Last Stand for Icon of the Prairie

They are nature’s own Greek chorus--plumed performers, dancing and chanting in a Dionysian frenzy, celebrating fertility, foreshadowing tragedy. Their own.

It is dawn in the Jack Morrow Hills, a patch of pimples on the edge of Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin, a mesmerizingly barren expanse of sage that one 19th century traveler said only “a mad poet” could love. Here, the strutting sage grouse flare their tails like peacocks in brown camouflage and croon their own love poetry. They sound strangely like burbling water coolers, only louder.

The sage grouse are among the West’s oldest inhabitants. Their theatrical mating rituals have heralded the arrival of spring on the western plains for thousands of years. But their numbers are steadily dwindling, and in many places they are gone.

Federal wildlife officials are evaluating petitions from conservation groups to place the sage grouse on the endangered species list. If protection is granted, restrictions on land use could follow.

For the state’s powerful mining and petroleum industries--along with ranchers, farmers and sportsmen--a federal listing could turn the grouse into the prairie equivalent of the spotted owl, raising the specter of years of social strife and economic pain similar to that seen in the Pacific Northwest.

An icon of a more primitive America, the sage grouse is a casualty of the forces that have modernized the nation--irrigated agriculture, the oil and gas industry, motorized recreation and suburban expansion. Wildlife experts and residents of rural Wyoming rue the bird’s decline. They fear the degradation of open spaces that sustain human as well as animal life.

But Wyomingites face a dilemma. The forces that drive their economy are the same that could run roughshod over the sage grouse and turn the lonesome prairie into an industrialized plain.

“We all need petroleum products, but the question we are beginning to ask ourselves is: at what price,” said Rod Rozier, a former oil field engineer who ranches in sage grouse country northwest of the Great Divide Basin.

Nowhere are grouse more numerous than in Wyoming. Nowhere are habitat conditions more favorable. But few states are more dependent on the energy industry, and today that industry is abuzz with bright new natural gas prospects, many of them in the heart of the state’s best grouse habitat.

Although wildlife can coexist with oil and gas wells, “it’s all a matter of scale, how fast and how much you develop,” said Doug McWhirter, a wildlife expert with the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish.

Trouble comes, McWhirter said, when an energy boom overwhelms a landscape with construction, roads, people, traffic and noise. Such a boom is in the offing, and it won’t be easy to apply the brakes. A state without an income tax, Wyoming depends on taxes and royalties from oil and gas for nearly half of its general fund. Some counties that get up to 80% of their revenues from energy taxes couldn’t function without the industry, at least not without significantly higher taxes on residents.

“If there is anything that Wyomingites love more than their wildlife, it’s low taxes,” said Andy Tenney, a Wyoming resident who works for the federal Bureau of Land Management.

America’s Serengeti Plain

Beyond the colorful bird, the future of one of America’s most extraordinary empty places is at stake. For thousands of square miles, Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin and its environs spread out across sage-covered hills, sand dunes, buttes and canyons. If any place south of the Alaskan tundra qualifies as America’s Serengeti Plain, this is it. The desolate country, near the center of the state, is home to wild mustangs, mule deer, elk and 50,000 pronghorn, the largest herd of America’s version of the antelope.

Pioneers dubbed the area the Great American Desert. Hundreds of thousands of emigrants and gold seekers crossed it in covered wagons. The ruts of the Oregon Trail are plainly visible, as are the remnants of stage stops, Pony Express stations and grave markers.

Since the 1890s, politicians and naturalists have made repeated efforts at restricting industrial activity in the region by proposing a game refuge or the state’s third national park after Yellowstone and Grand Teton. But mineral interests have always prevailed. Gold, jade and uranium have all been found in abundance here. So has natural gas.

The primacy of energy interests recently influenced the direction of the nation’s longest hiking trail. Pending development of gas leases on the west side of the basin led federal officials to reroute the 3,200-mile Continental Divide National Trail away from some of the most scenic country in the Divide Basin and onto a dirt road.

Although most of the basin is public domain, federal land managers have traditionally bowed to the interests of commercial lessees when it has come to balancing public access and recreation with those of livestock, mining and oil and gas.

The southeast corner of the basin is already peppered with wells, tanks, compressors, roads, pipelines and waste pits. Much more development is planned. The entire region could see 10,000 more wells over the next decade. New technology that has made it easier and cheaper to locate and extract gas from subterranean sands and coal seams could make Wyoming the premier natural gas producing region of the country, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Wyoming currently ranks fifth in gas production.

One of the most effective techniques for extracting the gas requires the expulsion of millions of gallons of underground water. It is a process that some scientists worry could dry up water sources on which livestock and wildlife depend.

People here have always had a soft spot for the sage grouse. Plains Indians imitated its movements in their own dances. Lewis and Clark were enthralled by it.

About 50% of the grouse’s historic nesting grounds in the western United States and Canada has already been lost to human development. A species that once numbered more than a million may now be down to 160,000 birds scattered across parts of 11 states--including several thousand in far northeastern California--and two Canadian provinces. Wyoming is home to an estimated 20,000 grouse.

