S1E2 Cheatgrass, Area Fidelity, and GPS Tracking – Sage Grouse
In the final part of our Great Basin Sage Grouse podcast, we explore the threats of cheatgrass, fire, and area fidelity, along with the history of GPS tracking sage grouse in Utah.
In this episode, Gabby and AJ talk to Associate Professor and Rangeland Wildlife Extension Specialist at Utah State University, Dave Dahlgren. As a sage grouse researcher and scientist, Dave explores the threat of cheatgrass and fire in the Great Basin to habitat. He also shares his experience with changing technology in radio telemetry and how his pointing dogs have played a role in his research. Lastly, we discuss one of the most influential and limiting factors in sage grouse survival: area fidelity.
This is the second episode of a two-part series about sage grouse in Utah.
Listen to: Great Basin Sage Grouse Part One
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Clarification Note
After the release of this episode, Dr. Dahlgren provided helpful feedback to clarify a couple of technical points related to telemetry and radio-marking methods:
- Rump-Mount vs. Backpack GPS Radios: In this episode, we referred to GPS radio units used in research. It’s important to note that rump-mount GPS radios, which are used in our discussion, secure around the legs and hips. Backpack-style radios, in contrast, have straps that go around the wings and breast. Backpack-style marking has been shown to have significant negative effects on survival in most gamebird research.
- Telemetry Terminology: The term telemetry refers to all radio-marking and monitoring activities with wildlife, including GPS technology. In some cases, we might specify “GPS telemetry” or “VHF telemetry” to distinguish between newer GPS-based tracking and the older method involving ground or aerial tracking.
These distinctions don’t impact the main takeaways of the episode, but we appreciate the additional insights from experts in the field.
Great Basin Sage Grouse Podcast – Part Two – Audio Transcript
AJ: I have legit learned more about sage grouse in the past two weeks than I have in my entire life.
Gabby: No kidding. Talking to Dave is like taking a masterclass in sage grouse ecology.
AJ: We made the decision to split this episode into two parts to make this whole thing more digestible and to keep it under 30 minutes.
Gabby: So if you recall, in part one, we talked about where the Great Basin is, the sage grouse that live there, and some human-based threats to these birds.
AJ: Some people at home might be asking themselves how Dave has learned so much about sage grouse. We’re gonna explore that in this episode, which comes from his use of GPS transmitters as well as pointing dogs. But there are still looming threats to the Great Basin sage grouse population, and we’re gonna introduce a truly insidious character—the invasive species, cheatgrass.
Gabby: Cheatgrass, water, climate, and fire are a potentially disastrous recipe for destruction in this delicate ecosystem. In this episode, AJ and I also identify something we think is an overlooked reason why greater sage grouse are such an at-risk species: fidelity.
NASA Technical Report Server, October 10th, 1972: My final report. In summary, Earth-oriented satellite technology provides new opportunities to delve more effectively and more deeply than previously possible into some aspects of the behavior, physiology, and ecology of free-roaming animals in their natural ecosystem—especially in remote areas. These opportunities come at a time when an urgent need exists for accurate information about the migratory patterns of endangered species of whales, the movements and habits of polar bears throughout the Arctic, migrations of caribou in regions of projected oil pipelines, and the migratory behavior and island-finding systems in commercially important species of large sea turtles. New fire regimes and overgrazing by domestic livestock present similar problems affecting the future of the total world ecosystem. – Helmut Buchner, Senior Ecologist
AJ: The root of how we’re learning so much about sage grouse these days is GPS technology. Dave has worked through the evolution of tracking technology, from triangulating radio transmitters, or telemetry, to GPS backpacks.
Gabby: Using GPS technology to track sage grouse movements is a cornerstone of Dave’s work. The sheer amount of data that modern GPS units collect has told researchers so much about daily and seasonal sage grouse movements. However, it hasn’t always been like this. When Dave first started working with grouse, he used radio telemetry.
Dave: I’ve been at this since 2002. That’s when I started graduate school, and when I started trapping sage grouse, we were using little VHF transmitters. They were little barrel batteries with a necklace, so it’d go right around the sage grouse’s neck, and it just had a big, long antenna that shot down the back. It would send out a signal—just beep, beep, beep.
Right. And that’s what we used to track birds. So we needed a ground crew of so many people. I spent—I can’t tell you how many years on a four-wheeler—just going everywhere with the antenna, trying to hear.
For my PhD work, they had just come out with these little, like, one-and-a-half-gram VHF radios. They were tiny. We would go in, put a radio on the mother, follow her to her nest, then, when she hatched—within 24 hours—we’d go in either in the morning or the evening when it was cold and she was brooding. We’d get her off her brood and collect all those one-day-old chicks, then suture these little radios between their wings.
