Wildfire in the Trout Creek Mountains fueled 10 years of research on sage-grouse populations. The fieldwork came to an end this summer, but the insights gained can guide conservation efforts for years to come.
There was a waiting game in the desert this spring. It involved counting eggs before they hatched, then counting the days greater sage-grouse survived in the elements. It was part of an intensive study on habitat use and survival of adults and chicks. It was also the last year in the field after a decade of hard work and thoughtful effort.
“The study is looking at adult survivorship, so we’re monitoring how the adults survive over the calendar year, or ecological year,” explained Christian Hagen, Oregon State University (OSU) Senior Research Faculty for the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences. “In that, we’re looking at their entire life history; we’re following females to their nests, and of those nests that are successful, we then monitor the survival of the chicks out of those nests. It’s truly a you’ve-gotta-have-the-egg-before-the-chicken case.”
OSU’s long-term project monitored sage-grouse populations in response to wildfire in the Trout Creek Mountains for 10 years. The study was designed to examine how grouse respond to megafires and it was prompted by the Holloway Fire that burned nearly half a million acres in the area in 2012.
“Prior to the fire, it was one of the highest density populations of grouse in the state,” Christian said. He’s co-managed the project, which was primarily funded through the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). “It was a horrible loss of habitat, but they saw a huge opportunity to learn, so we sat down back in 2012 to have the conversation. We were all in agreement that we needed to do it for at least 10 years,” he recalled. “ODFW had the foresight that they didn’t have a lot of before-information, but we could certainly mark these birds and understand what they’re doing in this landscape post-fire and make some comparisons to other contemporaneous studies in the west.”
Across the West, fire is a natural and important part of shrub-steppe ecosystems. However, the spread of invasive, non-native annual grasses accelerates fire cycles and fragments or displaces wildlife habitats that are relied upon by sensitive species, such as greater sage-grouse. In some places, the presence of invasive cheatgrass has reduced natural fire intervals from every 30-100 years to every 5-15 years. This creates a disadvantage for sagebrush since they can’t recover as quickly as the invasive grasses. Related studies are helping ODLT learn how to successfully manage our properties to benefit sage-grouse and to ensure lands are more resilient to fire.
Christian was well aware of what information and research existed before the fires of 2012 since his prior role had been working as ODFW’s Sage Grouse Conservation Coordinator. The agency conducts lek counts in early spring to count males attempting to find a mate, but the OSU study focused on what comes after the elaborate courtship displays and subsequent breeding with females. The OSU study includes brood counts that monitor the survival of chicks, a fragile period in the life-history of sage-grouse.
This spring and summer, Jarrod Messman joined the project as OSU’s Faculty Research Assistant to conduct the final field work with the Hagen Lab and recorded nesting activity of females and brood activity of sage-grouse chicks. “Obviously, it takes them time to build the nest and lay the eggs,” Jarrod said. That’s approximately 10 or so days and then the female incubates the eggs for nearly a month. “It’s typically 27 or 28 days and then they all hatch on the same day. They’re precocial, so they are able to get up and follow mom from the nest site. That was my ‘day zero’ as a brood and I’d follow them for 54 days after that.”
Jarrod would follow them physically and remotely. This was thanks to tracking backpacks that are typically attached to birds in winter and usually fall off after a couple of years. “Since these were GPS units, I was able to download data and see where they were, where they’d been and what they’d been doing,” he explained.
Jarrod was based at our Trout Creek Ranch Headquarters, which helped with pre-dawn departures. He joked that he’s grown to love and hate sage-grouse, depending on where they nest, which could stem from needing to be at observation sites by 4 a.m. to limit disturbing the females. Even with those early-bird mornings, Jarrod enjoyed peaceful times in the dark, being enveloped by stars and fading into the landscape as pronghorn and chukar strode past.
Jarrod also conducted vegetation surveys, documenting the composition and structure of plant species used in and adjacent to nests. These records could assist in the recovery of sagebrush and native grasses by showing changes in vegetation that are infamously slow to recover, especially at lower elevations.
Over the course of 10 years, 236 females were monitored and nearly 300,000 grouse locations were collected around an extended perimeter of the Holloway Fire, or an area the size of Rhode Island. For 2023, Jarrod monitored 15 females who created 11 nests. Of those, eight were successful in having chicks hatch. Five of those broods were deemed successful on their 54th day of staying alive and they had an average of five chicks per brood. “It was a really good year with above average success for both nests and broods,” Jarrod beamed.
The data still needs to be analyzed to help determine what areas sage-grouse preferred for food and cover, both for security from predation and to keep them warm or cool. The end product will be a map, or a source-sink model, that shows what habitats the birds are either successful in or not. This comes from overlaying a map of what habitat they used during a year with a map that tracked survival rates in those habitats.
It also comes from years of collaboration among individuals, organizations and agencies, with a long list of community support. The project was led by OSU research faculty Christian Hagen and Katie Dugger, an OSU faculty and United States Geological Survey Assistant Unit Leader. It included graduate students, post doctoral students, field technicians and a large number of volunteers, along with local ranchers providing access to their private property, and financial and field support from the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Christian is proud of what’s been accomplished and is optimistic about the recovery of sage-grouse habitat in the Trout Creek Mountains, even though he suspects some areas may never host birds again. “Without much of a human touch, this system is recovering. It’s not gonna be 100%, but the system is recovering, the birds are responding and so that gives me great hope,” he reflected. “The Trout Creeks is 8,000 feet in elevation, so it’s a highly resilient system because it’s high and wet and cold. If you have similar disturbance in lower elevation, which we have had, I don’t know if we can share the same positive outlook for those particular sites because they‘re not as resilient to the invasion of cheatgrass and other annuals.”
Christian hopes to continue working with landowners and land managers in the area who are adapting their own plans to work on the landscape. Any data going forward would be to answer new questions as it relates to changes in land use. Although the field study has come to an end, community involvement will continue with greater sage-grouse and sagebrush habitats, and researchers like Christian can offer a decade’s worth of experience and insights to ongoing efforts.
“It’s been my life’s work and I’m still heavily engaged in it all,” shared Christian. “On a personal level it’s very rewarding to be able to contribute to the conservation of the species that essentially gave me my start in the wildlife profession, so maybe I’m able to give back a little here.
Feature image: A juvenile greater-sage grouse is surrounded by invasive cheatgrass. — Oregon State University
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Learn More
- Discover Hagen Lab’s research, team members, publications and their intriguing photos via their Instagram channel.
- Check out OSU’s information on greater-sage grouse and on Christian Hagen’s work.
- Read the latest Annual Population Report (Sept 2023) from ODFW’s sage-grouse studies.
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