To say that sage grouse now are extinct in western North Dakota might be stretching things — but only slightly — after surveys of the leks, the birds’ communal mating grounds, this spring failed to find a single male on the mating grounds, a Game and Fish Department biologist says.
This was the first year that state and federal surveyors failed to count a single male sage grouse in Bowman County, the last place in western North Dakota with a remnant population of the beleaguered grouse species, said Jesse Kolar, the Game and Fish Department’s upland game management supervisor in Dickinson.
Zero. Nada. None.
They did count one female, Kolar says.
“I wouldn’t say they’re extinct from North Dakota, but I do think you could argue they’re functionally extinct,” Kolar said. “I don’t think they’re going to bounce back from as low as they are right now to any meaningful numbers.”
Unless, of course, the western grouse species has “some really successful production years” in adjacent areas of South Dakota and Montana, “which hasn’t been the recent trend,” Kolar said.
The decline in North Dakota’s sage grouse population dates back as far as the 1950s, Kolar says, but the downtrend worsened in 2006 or 2007, when West Nile virus was confirmed in the species.
“That was a significant factor and possibly the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said. “Once our (lek count) numbers dipped below 150 males, we’ve never seen consistent rebounds in the population.”
North Dakota’s last sage grouse season was in 2007.
A variety of factors are behind the decline, Kolar says, including loss of the Big Sagebrush species — Artemisia tridentanta — upon which the birds rely, rangeland conversion, agriculture and energy development.
Ideally, sage grouse prefer 10- to 20-square-mile tracts of Big Sagebrush habitat that is relatively undisturbed, Kolar says.
“In North Dakota, we haven’t had that for many years,” he said. “That’s why I sometimes say it’s surprising they held on for as long as they have.”
The frustrating part, Kolar says, is there’s no single cause behind the species’ disappearance from the western North Dakota landscape.
“If it were just energy development, we could go and combat energy development in a part of their range and try to set up a core where we didn’t have energy development,” Kolar said. “Or, if it were just agricultural development, we could do habitat easements and find a big enough core where we could really protect it from agricultural conversion.
“But no, it’s an ‘all of the above’ (scenario).”
In an effort to jumpstart the population, the Game and Fish Department translocated sage grouse from Wyoming from 2017 to 2020. The department translocated 205 sage grouse — 60 males, 84 females and 61 chicks — during the four-year effort.
“We tried a lot of different things, spent a lot of money trying to supplement the population and unfortunately, none of that worked,” said Bill Haase, wildlife chief for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department.
From a low of five male sage grouse in 2017, the count rebounded to 29 in 2019, Kolar says — still far below the previous high of 199 males in 2007. That was followed by 74 in 2008 “and steady declines after,” he said.
The rebound in 2019 could be due, at least in part, to the department’s translocations, Kolar says, but surveyors didn’t see many males with leg bands during the spring lek surveys, which would have indicated Wyoming birds.
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“It’s a bit unclear as to what caused the rebound, especially since areas outside of our translocation area also rebounded,” Kolar said. “Ultimately, the expensive translocations were not feasible to continue long-term, and we saw an immediate decline following the translocation project — further supporting the futility of continuing translocation efforts.”
Given the declines, Game and Fish isn’t investing as much effort into sage grouse counts as it did 10 years ago. The department used to count all historic leks two to three times every spring, Kolar says, but many of those hadn’t had sage grouse for more than 15 years, and so efforts in those areas were discontinued.
“I’ve done searches from the air to see if any of those have re-ignited, but searches have not turned up any grouse that we were not finding from the ground,” Kolar said. “It’s likely that there were a handful of sage grouse males remaining in North Dakota that we did not detect, but not likely that we’re missing enough to change the story of a decline toward extirpation from the state.”