Each radio had a little tube on the top and bottom, and then we’d follow them around. We wanted to know what their survival rate was and if we could tell what was killing them. We had GPS technology on big game and other large species for a while, but with birds, ornithologists have regulations. You want to be 3% or less of the body weight for your tag—5% is the max you can do.
So we really had to get into that 20-gram range—somewhere in the twenties or less—for a female sage grouse to handle the weight of that tag without affecting her survival. That didn’t happen until about 2010. What we do now is put them around their hips in what we call a rump mount. They go around the legs, up into the groin, and back around the hips. You just tighten that down so it sits right above their rump feathers, balancing it on the back. We use Teflon ribbon and sew in a little bit of elastic so they can still jump, get into flight, and do all those kinds of things.
Now, our GPS radios are down in the teens. I just ordered some 15-gram radios and some 10-gram ones. Once you get into GPS, it goes in all these directions. The simplest is a store-on-board, which takes data and keeps it onboard. Then you come in with a base station and antenna using a UHF signal. Once you connect, it downloads all your data. A lot of the ones I used required you to get within 200 yards of them, which was tedious. Then, we found a company that’s legit—we’re getting two, three, even five miles away, and we can still download the data.
There are also GSM or cellular transmitters. They don’t have a full SIM card, but they hook into cell phone coverage and send data that way. The problem is, if you take grouse habitat in Western North America and invert it, that’s where you have the best cell coverage. If you invert cell coverage, then you have the best sage grouse habitat. So, having coverage and marked birds is pretty tough. I’ve never had it be successful.
Then, we had satellite radios. They would take about six locations a day, and every three days, a satellite would pass over and collect the data. The data would go to a company in France, and then I’d get an email with my data. That was really cool. With telemetry, if I got one bird location a week, I was doing really well. With GPS, I get six locations a day. And now, with store-on-board, we’re getting a location every 20 minutes. The amount of data is just crazy, and it’s fascinating to watch. Sage grouse will spend a lot of time in one area, and then, boom, they’re 10 miles away—just like you’d expect.
AJ: I had to ask Dave where his pointing dogs intersected with his research. While they tried using dogs to capture birds, other methods proved more effective. But dogs still came in for the win.
Dave: I didn’t have much choice in the matter when it came to dogs. A little background on myself—I was born into a home with a German Shorthaired Pointer and an English Pointer. They were my whole world growing up. I have three dogs right now—two German Shorthairs, Mo and Hayes, and a German Wirehaired Pointer named Josie. We just call her Jojo.
Gabby: Dave originally used his pointers for a sage grouse research project during his master’s degree, using radio telemetry. He tried to find marked birds in 16 hundred-acre plots, but the birds he tagged were nowhere to be found. He decided to work his dog through the plots to see if unmarked sage grouse were using them—and, lo and behold, they were.
AJ: His dog found over 100 grouse. Dave tested his theory two more times. The first time, another graduate student with a bird dog helped—they found 122 grouse. The third time, Dave got assistance from the Utah Chukar Foundation, running every plot simultaneously. They found 121 grouse. Dave verified that no, he wasn’t double-sampling. Sage grouse were using his research plots—even if they weren’t the birds he originally tagged with GPS.
Gabby: In addition to using his dogs for his own research, Dave also co-authored the chapter titled “Use of Dogs in Wildlife Research and Management” in the Wildlife Society’s 2020 edition of the Wildlife Techniques Manual. AJ and I are looking forward to dedicating an episode to this topic sooner rather than later.
Use of Dogs in Wildlife Research and Management, 2020: We hope this chapter will not only serve as a reference for field practitioners but also stimulate new applications of dogs in our field. Dogs have limitations, and there are special considerations in using them.
Just as with any technique or tool, despite their limitations, they provide the wildlife professional with abilities that cannot be otherwise replicated. The author’s experience and available literature indicate that dogs are truly an underused tool. We hope that professionals find this information useful and consider methods that might be employed with dogs to better manage wildlife resources.
In many instances, dogs’ superior abilities can lead to better data collection and management. Current advances in techniques and technology, such as DNA analysis, livestock protection, GPS technology, and statistical analysis, increase the value of dogs for wildlife work. When used properly, man’s best friend may, in fact, be a biologist’s best asset.
Dave: I’ll be honest—I learned as much from my dogs doing research as I did from telemetry. But just as much from the dogs showing me grouse behavior and that kind of thing. But we have a lot of students who don’t have a hunting background anymore. They didn’t grow up hunting, and it’s not their fault. They just didn’t get the chance—so where do they get it?
