S1E1 Great Basin Sage Grouse – Project Upland Podcast
Explore the research of sage grouse and sage habitat in the Great Basin of Utah with Dave Dahlgren, PhD, a leader in sage grouse science.
In this episode, Gabby and AJ talk to Utah-based sage grouse expert Dave Dahlgren. As a sage grouse researcher and biologist, Dave teaches us about huge amounts of habitat sage grouse need to survive and explains human-centric issues impacting their continued existence.
This is the first episode of a two-part series about sage grouse in Utah.
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Great Basin Sage Grouse – Part One – Audio Transcript
Gabby: AJ, have you ever seen a sage grouse before?
AJ: I have. I’ve hunted them in Montana. I can remember how insane it was to see them for the first time—a group of mature males. I was filming at that exact moment, not shooting, but I was awestruck by how massive they were. It’s very obvious why people call those big males bombers.
Gabby: They really are huge. I’ve had the privilege of hunting them in Wyoming, and they couldn’t be a more beautiful bird. They’re an incredible symbol of sagebrush ecosystems.
AJ: Sage grouse in general represent a powder keg in the fight over environmental issues. The complexity of the topic lends itself to challenges that have been met in national politics. So instead of tackling all of the sage grouse issues at once, we’ll hone in on a specific region—in this case, the Great Basin in western Utah.
Gabby: And as you’ll learn in this episode, not all sage grouse habitat is created equal. The topic of sage grouse conservation spans across nine states and a small portion of southern Canada, and each place comes with its own unique issues.
AJ: This is a great example of how funding for science, federal and state agencies, big wild spaces, and the expertise of academia are essential—not only to how we succeed going forward, but also to how we know so much already today. As we will learn in this episode, science can solve and mitigate many game species issues.
Gabby: We will also have an unlikely appearance from a non-game bird that has a stake in this story as well—the Pinyon Jay.
John Muir: When in full plumage, he’s a beautiful bird with a long, firm, sharp-pointed tail, which, in walking, is slightly raised and swings sideways, back and forth with each step. The male is handsomely marked with black and white on the neck, back, and wings, weighs five or six pounds, and measures about 30 inches in length.
The female is clad mostly in plain brown and is not so large. They occasionally wander from the sage plains into the open nut pine and juniper woods, but never enter the main coniferous forest. It is only in the broad, dry, half-desert sage plains that they’re quite at home, where the weather is blazing hot in summer and cold in winter. – December, 1898, John Muir.
AJ: The sound you were hearing is a male sage grouse during their courtship display on a lek in the springtime. A large male can push the scales at seven pounds. This makes them the largest of North America’s native grouse species. They are a game bird that gets a lot of attention—not just from hunters or for how impressive they are, but because of where and how they live.
Gabby: Before we go any further, let’s first learn some background information about the greater sage grouse from a species expert, Dave Dahlgren.
Dave: Most people I work with—like agency folks and others—they’re sick of talking about sage grouse. But I love ’em still, and I could talk about ’em all day. My name’s David Dahlgren. I am an associate professor and Rangeland Wildlife Extension Specialist at Utah State University.
So, the greater sage grouse occupies—or at least historically occupied—most of western North America where we had sagebrush ecosystems. We’ve lost about half of our sage grouse habitat in the western U.S., and thus this species kind of represents a bigger biome. Some people might use the word “umbrella species.” There are over 300 wildlife species that use or are dependent on the sagebrush system. That’s really the bigger issue with sage grouse.
AJ: Dave has been working with sage grouse since the early 2000s. In fact, sage grouse research is his bread and butter. Through his work, he’s learned some truly incredible things about sage grouse, including just how much space they require to survive. This is about lots of space, and Dave has really pinned down a very black-and-white scientific explanation of how much space sage grouse need to survive.
