NORTH DAKOTA OUTDOORS MAGAZINE

Last of the Leks

Ron Wilson

Sage grouse male displaying with sun behind

While it’s premature to write an obituary for sage grouse in southwestern North Dakota, wildlife biologists have seen few, if any, indicators signaling a comeback in a population in slow decline for nearly two decades.

“I know some people have said the sage grouse population in North Dakota is on hospice, and I think that’s probably an accurate thing to say,” said Jesse Kolar, North Dakota Game and Fish Department upland game management supervisor in Dickinson. “I think the only saving grace we have is that Montana and South Dakota still have sage grouse connected to our population, so we could hope that those birds would source into our population. However, in the last couple of years, those populations haven’t been doing as well. South Dakota shut down their hunting season like us due to declines, and Montana has seen similar declines right across the border.”

To get the best population estimate of sage grouse in southwestern North Dakota, wildlife biologists have for years started “listening runs” in mid-March looking for sage grouse leks, followed by counting the number of birds in attendance on those strutting grounds beginning April 1.

“Unfortunately, today we’re down to just two remaining leks that we know of,” Kolar said on April 3 in southwestern Bowman County. “Last year there were 23 males on those two leks. This year our preliminary counts have been even lower. The lek where we saw 13 birds last year had about three so far. It’s early, so maybe we’ll see more later in the season, but it doesn’t seem promising.”

North Dakota is on the eastern edge of the birds’ range where habitat and climatic factors limit sage grouse success and expansion, so their numbers in the state have never been staggering. Even so, the birds have been around for eons and even considering their end is disheartening.

“Sage grouse are very emblematic, iconic, beautiful birds that have unique dancing rituals that surprise those people lucky enough to have seen them display,” Kolar said. “Like the struggling prairie chicken population in northeastern North Dakota, it’s hard to think of letting go of sage grouse in this part of the state.”

Kolar said biologists measure North Dakota’s sage grouse population through spring lek counts because the birds are sparse on any landscape and measuring them in summer or fall is difficult.

Sage grouse hen in dry grass

A hen sage grouse watches male grouse display on a lek

“In the spring, they’re territorial, they’ll go to the same territorial leks and we’re able to monitor males from year to year to year,” he said. “The population in North Dakota could blip out according to our lek counts, but we’ll still probably have sage grouse wandering in from South Dakota and Montana leks even after ours would zero out. We’re probably going to have sage grouse quite a few years into the future, but just not the numbers that we used to have and potentially no more breeding population, just vagrants.”

The last time more than 100 males were counted on leks in North Dakota was 2007 when 199 were in attendance. Since then, their numbers have dropped significantly and there were years the totals never reached double digits.

So, what gives?

“Around 2006 to 2008, their numbers dropped pretty precipitously, and we think it’s because West Nile virus showed up on the landscape,” Kolar said. “But in the grand scheme of things, there are a lot of causes to the sage grouse decline. We’ve lost sagebrush, we’ve had fragmentation with oil and gas development and other human development in their core habitat. Sage grouse like great big areas of predominantly undisturbed sagebrush and grasslands. And we don’t have a lot of that left in their core range.”

Sage grouse have been secreted away in southwestern North Dakota for eons because of the species’ fundamental tie to the aromatic plant — Wyoming big sagebrush — found in its name.

View of fanned tail of displaying sage grouse male

While North Dakota doesn’t harbor near the numbers of sage grouse it once did, these big birds, weighing in at about 7 pounds, are hard to miss when displaying.

Grouse look to sagebrush for food, cover from the weather and predators, and nesting and brood habitat. Sadly, about half of the big sage habitat in North Dakota that hasn’t been fragmented from the landscape has at one time been sprayed, burned, disked or otherwise removed from the grasslands.

When the stars do align and both sexes show up on the leks in spring, what follows isn’t an immediate, influential boost to the population like you sometimes see with other upland birds.

“Sage grouse aren’t as productive as sharptails, partridge or pheasants. They definitely are on the slow production, longer lifespan scale,” Kolar said. “Some of our wildlife produces really rapidly — produces a lot of young and they die frequently. Sage grouse are more adapted to producing fewer young.

“Usually, a sage grouse nest of six to eight eggs might only produce two to three fledglings, which is far fewer than a brood of pheasants or partridge,” he added. “The way they counter that is by having longer lifespans. So, unlike a partridge or pheasant that might have 2- or 3-year lifespan norm, we could expect sage grouse to live 5 to 7 years and often longer.”

The transition from egg to survival, however, is a difficult journey for sage grouse.

“The leading direct cause of mortality is usually predation for a lot of the chicks. A lot of the nests, they’d all hatch out if it weren’t for predators,” Kolar said. “Sometimes there are fertility issues in areas where we don’t have enough males, so the hens aren’t being bred. But for the most part, predation is the main reason that the nests don’t hatch, and the young don’t survive.”

Other factors that decrease hatching rates and chick survival, he added, include cold or wet weather, disturbance to hens during incubation, and diseases.

While sage grouse have long evolved with winged and four-legged critters that want to eat them, Kolar said it’s a rockier road for the birds nowadays because the habitat needed to keep them safe from predators is in much shorter supply.

Game and Fish Department wildlife managers haven’t sat idly by as sage grouse numbers slowly declined over time. In the last 20 years, for example, the agency was involved in habitat improvement and reclamation projects to help bolster the grouse population.

“Most recently, the Game and Fish invested quite a bit of time and money trying to translocate birds from Wyoming to North Dakota,” Kolar said. “We brought in over 300 sage grouse in a period of four years, including broods that we moved with hens so they could acclimate young. While it didn’t seem like it was enough to get our population back to where we wanted it to be, it did seem like it slowed the bleeding.”

Kolar said the lesson learned was that the Department would have needed to translocate many more birds for many more years, which wildlife managers weren’t willing to commit to without first improving larger blocks of habitat.

North Dakota had its first sage grouse hunting season in 1964 and it was closed just once, in 1979, before being shut down indefinitely in 2008. The season, a three-day hunt the majority of those years, never attracted a wide audience, maybe 100 or so hunters annually. Since 1980, the highest number of grouse harvested in one season was 71 birds in 1983. In 2007, conceivably the last season, only 21 birds were taken.

This hybrid, a cross between a sage grouse and a sharp-tailed grouse, was photographed a number of years ago in southwestern North Dakota. Game and Fish Department biologists have documented five hybrids over time. Hybrids compete with sage grouse and don’t contribute to the declining sage grouse population.

“As far as having a sage grouse hunting season again in North Dakota … I guess I’m pretty pessimistic,” Kolar said. “You never say never because all wildlife populations go through fluctuations and sometimes we do see unexpected spikes. But it doesn’t seem promising that we’ll open our season anytime soon. Although many studies have shown hunting is not a leading cause of mortality in sage grouse populations, when you get to this low point of a population, we can’t afford any additional mortality.”

Kolar would likely argue that aside from hunting seasons, maintaining a population of sage grouse to roam the landscape as they have for eons would be enough.

“Before I became an upland game biologist, I worked with the Department on a research project on pronghorn. A lot of collared pronghorn were down in Bowman County, overlapping our sage grouse core areas. And at that time there were still leks that had 20 to 25 males per lek,” he said. “I remember one time I was so impressed, I told Dad we should go down and see the sage grouse in Bowman County.

“And we drove down in the morning without any knowledge of where leks were and we spotted a lek and were able to see sage grouse,” Kolar added. “Nowadays, you wouldn’t be able to go around and find sage grouse so easily. It’s pretty thin pickings looking for the needle in the haystack that are the few remaining leks.”

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