Gabby: I was one of those wildlife students when I was going to school in Madison. Up until my senior year, I had never been hunting before—I had zero experience. So I did a program called Conservation Leaders for Tomorrow, and its goal was to expose future biologists to the culture of their hunting constituents.
I got to earn my hunter’s safety certification through that program and ultimately shot my first turkey the weekend after completing it.
AJ: So what you’re saying is without volunteers helping expose you—a future wildlife professional—to hunting, you would’ve never ended up where you are today?
Gabby: Exactly. So to me, this is a huge way that the public can get involved. Contact your local university’s wildlife department or extension specialist and offer to expose interested students to hunting.
Aldo Leopold, 1949: Cheatgrass grows in dense stands, and each stem bears a mass of prickly awns, which render the mature plant inedible to livestock. To appreciate the predicament of a cow trying to eat mature cheatgrass, try walking through it in low shoes. Field workers in cheatgrass country wear high boots. These prickly awns cover the autumn hills with a yellow blanket as flammable as cotton wool.
It is impossible to fully protect cheatgrass country from fire. As a consequence, the remnants of good browse plants such as sagebrush and bitterbrush are being burned back to higher altitudes, where they are less useful as winter forage. The lower fringes of pine timber, needed as winter cover for deer and birds, are likewise being singed back to higher levels.
AJ: If you remember from our last episode, conifer encroachment was a big topic. Now we’re gonna move on to the encroachment of cheatgrass.
Gabby: Cheatgrass was originally brought to the U.S. from Eurasia, and its introduction was mostly accidental. A 2003 paper from the U.S. Forest Service states: “The introduction of cheatgrass to North America probably occurred independently several times via shipped ballast, contaminated crop seed, packing material, and at least one deliberate introduction for a college experiment in Pullman, Washington, in 1898.”
AJ: According to the North Dakota State Library, one of the first introductions through ballast stumps was in 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri. An introduction near Denver, Colorado, originated from packing material or straw that was infested with cheatgrass seed.
Gabby: As of 2024, cheatgrass covered over 100 million acres in the Intermountain West. This is a big deal because cheatgrass outcompetes native grasses, and it’s highly flammable. Its seeds are easily spread, and one plant can produce anywhere from 25 to 5,000 seeds in one year. Thankfully, their seeds only remain viable for one to two years, which is exactly why I pull the cheatgrass growing in my yard every spring before it goes to seed.
AJ: Although cheatgrass spreads so easily and has covered thousands of miles, it isn’t particularly nutritious or palatable for things like deer, cattle, or even elk. In fact, the only thing we know that really eats it is chukar. And as much as we’d like that many chukar in the landscape, it’s just never going to be the case. Cheatgrass is incredible at reproducing. In fact, that’s part of how it got its name.
Dave: Cheatgrass is mostly an issue in the Great Basin. It’s not as much of an issue as we move up into the Wyoming basins and out toward the Great Plains because that climate is much more suited to perennial grasses.
We don’t see it take over systems as much as we do in the Great Basin. But what cheatgrass does is actually cheat other grasses out of moisture and nutrients—that’s its name, right? It grows during the winter, creating little green shoots, and then as spring comes, it’s up and going, absorbing moisture and nutrients from the soil faster than our native perennials. So it cheats them out of those nutrients.
But the biggest issue with cheatgrass is it’s a tinderbox. Its tendency is to ignite, and its fire return interval averages somewhere between five and seven years. If you just had a monoculture of cheatgrass, it would burn every five to seven years.
And the problem is that most sage plants—almost all, except for a couple I can think of—don’t resprout. They have to grow from seed. So once fire takes out the shrub component, you need a lot of time for it to reseed and start growing again. If you’re at lower elevations, many of those sagebrush plants you see are 30 to 50 years old. It probably takes about 30 years to get back to that normal sage cover.
Gabby: Historically, snow has been what’s kept cheatgrass from climbing higher and higher in elevation. However, recent data has shown that Utah has been experiencing wetter winters. It’s not because it’s snowing more—it’s raining more. Rain actually helps cheatgrass cheat, allowing it to continue outcompeting native vegetation while creeping higher and higher.
Dave: Cheatgrass typically has not been a high-elevation plant, so our higher elevations have been insulated from the cheatgrass issue. One of the things that keeps cheatgrass out of higher elevations is snowpack—because once we have snow laying on the ground, cheatgrass can’t cheat. It can’t start germination in the winter because snow is overlaying all that. But if we get less and less snow, cheatgrass can start to do its thing.
