillesland said, although for reasons not yet known, their collared birds die at a slightly higher rate. "Maybe it's due to the stress of collaring," he suggested.

The more data the local group can collect, the better informed decisions local wildlife managers can make about how to restore sage grouse numbers.

The local working group was formed, he said, "because our idea was, if we do nothing, we're not helping."

The ultimate goal, he said, is to avoid the regulations and restrictions that come with a federal listing, but still help the birds recover. "Ideally, this will be a win-win for everyone," he said.

The local working group can always use volunteers, he added. The group meets the first Thursday of each month at 7 p.m. at the police station's public meeting room.