WINNETT — On a bare patch of ground 15 miles northwest of Winnett, more than 20 male sage grouse have gathered in the pre-dawn to get their strut on.
Sporting spiked feathers on the backs of their necks and a wide fan of tail feathers, the birds jockey for position and puff out air sacks within their chests like pillows, causing a distinctive drumming sound when air is released.
“What these guys are trying to do is show off for the girls,” whispers Matt Comer, a Lewistown-based wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who watches the birds through binoculars from his pickup truck.
To be sure, the exotic spring ritual — mating season peaks in April — is an entertaining show, but Comer is here to work, counting the number of birds to better focus conservation efforts in the area.
Across the West, the iconic bird with the showy mating dance is experiencing population declines, and government land managers, with help from ranchers and conservation groups, are pouring tens of millions of dollars and rewriting dozens of management plans to protect habitat where the birds still thrive.
The goal of the sweeping plans, occurring on both private and public lands in 11 states including Montana, is to increase the population and avert the listing of the bird as a threatened and endangered species, which experts say would bring tougher restrictions on grazing and energy development.
“It would just have catastrophic impacts on our food and energy security, much of which comes out of the West,” said Dave Naugle, a wildlife professor at the University of Montana who is serving as science adviser for the national sage grouse initiative headed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
In 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said listing the sage grouse was warranted but “precluded” because of more pressing priorities.
In the ruling, USFWS said many local sage grouse populations, if trends persist, may disappear within the next 30 to 100 years, leaving remaining populations more vulnerable to extinction.
Conservation initiatives on 186 million acres of public and private sage grouse habitat are now under way in the West in attempts to avoid instatement of federal protections, and the clock is ticking. The USFWS plans to revisit the listing decision in 2015.
If the sage grouse is listed as endangered or threatened, UM’s Naugle predicts that restrictions on both energy extraction and grazing likely would follow. This would create the possibility the prairie bird will become the northern spotted owl of the West, pitting conservation and development interests in messy legal and political fights.
Montana has about 18 percent of the estimated population of 200,000 sage grouse, second only to Wyoming. There are 125 leks, traditional place where males assemble during the mating season, alone in the Winnett vicinity, which is a hot spot for the birds nationally because ranchers have kept the large tracts the birds need to survive in tact.
“That doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved,” says Comer of the habitat.
The BLM is heading efforts on land it manages, rewriting almost 100 management plans across the West to improve protections. The agency manages about 45 percent of the sage grouse habitat.
The NRCS is leading the charge on private land, where 39 percent of sage grouse are found.
“This is like nothing we’ve ever done before,” said Tim Griffiths, the Bozeman-based national sage grouse initiative coordinator for the NRCS. “For the first time, we truly are breaking down boundaries between public and private.”
In 2010 and 2011, $115 million in Farm Bill money was appropriated for the NRCS’ national sage grouse conservation initiative in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, eastern California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.
Griffiths says the agency launched the program because listing would threaten grazing on agricultural lands.
“If grazing were reduced or negated on all of those lands, a lot of these ranches simply couldn’t exist any more,” Griffiths said.
Another $40 million has been set aside so far in 2012. Private groups supporting the work have chipped in another $60 million.
Through the program, 24 additional NRCS grazing agents — four in Montana — have been hired to assist ranchers in voluntarily enrolling land in new grazing systems.
Overgrazing can degrade sage grouse habitat by decreasing grasses needed for brood-rearing and concealment from predators.
To date, 1.3 million acres of agricultural land has been enrolled in the grazing system improvement program, including 240,000 acres in Montana, mostly in the Malta, Winnett, Roundup, Forsyth and Dillon areas.
Changing grazing rotations will increase the growth of grasses, Griffiths said.
“It’s one of the best government programs I’ve ever seen,” said Mike Delaney, a 57-year-old rancher at Grass Range. “All of the wildlife groups should love this, too.”
Delaney and his wife, Deb, are participating in the program. The couple runs 500 head of cattle.