Bird Symbolizes a Place, a Way of Life

The sage grouse belongs to the old, unpeopled West, which Wyoming with its absence of cities and sparse population prides itself in representing. It is the least populous state and the only one to have fewer residents than a decade ago.

The sage grouse needs the peace and quiet of the untrammeled prairie. Out here, humans’ sympathy for the birds is bound up with their own love of open spaces.

While environmentalists have hatched strategies to save the species, cowboys, concerned about the proliferation of natural gas wells across the range, have been among the most eloquent defenders of the habitat they share with the birds and a host of other wildlife.

“The opportunity to ride a horse on the top of the mesa at daybreak,” said Wyoming cattleman Albert Sommers Jr., “and be surprised by a burrowing owl clattering out of a badger hole is exciting. The opportunity to be part of a family that has enjoyed the wintering mule deer herds is unique. The opportunity to walk through the sagebrush in the summer and watch fat horny toads soaking up the sun makes me smile.”

Sommers was addressing a hearing convened by federal officials who must decide the fate of 200,000 acres of sage grouse habitat that lie atop the most productive natural gas field in the state. Just outside the town of Pinedale, the area shares many of the geological features of the nearby Great Divide Basin and is also rich in wildlife.

Energy companies are waiting for permission from the Bureau of Land Management to drill 300 to 1,000 new wells near Pinedale. The conditions governing the expanded activity will represent the government’s first attempt to protect sage grouse since the bird was declared a potential candidate for the endangered species list.

The federal government owns much of the land that covers the most promising oil and gas strata in Wyoming. But typically, energy leases, some of which were first issued 50 years ago, grant broad license to drill.

Up to now the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the property and granted the leases, has said it has little power to lessen the impact of drilling. The agency hasn’t indicated yet whether it plans to take a tougher stand near Pinedale and in the most sensitive areas of the Great Divide Basin such as the Jack Morrow Hills. It has, however, admitted that fields with eight or more wells per square mile could have serious environmental consequences.

“In some areas, development will lead to significant adverse impacts to water resources, wildlife and wildlife habitat, i.e. big game (pronghorn and mule deer) and sage grouse,” the bureau concluded in a first draft of its analysis of the Pinedale project. “No technically or economically feasible level of mitigation can be applied in these areas to minimize the severity of impacts.”

Sage grouse have been in the way of progress for 100 years or more, ever since the Homestead Act of 1862 invited the carving up of the open range. Millions of acres of habitat were transformed as farmers flooded fields and used mechanical beaters and chemicals to destroy sagebrush. Domestic livestock competed with sage grouse and other wildlife for the native grasses that grow in between clumps of sagebrush. Predation has increased as human improvements have opened up the terrain and improved access for the bird’s natural enemies. Roads and pipelines have provided corridors for coyotes, foxes and skunks, while fences and power lines have made convenient perches for hawks and eagles.

Representatives of the oil and gas industry say they have been drilling in Wyoming for 115 years without causing serious consequences to most of the state’s wildlife.

“We must have been doing something right,” said Rick Robitaille, president of the Petroleum Assn. of Wyoming.

At first glance, it seems as though the wildlife have outlasted each new boom. Near the Continental Divide Trail, herds of wild horses lope across the piles of tailings from abandoned uranium mines. Pronghorn browse in the ruins of Jeffrey City, once the capital of the state’s uranium boom and now virtually deserted.

The wildlife returns, but in smaller numbers, the biologists say. One of the main reason is that continual disturbances to the land have degraded the forage, replacing native grasses with hardier but less nutritious varieties.

Alison Lyon, a biologist hired by the petroleum industry to study the effects of well fields on wildlife, has noted sage grouse declines.

“We are seeing fewer birds and lower nesting rates in places where industrial infrastructure is particularly dense,” Lyon said.

The best strategy to avoid a crisis of spotted owl proportions, say wildlife experts, is to come up with voluntary plans to protect the sage grouse in its remaining strongholds.

“If we get enough conservation practices to remove the most serious threats, it could lead to potential avoidance of listing,” said Pat Deibert, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Wyoming who will play a key role in deciding whether to list the sage grouse.

The Endangered Species Act is

perhaps the single most detested piece of federal legislation in this part of the country. The prospect of another listed species could very well prompt the kind of voluntary conservation efforts Deibert hopes for. Still, it won’t be easy.

Pinedale resident Paul Hagenstein, who has relied on gas leases on his own ranch to tide him over during lean years, summed up the dilemma facing many people in Wyoming.

“No amount of royalties will ever give me the enjoyment of sitting on a ditch bank in the morning and watching the deer, the ducks and the grouse. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be sitting here at all if it weren’t for those royalties.”

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The Next Spotted Owl?

Sage grouse are declining dramatically across the western plains. Oil and gas development in the heart of Wyoming’s sage grouse habitat, shown in white below, is among the threats.

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Sage Grouse

* Range: Sagebrush rangelands of western North America; abundant where sagebrush provides 15%-50% of ground cover. Use sagebrush for food and cover.

* Features: Male distinguished by pointed, spread tail and inflated air sacs in chest during breeding display. Grouse mate on strutting grounds called leks, from late March to late May.

* Number: About 160,000 across 11 U.S. states, 20,000 in Wyoming.

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Source: The Audubon Society Master Guide to Birding