Dave: If you think of a lek—okay, so a lek is a single point on the map, right? Now draw a 20-mile buffer around that lek. So now you’ve got this big circle, and that creates an area. If 25% or less of that buffer is sagebrush, the chance of that lek persisting is zero. It’s not gonna persist, okay? Between 25% and 50% of that buffer being dominated by sagebrush, you have this sliding scale—the closer you get to 50%, the closer you’re getting to about a 75–80% probability that the lek will persist. And the closer you get to 25%, the closer the probability drops to zero.
Once you go over 50% of that buffer, now you’re above 80% probability, getting close to 90%. Once you go above two-thirds—two-thirds or higher—you’re practically at 100% probability that the lek will persist. That is the biggest issue with sage grouse. We spend all this time working on things like whether there are enough forbs, whether there are enough grasses, or all these other components—when the real issue is that 20-mile buffer around the lek and how much of that is sagebrush.
Gabby: This two-thirds rule that Dave describes really helps me grasp just how much habitat sage grouse need to persist. Thinking about how regional groups of grouse require a 20-mile buffer around their lekking grounds really drives home the idea of the scale at which sage grouse management takes place.
Sage grouse are truly unlike pheasants in this way. They need more than a quarter section of good habitat to survive. They need 20, 40, 50-plus miles of contiguous suitable habitat in order to exist.
AJ: Just a heads-up, we did censor some of the dialogue to protect specific locations. Okay?
Dave: Think about an elk. In winter, it might be in one area, and then after hunting season—bam—it’s 40, 50 miles over here. That’s how sage grouse use the landscape, and that’s what affects their persistence.
I’ll give you an example. We were doing a project at a lek in Utah—just past the crook of that hill, okay? We captured a female, put a radio on her, and then we couldn’t find her. So we did a flight, and we found her on a nest by the Idaho border—55 miles away. We caught her on a lek here, and she nested 55 miles from there.
And what’s interesting about sage grouse is that some individuals might spend their whole lives right around that lek, while others might make mid-sized movements, and still others may do these 50-mile migrations. That variation is important because some years it’s advantageous to stay around the lek, while other years it’s more beneficial to leave and expend energy migrating elsewhere. We need that variation for populations to persist over time.
John Muir: In leafy regions blessed with copious rains, we learned to measure the productive capacity of the soil by its natural vegetation. But this rule is almost wholly inapplicable here, for notwithstanding its savage nakedness, scarce at all veiled by a sparse growth of sage, the desert soil of the Great Basin is as rich in the elements that in rainy regions rise and ripen into food as that of any other state in the Union. – 1918, John Muir.
AJ: This story sits us in the Great Basin in the 21st century. But before today, the Great Basin shows fossil evidence of human habitation dating back to 12,000 BC. By 1869, the first railroad passed through, and the settlement of the West was well underway. According to NASA, the Earth’s crust in the Basin and Range Province is gradually expanding, cracking into hundreds of faults as it thins over millions of years. Land on one side of the faults rose, forming mountains, even as the land on the other side sank into basins.
Gabby: The Greater Sage-Grouse range stretches across the Western United States and into Canada. This bird can be found from Washington to eastern Montana, all the way down to northwestern Colorado and eastern California. Although this bird is a sagebrush obligate—or a species that requires sagebrush to survive—not all lands covered in sagebrush are equal.
The sage steppe of eastern Montana looks a lot different than the semi-desert sage lands found in Utah’s Great Basin, which is where Dave Dahlgren’s research takes place. The Great Basin is an ecoregion and basically a watershed that has no outlet. So, the Great Salt Lake is the kind of flagship terminus—you know, a Great Basin lake.
Dave: It was basically created by the historic or prehistoric Lake Bonneville, and that was an inland, huge lake that covered most of Nevada, the western side of Utah, and a little bit up into Oregon and maybe even Idaho. But basically, anything that drains into the interior—either to the Great Salt Lake or any of those other interior salt lake-type areas—is the Great Basin.
AJ: As a New Englander, sometimes I have a tough time grasping the sheer size of the public lands out West, and therefore the dynamics of their social impacts. When I think about ruffed grouse in New England, it’s more about public access on private land, like timberlands, and the importance of state agencies, the public, and private landowner relations to keep those places freely open.