Mike Delaney was born and raised on the ranch and has witnessed the lek courtships many times. The sage grouse, he says, is a “neat bird,” but he’s seen declines in recent years. He suspects West Nile virus.
With financial and technical support, the NRCS helped the couple install new fencing and water pipelines to new, divided pastures. That will allow 20 percent of the rangeland to be rested periodically as part of a five-year grazing rotation plan. The couple always had wanted to make the improvements, but lacked the resources.
The new growth of grass that will result from resting a portion of their rangeland will benefit both cattle and wildlife, including sage grouse, while leaving the ranch in better condition to turn over to his two children, Delaney said.
“With this whole endangered species deal, we’re trying to make the habitat better for the bird and do our share of increasing their habitat,” Delaney said.
The NRCS also has used the Farm Bill funding to purchase 240,000 acres in conservation easements targeting large, working ranches with key sage grouse habitat to prevent the land from being carved up into “ranchettes.”
“These sage grouse hate disturbance, so when that happens the populations plummet,” Griffiths said.
In Montana, conservation easements have been purchased on 42,000 acres in the Malta and Roundup areas.
UM’s Naugle said he hopes the model of upfront investment and involvement of private landowners, and state-federal cooperation, can become a model for solving complex conservation efforts over large landscapes with multiple ownership.
“Instead of a top down regulatory fist, if we can do this through incentives, proactively and voluntary way, we can set the stage for how we can do this in other places,” Naugle said.
Thirteen core areas in 25 percent of the bird’s distribution—where 75 percent of the birds live — are being targeted in the program.
By focusing conservation efforts in these high-population locations, the hope is other locations will remain available for activities such as energy development, Naugle said.
For its part, the BLM, on orders from Washington, is revising 98 management plans to beef up protections of sage grouse territory on public land, where both grazing and oil and gas development occur.
In Montana, plans are being revised in Miles City, Dillon, the Hi-Line, Lewistown and Billings districts.
Alternatives to protect sage grouse will be out for public comment later this spring for the Montana plans, said John Carlson, program lead for fisheries, wildlife and threatened and endangered species for the BLM’s Montana-Dakotas office.
Some of the alternatives that will be considered will be more favorable to sage grouse, others less so, he said.
Public fascination with sage grouse always has been high, Carlson said. It’s a game bird, which partly explains the interest, he said. Sage grouse also is emblematic of “big open places.”
“And they have these crazy dances,” Carlson said. “Watching them on the leks in the spring time is pretty special.”
Carlson is “fairly confident” conservation measures can be implemented on BLM lands that will avert a listing of the bird. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which will make the listing decision, has representatives serving on regional BLM teams reviewing the sage grouse plans, Carlson said.
Depending on the state, energy development, conversion of native sage to farm ground, livestock grazing, urbanization and disease are factors in the decline of sage grouse.
Loss of habitat to tillage and energy development is the biggest threats in Montana, Carlson said.
Already in Wyoming, 12 years of coal-bed methane gas development in the Powder River Basin coincided with a 79 percent decline in sage grouse population, with energy development prompting birds to abandon leks, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Montana saw 25,351 acres of sagebrush converted to tilled agriculture between 2005 and 2009, according to the USFWS.
Oil development and its impact on sage grouse will be addressed in the BLM plan revisions, Carlson said.
While most sage brush habitat skirts the oil patch in eastern Montana, Dave Galt, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association, worries that restrictions resulting from protecting sage grouse could affect future construction of pipelines needed to get oil out of the Bakken area.
Impacts also could result on future oil development in other areas, including Fergus, Garfield, Treasure, Custer, Fallon and Power River counties.
“The point is that if the bird gets listed, anywhere in the state that’s considered prime sage grouse habitat is going to be difficult, if not impossible, to get a drilling permit on, including private land in key areas,” he said.
Jon Marvel, executive director of the Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project, said the NRCS’ sage grouse conservation effort on private land is well intentioned.
