In some 50 years of working as a sage grouse scientist, Clait Braun has seen it all. He’s witnessed the adoption of conservation plans, their subsequent dilution, the loss and degradation of sage grouse habitat, the waxing and waning of populations.
He even helped discover and document a new species — the Gunnison sage grouse, distinguished by its inordinately long neck plumage — in the late 1990s. He’s so highly regarded that courts accept his descriptions of species’ health and status as expert testimony.
Over the decades, Braun has battled bureaucracy, tangling with politicians and wildlife officials in Colorado where he worked most of his career. Time and again, he says, he’s heard them explain away declining populations of greater sage grouse as insignificant events.
Population slides are part of a pattern that includes recovery, bureaucrats have said and continue to say. There are other excuses, Braun said: populations are cyclical … it’s happening across the Western landscape, so we’re not to blame … prolonged drought.
Against this backdrop, bad news for greater sage grouse has continued to mount. Spring population surveys of the chicken-sized bird showed a continued three-year slide in 2019. Population estimates, meanwhile, were down an average of 44% across 12 western states and provinces over the last three years.
Braun decided he’d had a gut of it. What’s been described as a roller coaster ride for greater sage grouse, a ride that’s due for an upswing, has in fact been an overall decline indicating the fragile species is in dire straits, he contends.
So, with two colleagues, the retired biologist wrote a piece (see below) that calls greater sage grouse a “species in crisis” and those in charge of its health “agencies in denial.”
“State wildlife agencies appear eager to dismiss recent population declines as merely being a result of a low in the ‘cycle’ or related to unfavorable weather,” he and co-authors wrote in the December 2019 issue of Grouse News, an international, scientists’ newsletter. Cycles don’t adequately explain the declines, he and colleagues Jack Connelly and Michael Schroeder wrote. Blaming population losses on cycles or weather “seems to be an abdication of responsibility,” their essay reads.
If Braun had his way, greater sage grouse would be listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened in every state but Wyoming, he said.
Wyoming Game and Fish Department Sage Grouse and Sagebrush Biologist Leslie Schreiber challenged the article’s conclusion, at least for Wyoming. “The sage grouse is not in a crisis,” she said in an interview.
A graph of population estimates between 1996 and 2019 shows that greater sage grouse numbers in the state “are within the range of variability we’ve seen in the last 20 years,” she said. “It’s too early to tell if the peaks and troughs are stair-stepping down,” to indicate long-term decline, she said.
Although the widely used method for estimating grouse populations — counting strutting males on breeding ground leks in the spring — was developed in Wyoming, it wasn’t widely and systematically applied until after the mid 1990s, Schreiber said. That puts earlier counts, and trend analyses based on them, in question, she said.
The estimates and data from before about 2000 should be viewed with “a very large grain of salt,” Schreiber said.
She also provided scientific papers that address wildlife population cycles, including one that tracked waxing and waning populations of greater sage grouse and cottontail rabbits. The 2010 paper by lead author Bradley C. Fedy supports a theory of cycles and ties the two species together in their cyclical nature.
A 2017 paper by Jeffrey R. Rowl and Fedy also documents population cycles among greater sage grouse, though it says their lengths varied.
In the Wyoming basin, a geographic enclave that includes most of the state, the length of the cycles appeared to shorten, the paper said.
The papers and discussion “points to the need for more research into the nature of sage grouse fluctuations,” Schreiber said. It may be that scientists also have to get on the same page with established definitions — a separate issue to ongoing conservation efforts, she said.
“If the term ‘cycle’ is being misused… the scientific community should discuss that,” she said.
‘Things are not good’
Decades of experience with bureaucrats and politicians led Braun and others to write the article, Braun said. “We’ve been around the block a few times,” he said. “We understand the games Game and Fish agencies [play] with numbers.”
“We think the agencies misrepresent their data,” he said. “They see good things. We see things that are problematic.
“Our professional view is things are not good.”
Tom Christiansen, Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s former greater sage grouse leader, seen here in 2015, checks out the habitat near the Divide Lek where up to 300 male grouse strut in mating rituals in the spring. Christiansen and other conservationists urged Gov. Mark Gordon to intervene in BLM oil and gas lease sales to ensure that grouse in what may be the world’s finest habitat are properly protected.
Co-author Schroeder, an upland bird research scientist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said enough data exists to justify the paper’s bleak long-range West-wide assessment.
“We’ve gone through this so many times, it’s almost like déjà vu all over again,” he said.
“There’s always a tendency to say ‘it’s low in the cycle and the population is going to increase.’
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