So, I have to ask—what percentage of the sage-grouse population occurs on public lands?
Gabby: From my understanding, across the sage-grouse range, the majority of it is located on public lands, particularly on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. Utah specifically is about 70% public land. Its western portion is part of the Great Basin, and nearly 8 million acres of it is owned by the BLM alone.
That’s about 12,500 square miles.
AJ: All right. To be clear, that’s bigger than the state of New Hampshire. So, is all of that sage-grouse habitat?
Gabby: Kind of. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, most of that area is included in the Greater Sage-Grouse historic range. Today, sage-grouse occur mostly around the edges of Utah’s borders, where the elevation is higher and there’s more private land.
The Great Basin itself is not actually super great grouse habitat. As it turns out, sage-grouse need more than just sagebrush to survive. They depend on perennial grasses and forbs that live between the sage. Sage-grouse, especially hens, rely on these nutritious foods to stay healthy prior to the breeding season. During the brooding season, chicks rely on insects as a protein-rich food source. Insects are more strongly associated with areas with forbs and grasses than large swaths of sagebrush. Without these resources, grasses are probably more about cover.
Dave: They don’t eat much grass—sage-grouse don’t. But I think the bigger thing that’s probably more specific—and if you’re not into this world, you may not know it—is that if you think of a continuous line between northeastern Montana and come straight down into southern Nevada, instead of an east-west line, just tilt it across, the variation in sagebrush systems and communities along that line is incredible. And yet, this one species inhabits all of them.
So when you get down to southern Nevada or where I do a lot of work in southern Utah, you don’t have a lot of grasses and forbs in those systems. In fact, one ecological term for it is semi-desert sagebrush. It just doesn’t have the grasses and forbs or even the potential to support them. Yet, when you’re up in that part of Montana, I remember the first time I visited, I thought, This isn’t sage-grouse habitat. Why would sage-grouse live here? There’s not enough sagebrush. And yet, there they were—I was finding them.
So, it’s that incredible variation that makes it challenging to define what pristine habitat looks like in southern Nevada and southern Utah versus northeastern Montana. Those are very different in terms of what creates ideal habitat.
I think the next biggest thing that comes to my mind—I talked earlier about this variation in habitat across the range, from more of a grassland with some sagebrush up north to a semi-desert as we move further southwest. I’m actually part of a project that’s combining telemetry data across populations along that entire continuum.
We’re looking at habitat selection now, combining all that data into one big dataset to really analyze the variation in habitat use based on location. That kind of study wouldn’t have been possible before. To conduct a habitat selection study, you need an enormous amount of data—thousands and thousands of points—for the models to start processing and producing meaningful assessments.
It’s not published yet, but it’s on its way. So, that’s my next big takeaway. We’ve learned that we need focused conservation areas for sage-grouse. It’s kind of a triage approach: Where do we have them? Where are they thriving? Let’s hold onto those areas first. Then, we can start looking at areas where they are less likely to persist and figure out different strategies. That’s been the core approach to sage-grouse conservation so far.
Gabby: Pristine habitat in Utah looks a lot different than pristine habitat in Montana. In Utah, sagebrush ecosystems face both naturally occurring and human-caused threats. However, not all of these issues necessarily have negative impacts.
In the next part of this episode, we’ll explore the human-centric issues affecting sage-grouse—livestock, energy, and fences.
AJ: Let’s use agriculture as our first example of a conservation issue that may not necessarily be as bad as it seems.
Livestock grazing is a huge topic that people talk about all the time. If you read an article about sage-grouse, you’ll hear about grazing. But surprisingly, there are—like—zero studies that show actual detriments.
Dave: When it comes to grazing and sage-grouse, I had the highest chick survival rate reported in the literature—over 50% of the sage-grouse chicks survived. And that was all in the presence of active grazing. In fact, I saw something that—I can’t say this is totally data-driven and analyzed—but it almost seemed like they sought out livestock, especially cows, and wanted their broods in those areas.