The group unsuccessfully sued the USFWS for not immediately listing sage grouse in 2011.
The conservation easements in particular will help sage grouse, Marvel said. But the targeted private lands are a drop in the bucket compared to total acreage of sage grouse habitat at stake, he said.
“Where the rubber meets the road is on public lands, and that’s where the politics really gets intense,” Marvel said.
BLM manages 30 million acres of land occupied by sage grouse and another 10 million acres of potentially suitable habitat.
If the agency implements the restrictions on grazing and oil development that Marvel says truly are needed to protect the bird, the impact wouldn’t be any different than if the bird was listed, he said.
“That’s the irony of the BLM’s situation,” Marvel said. “Either they are going to protect the habitat or they will not.”
Western Watersheds is challenging 16 BLM resource management plans covering 35 million acres of public lands in the West in federal district court in Boise. The lawsuit alleges those plans fail to analyze impacts of management decisions on sage grouse habitat. The court already has reversed two of the management plans.
Western Watersheds also is suing the BLM in Montana over the management plan for the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, primarily over the impact of livestock grazing on riparian cottonwood forests and sage grouse habitat.
Real protections for sage grouse, Marvel said, will depend largely on what ends up in the revised BLM management plans. If the agency follows the advice of its scientists, Marvel said, requirements that benefit sage grouse are likely.
But Marvel worries that oil and gas and the livestock industry will pressure the agency not to limit development or grazing in key habitat.
“As a consequence, it may not matter how much (NRCS’) Tim Griffiths spends on private land or how much money BLM spends — if the outcome is determined by Exxon Mobile or Peabody Coal or public lands ranchers,” Marvel said.
Sage grouse, standing up to 2 feet tall and weighing 2 to 7 pounds, are the largest grouse in North America.
Comer calls it the poster child for hundreds of plant, animal and bird species at risk from sage brush habitat loss.
“It’s one of those critters that needs large, intact habitats to be able to make it,” he said.
Prior to European settlement in the 19th Century, sage grouse numbered in the millions in western North America.
Today, the estimated population is 200,000, with 5,000 leks where the birds breed.
Montana has 992 leks, which average about 17 males each.
The leading game bird in the West until the early 1900s, sage grouse population declines in Montana generally is related to loss of sagebrush habitat, perhaps as much as 50 percent since the turn of the 20th Century, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife Parks.
Large tracts remain in Montana, however, and Comer is confident the current sage grouse population can be maintained, and even improved, as long as the threats are minimized and the various jurisdictions work together.
“It just has to be a broader effort,” Comer says. “The BLM can’t do it alone.”
In many cases, he says, the BLM already is implementing protections on the ground that will be formally incorporated into the management plans later.
Besides monitoring the prairie dance floors to beef up baseline population data, BLM is placing fluorescent markers on barbed wire fences near larger leks, Comer said. This spring alone, markers were placed on four miles of fencing near large leks around Winnett. Without the fence markers, chances are several times higher the birds will collide with the fences.
The agency also is planning to seed 300 acres of non-native crested wheat grass back to native sage grasses and sagebrush.
One day earlier this month, Comer pulled his four-wheel drive pickup onto a two-track road and parked next to an open field below a ridge barely visible thanks to a cloud-shrouded moon. It was 6 a.m. and 54 degrees and sage brush country — acre-upon-acre as far as the eye could see — was beginning to wake up. Coyotes howled, a horned lark sang and chorus frogs chirped like crickets.
But it was a dull, low sound, akin to heavy balls being dropped into a pool of water — baloop, baloop, baloop — that stood out. It was the air sacks in the chests of the males popping, which can be heard for a mile or two.
The males are counted to estimate populations because the plain-looking hens blend in so well with the environment. After mating, the males take off, leaving the females to tend nests in vicinity of the leks.
The highest number of birds counted on a lek this spring was 53 males. At this location, Comer counted 21 males and three females.
“That’s a big lek anymore,” he says.