Category: Sage Grouse
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Flawed Study Minimizes Harm to Sage Grouse from Livestock Grazing
Numerous headlines on Ag network media are championing a new University of Idaho study that alleges that livestock grazing does not harm sage grouse, a proposed endangered species. Across the range of sage grouse, livestock grazing is the primary land use, so it’s not surprising that grazing might be a factor in sage grouse decline.…
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Rewilding a Mountain
How removing cattle led to a massive ecological recovery
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Wyoming research challenges benefits, highlights pitfalls of mowing and spraying sagebrush
Longtime habitat management techniques don’t stimulate vegetation growth in one sagebrush subspecies and may have detrimental effects on sage grouse and sagebrush-reliant songbirds, several studies show. The subtitle could be “No Sh#t Sherlock”. ts always nice when science is heard. For decades virtually all sage grouse experts were against killing sagebrush for sage grouse. The…
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Stepping Lightly In The Sage — More Bovine Curtain Propaganda
If you pay attention to livestock grazing issues on public lands, you invariably will see research promoting cattle grazing as the magic elixir that can repair damaged riparian areas, eliminate cheatgrass and other weeds, reduce wildfires, increase soil carbon storage, and improve habitat for endangered species like sage grouse. If you think this is too…
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Forbs and Sage Grouse
The sagebrush steppe dominates the drier parts of the West, including parts of Southeast Oregon, much of Nevada, southern Idaho, western Wyoming, western Colorado, western Utah, and parts of New Mexico. Sagebrush steppe covers 165 million acres of the West. Due to many factors, including farming, ranching, subdivisions, and, most importantly, range fires, sagebrush vegetation…
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BOSH Project Destroys Tens of Thousands Acres of Juniper
The BOSH project in southern Idaho ultimately plans to destroy tens of thousands of acres of juniper woodlands on BLM lands. BOSH stands for Bruneau-Owyhee Sagebrush Habitat Project. The advocates of the BOSH project use pejorative language to characterize the Juniper clearing from the landscape. Terms like “restoring” the “natural” condition of the land assume…
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Sage Grouse “Collaborative Conservation Effort” is an On-Going Disaster
The numbers don’t lie — and the sage grouse “collaborative conservation effort” is a total and on-going failure. There were 16 million Greater Sage Grouse before Europeans arrived and began the destruction of the “sagebrush sea” in the Great Plains. The iconic birds were down to 400,000 in 2015 when Obama’s Secretary of Interior, Sally Jewell, rejected…
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No Such Thing As Frequent Fire In Sagebrush Ecosystems
An important question regarding sagebrush ecosystems, and species that rely upon them like sage grouse has to do with exactly what constitutes the fire rotation in sagebrush habitat? And a corrolary question is do current fire management policies emulate these historical conditions? William Baker’s paper, Scaling Landscape Fire History: Wildfires Not Historically Frequent in the…