07/24/2026
the land ethic
toward a state of harmony between men and land by Chris Madson
Grouse and grazing in the sage (abridged via Facebook)
George Bird Grinnell, an eminent naturalist with long experience on the western frontier, was never fond of exaggeration. In the fall of 1886, he was camped in Wyoming’s Shirley Basin, the far eastern edge of sage grouse range. He woke one morning to the sound of wings.
“Looking up from the tent at the edge of the bluff above us, we could see projecting over it the heads of hundreds of the birds, and, as those standing there took flight, others stepped forward to occupy their places. The number of Grouse which flew over the camp reminded me of the oldtime flights of Passenger Pigeons that I used to see when I was a boy. Before long the narrow valley where the water was, was a moving mass of gray. I have no means whatever of estimating the number of birds which I saw, but there must have been thousands of them.”[xi]
By the early twentieth century, the unrelenting intensity of grazing had prepared the way for outright loss of huge tracts of sage to cheatgrass and devastated the sagebrush habitats that remained. Half the original habitat of the sage grouse was simply erased. It’s a legacy of ignorance and greed left to us by the generations of stockmen and farmers who first tamed the Intermountain West.
I think it’s fair to say that many modern ranchers share a concern for the sage and the wildlife it supports. For some, their only reason is the lingering threat of a federal listing of the sage grouse and/or another denizen of the sage, like the pygmy rabbit or Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, as threatened or even endangered. Others have a stake in the land that transcends business. Either way, they want guidance on grazing practices that provide for sage grouse. The question then arises: What sort of grazing regime suits sage grouse? Is it even possible to keep healthy populations of sage grouse and profitable numbers of cattle on the same landscape and, if it is, how?
And, even after decades of research, the shocking answer seems to be: We don’t know for sure.
In 1937, George Girard wrote: “An ideal sage grouse refuge would also necessarily have to be protected from grazing of any sort,” but he added, “If deferred grazing were practiced, giving the grass and other forage an opportunity to develop, it would furnish food and cover and consequently nesting areas.”[xii]
In his 1952 monograph on sage grouse, Bob Patterson made a distinction between grazing and overgrazing. “As a result of overgrazing by sheep, a small parcel of land at the lower end of Eden Valley lost its attractiveness as a nesting area for sage grouse,” but “there is no indication that moderate utilization of the range in the upper Green River Basin by sheep had created any conditions seriously detrimental to sage grouse.”[xiii]
In 1994, a group of Oregon researchers monitored 124 sage grouse nests. Only 18 of the nests escaped the notice of predators, and these successful nests had “greater cover of tall, residual grasses and medium height shrubs” than nests that had been destroyed by predators. Our data indicated the value of residual grass cover at sage grouse nests.”[xiv]
A 1998 study in southern Wyoming found that “areas with greater shrub coverage, taller grass, and residual grass, and greater litter cover were used for nesting.” The researchers went on to observe that “our results suggest that grazing management practices that promote increased height and coverage of grass will increase chick survival.” They recommended “maintaining residual grass heights of more than 10 centimeters to provide nesting sage grouse with suitable concealment and screening cover.”[xv]
In 2005, yet another group of researchers found that sage grouse preferred to nest in places that had more shrub canopy, residual grass cover, and grass height. They concluded that “management strategies that protect dense sagebrush stands and enhance residual grass cover and height within those stands should be used to increase nesting success of greater sage grouse.”[xvi]
Other studies have reached the same conclusions. The evidence is overwhelming— sage grouse prefer to nest and raise broods in stands of sage that have a thriving understory of grasses and broad-leaved plants. This makes intuitive sense. Grass cover helps hide a nesting hen from predators, provides escape cover for chicks after they hatch, and supports a smorgasbord of insects, seeds, and foliage to feed the growing brood. If a little grass/forb cover is good, it would seem that more would be better. In ecosystems that evolved with no significant herds of large grazing animals, the science suggests that the way to produce the most sage grouse would be to eliminate herds of large domestic grazing animals entirely.
Two long-term studies, one in Idaho and one in eastern Montana, have tried to quantify the effects different grazing regimes have on sage grouse. After a decade of research in each place, neither study offers much guidance for a rancher interested in supporting the birds. Is it better to rest a sagebrush pasture first thing in the spring when sage grouse are nesting, or is it preferable to leave some forage standing at the end of the growing season so there will be cover before the forage starts to grow the next spring? These studies provide little insight. Is it better to rest a pasture for a year or more? What about rest-rotation grazing? Is there some optimum level of grazing that supports livestock and grouse at the same time? The studies offer few answers, except to imply that, when managed “responsibly,” grouse and grazing seem to go together without much problem.
That’s a convenient conclusion, since it implies that ranchers and land managers like the BLM have had nothing to do with the ongoing decline in sage grouse numbers. It doesn’t bother to define what “responsible” management looks like; it flies in the face of a huge body of research at the scale of the individual nesting hen, and it ignores the history of livestock’s impact on grouse in the early twentieth century. The apparent contradiction is troubling.
It’s worth noting that stricter control of grazing on the public domain, beginning in the late 1930s, combined with effective regulation of hunting, gave sage grouse a boost that lasted more than 30 years. The renewed decline in the last decades of the twentieth century seems to be due, at least in part, to another influence. We know that sage grouse do better when the sage gets more precipitation, and a quick look at the data on drought shows that the last fifty years have been much drier than the fifty years that preceded them. A lack of moisture takes a toll on everything in the sage, from grass and forbs to livestock and wildlife like pronghorn and grouse. So maybe we can blame the decline on climate change.
But that doesn’t relieve us of our responsibility as managers. We can’t make it rain, but we can adjust livestock grazing pressure as conditions change, especially on the public domain. A recent analysis shows that 56,000,000 acres of range under the aegis of the Bureau of Land Management have failed to meet the agency’s own standards for ecological health, which are not known to be overly stringent. On at least 37,000,000 of those acres, overgrazing is the cause,[xvii] and on much of the rest, a long history of range abuse has almost certainly encouraged cheatgrass and contributed to the problem. Whatever effect well-managed grazing might have on sage grouse, we know from history that persistent range abuse is bad for grouse and other wildlife and no better for ranchers in the long haul.
There’s a lot we still don’t know for certain about the interaction between sage grouse and livestock in the Intermountain West. The best way to change that is with long-term peer-reviewed research. Until we have dependable answers from that effort, we should pay attention to what science already tells us and leave more grass for the grouse.
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