Some recent models I’ve seen from other researchers show cheatgrass is actually creeping higher and higher, and I’ve seen it myself in the areas I work. I have an area in Southern Utah where I’ve had cheatgrass in aspen stands, and I’m like—uh, this is crazy. The problem with cheatgrass is its fire return interval, and then sagebrush just can’t get a hold again.
Unfortunately, we don’t have an answer. I remember visiting a lab in Oregon that specializes in this, and I asked, “Okay, what’s the solution to this problem of getting sagebrush back in the system and dealing with cheatgrass?” They said, “We don’t know.” I thought, “If anybody should know, you should know!” But they didn’t, because we just don’t have the technology right now to overcome the cheatgrass issue.
AJ: Things like agriculture or fencing may not be deserving as much attention as they get. When we think of how Dave’s two-thirds rule holds up for sage grouse, the impacts of cheatgrass fueling wildfires present a far more imminent challenge.
Gabby: When it comes to sage grouse conservation, humans are doing a lot in terms of research and active habitat management. However, something that Dave told us really stuck with me—it helped me understand exactly why habitat loss and fragmentation are so bad for sage grouse. It’s because of their site fidelity, or rather, their area fidelity.
Dave: What’s the role of fidelity in sage grouse habitat use? What I mean by that is—if we track a hen, and she nests in a particular spot, chances are the next year she’ll nest within a couple hundred yards of that same spot. It’s not strict site fidelity, like a heron rookery or a golden eagle nest where they return to a built nest. Instead, it’s more like area fidelity—their seasonal habitat home range overlaps significantly from year to year.
A colleague in Montana has studied this, and we’ve found that fidelity actually determines habitat selection more than the habitat itself does. What that means is, because sage grouse have used an area before, they are more likely to return to that area—even if it’s no longer good for them.
For example, let’s say a big fire comes through and burns out most of the sagebrush cover. Their risk of mortality goes way up when there’s not enough sagebrush cover, right? But because they have fidelity to that spot, they keep coming back, and they just die quicker. We can restore habitat in some cases, but we can also create great habitat that nothing wants to use—because they’ve never used it before. So how do we create fidelity?
AJ: We’ve explored many types of issues threatening sage grouse in the Great Basin, whether naturally occurring or human-caused. The fact that sage grouse have such a strong area fidelity can actually be a real problem. If these areas degrade, those birds have a much lower chance of survival. They’re going to return there and not find anything. And again, we have to remember the scale at which this occurs. We’re not just talking about 20 miles at a minimum—we’re also talking about thousands of miles on the other end of the spectrum.
Gabby: These concepts of space and fidelity are hugely important. Without space, they won’t persist. Without protecting high-fidelity areas, they won’t persist. It seems to me that maintaining large swaths of high-quality sage grouse habitat within a 50-mile radius of high site fidelity areas is one of the most effective ways we can help these birds. Given the sheer number of conservation issues and the scale at which they occur, conserving sage grouse is really, really difficult.
Dave: A lot of sage grouse conservation work has shifted to local working groups. The great thing about these groups is that they’re open to anyone who cares. You become a stakeholder as soon as you care. We welcome people to those local working group meetings. The state of Wyoming has a strong local working group program, and anybody interested can become part of those groups.
These groups are based on specific regions or areas—what we call resource areas—that they are responsible for looking after and managing. After that, there’s the political side—showing your representatives that you care about these issues. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much representatives want to understand. Most of them aren’t natural resource experts, but they need help making informed decisions. And that’s a good thing.
Lastly, get involved in an NGO. Just last Saturday, we had the Utah Chukar and Wildlife Foundation banquet. I had my grad students there so that bird hunters—mostly—could see what research they’re doing. The Chukar Foundation gives me funding every year to support my research and to help move the conservation needle forward. These are important efforts we can all be involved in.
AJ: A trend you’re going to hear in a lot of these episodes is that state and federal agencies have very limited funding and manpower to tackle these issues. It gets even trickier because one size doesn’t fit all. We can’t manage sage grouse the same way across their entire range because sagebrush ecosystems vary so widely. While scientists are doing their part—including creating a national plan that accounts for the diversity of habitat across a massive landscape—there is a huge need for more engagement and assistance from the public. Perhaps more than ever, we need to ensure that critical funding resources are directed at both research and management. Even just being informed is important—these birds truly rely on us.
Dave: This is going to sound silly, but I’m a big Star Wars fan. The first movie I ever saw as a kid was The Empire Strikes Back. There’s that line where they talk about how everything is connected—we’re all symbiotic life forms depending on each other. There’s some real truth to that when it comes to ecosystems and life. I think that’s something we should all keep in mind as we face ecosystem challenges and risks in the future.