And I thought, Why are they doing that? Then I realized—if a coyote comes around, those livestock chase it out lickety-split, right? And I thought, Oh man, maybe there’s some advantage there.
If you look across the range of sage-grouse, almost all the large intact populations are grazed. There’s about 87% overlap between grazing and our sage-grouse populations. I’ve come to see that, on the whole, livestock are much more compatible with game birds than we might think.
Does overgrazing happen? Yeah, but it’s usually very localized. What we forget is that when we see a local area that has been overused, that also means there are other areas that weren’t overused—and we tend to overlook that when we think about oil and gas impacts out West as well.
Gabby: For me, the first thing that comes to mind is habitat fragmentation. But are oil pads occurring at high enough densities to truly have a negative impact on Great Basin sage-grouse? The energy issue is interesting. Some research has shown that it’s not until you reach a certain well density that you start to see negative impacts on sage-grouse.
Dave: So there is a well density threshold we can stay below. I can’t remember the exact number off the top of my head, but the research showed that until you hit that threshold, the impact on the bird isn’t significant.
That’s where directional drilling can become a solution. But the biggest issue with sage-grouse overall is scale.
Throughout my career, communicating the concept of scale in sage-grouse conservation has been my biggest challenge—whether I’m talking to the public or even to conservation organizations and agencies. It’s about helping them understand that scale because sage-grouse use the landscape like elk do. They need huge tracts of contiguous sagebrush to have a high likelihood of persistence.
AJ: I really want to emphasize that energy development can coexist with sound sage-grouse management practices. But when greed pushes environmental concerns to the backseat, that’s when everything falls apart.
Science-based management is not a zero-sum game. Follow the science, and we can all take a victory lap. It all comes back to habitat, habitat, habitat.
Dave: I was doing some research in southern Utah, and another grad student working on his PhD with me was studying prairie dogs. He was working with Utah prairie dogs, an endangered species, and was testing different levels of cattle grazing to see how it affected prairie dog use, vegetation, and plant communities.
He kept telling me, Since we put in these new fences—ones that had never been there before—I keep seeing sage-grouse hits on them. It looks like mostly male feathers.
Then he said, You need to go up there and see if there’s a lek.
This area was way off the beaten path—just a two-track road for miles to get there. Finally, one spring, I had time to check it out. I came over the hill, and there they were—208 males dancing.
We had found a lek. And not just any lek—one of the biggest on the mountain.
If you’ve heard of sage-grouse conservation, you’ve probably heard about the white reflectors being installed on the top wire of barbed-wire fences out West.
Gabby: Dave was actually part of the initial effort to install them. But since then, he’s had time to reflect on whether all that effort spent on fencing was actually worth it.
Dave: You know, NRCS had a big movement, installing lots of markers and working with private landowners. What I liked about NRCS’s approach is that they modeled the landscape and asked, Where are we at the highest risk?
They focused on areas around leks and wintering grounds, which I think was the right way to go. However, I’ll add this—it’s just like hunting mortality. Is it really going to affect the population? Mortality has to occur at a certain level before it becomes additive to the population and starts to have a real impact.
So, with all our marked birds out there, were we seeing fence collisions at a rate that was actually hurting the population? Not that I know of—definitely not in my work. I think it was a good-faith effort, and it certainly saved some birds. I was all for it. We’re doing the best we can with what we have.
But is fence marking the answer? No, I don’t think it’s the whole answer. But there’s no silver bullet to any of this, right? I think it was a good initiative. I also did a lot of LUSH project work in Kansas, where we marked fences where we thought there might be an issue. I felt that was a worthwhile effort too.
My only concern with projects like that is that they sometimes shift the focus away from habitat. We get caught up trying to save everything, and suddenly we forget the real priority—we need more connected habitat more than we need markers on fences. And that’s where I start to have issues with some of these approaches.
John Muir: In the number of individual trees and extensive range, this curious little conifer surpasses all the others combined. Nearly every mountain in the state is planted with it, from near the base to a height of 8,000 to 9,000 feet above the sea. Tens of thousands of acres occur in one continuous belt. Indeed, viewed comprehensively, the entire state seems to be pretty evenly divided into mountain ranges covered with nut pines and plains covered with sage—now a swath of pines stretching from north to south, now a swath of sage. One black, the other gray. One severely level, the other sweeping on complacently over ridge and valley and lofty crowning dome. – 1918, John Muir.
Gabby: Conifers are an interesting subject because there’s another species, the Pinyon Jay, that relies on pinyon-juniper (PJ) ecosystems. As far as wildlife managers can tell, managing for both sage-grouse and Pinyon Jays is kind of a catch-22.
Dave: Right now, most of my research funding is focused on conifer issues within sagebrush habitats because those conifer issues directly affect Pinyon Jays as well.
I call it the cage match—you’ve got sage-grouse and sagebrush on one side, and then you’ve got conifer encroachment and pinyon-juniper woodlands with the Pinyon Jay on the other. And they’re colliding. So, who’s going to win that conservation fight? Because it seems like there’s no clear winner.
We’re looking at sage-grouse, Pinyon Jays, and sagebrush songbirds all at the same time, trying to determine the best cost-benefit approach.
Conifers have expanded beyond their natural range. So, we have to ask: What should that ecological site really look like? These trees have encroached into sagebrush habitats, reducing habitat for sage-grouse and other sagebrush obligates. But at the same time, the Pinyon Jay is an obligate species for pinyon-juniper woodlands.
So, what do we do?
What’s even more interesting is that Pinyon Jays have been declining, even as pinyon-juniper woodlands have been expanding. So, wait a minute—if their habitat is increasing, why are their populations decreasing?
I’ve been the only sage-grouse researcher working with some of these Pinyon Jay groups, and it’s been fascinating to try to see the issue from both sides. But one thing is clear—conifer encroachment is a big deal. It’s a bigger deal in the Great Basin than in any other system when it comes to taking over sagebrush and reducing available habitat.
I did some research back in 2017 in northwest Utah, where we analyzed large-scale conifer removal treatments. Most of the treatments were done using bull hogs—that’s the big drum with carbide teeth that just shreds trees. It’s amazing to watch. It spreads tree debris, which actually creates a nice seedbed for other plant regeneration.
What we found was really interesting—sage-grouse nest survival actually increased after these treatments. Sage-grouse brood survival increased as well. We had radio-marked birds and tracked them, and we saw that survival didn’t just increase in the treated areas—it also increased in the intact sagebrush adjacent to the treatments.
This shows that space matters. The more open space you have—meaning treeless, contiguous habitat—the better it is for sage-grouse. Even if they weren’t using the treated areas directly, they still benefited from the removal of conifers nearby.
And we were able to demonstrate that clearly with our data.
What I don’t know is—what did we do to Pinyon Jays while we were doing all that? I don’t have the answer to that yet.
Gabby: What we’ve learned so far is that space is critical for sage-grouse. That two-thirds rule that Dave taught us is such a great example of why we need public lands—so this habitat remains long after we’re gone.
We’ve explored the challenges posed by humans, from energy development to fences, as well as natural threats like conifer encroachment.
AJ: But the Great Basin, a semi-desert environment, faces even greater threats—ones that could permanently alter the future of sage-grouse in the blink of an eye.
These are threats not so easily overcome.
Gabby: In the next episode, we’ll explore these issues in more depth and take a closer look at Dave’s work. Because not only is he an accomplished scientist, but his lifelong love for hunting and dogs intersects with sage-grouse research in a unique way.
AJ: And we’ll answer an important question: What is the more effective research tool—a pointing dog or a GPS transmitter?
Dave: One size doesn’t fit all. We can’t manage all sage-grouse the same way because of the diversity of habitats and community types. That’s what we’re trying to understand.
You know, the BLM has to have one overarching plan to move forward for sage-grouse—so does the Forest Service, and so do individual states.
So, how do we manage in a way that meets the needs of these different areas when they all have different ecological communities?
That’s the challenge. That’s the tip of the spear—and it’s where I’m pushing the hardest.