Feds say new investments in Oregon sage grouse habitat paying off, but conservationists disagree

The greater sage grouse lives in 11 western states, and has experienced an 80% population decline during the last 50 years. (Harney County Soil and Water Conservation District)

Work to restore imperiled sage grouse habitat in southeast Oregon is moving faster than Tracy Stone-Manning had imagined a year into massive federal investments in landscape restoration.

Stone-Manning, director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, recently visited the agency’s Lakeview field office and federal land near burns to see a spring and a lake that have returned following thousands of acres of juniper removal, trail maintenance and wildfire prevention work. The area in southeast Oregon is one of 21 federal “restoration landscapes” in the West identified by the bureau in 2023 to receive millions in funding.

“If we do our work right, you won’t see thousands of acres of land that’s been burned and that’s full of cheatgrass,” she told the Capital Chronicle. “The more we do juniper work, the more the hydrology of these landscapes will come back into balance, because it turns out junipers are kind of thirsty.”

But for conservationists, the greatest concern is what they don’t see on the landscape – a return of those iconic sage grouse. Their populations have declined significantly following decades of hunting, cattle grazing and development and have not improved despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investments in habitat restoration by state and federal governments over the last decade.

“Until they (the Bureau of Land Management) meaningfully address grazing, the species is going to careen towards extinction,” said Adam Bronstein, Oregon director for the nonprofit Western Watersheds Project. “The story about losing sage grouse is about grazing. That is the story.”

Return on investment

Last year, the bureau chose two areas in Oregon to receive federal funds for restoration work as a “restoration landscape.” One is the southeast sagebrush region, and the other, in southwest Oregon, is home to forests and watersheds in need of restoration after decades of logging and development.

Collectively, the two areas have received $10 million from the Inflation Reduction Act, part of $161 million allocated nationwide for restoration landscapes. A key priority for officials in southeast Oregon is to save sage grouse, which have gone from a population of millions to around 800,000 in the last few decades.

Despite more than $1 billion in state and federal investment over the last decade, the number of sage grouse in Oregon has fallen 20% since 2015, when federal and state regulators joined ranchers and conservation groups to hammer out a strategy for protecting the birds and keeping them off the federal Endangered Species List.

Stone-Manning does not see those population declines as a failure, saying the bird is not listed as endangered or threatened.

“The bird is holding on, right, and we need to have it hold on until we can turn the corner and have populations improve,” Stone-Manning said.

Stone-Manning also said the cattle, which conservationists say are overgrazing, trampling on plants and polluting streams with manure, actually help many of the 350 species that live in the region by eating invasive grasses. She said the cattle can help restore sagebrush territory in southeast Oregon.

“People are running cattle on public lands to improve the range habitat for sage grouse, for mule deer,” she said. “And it turns out, when we’re improving landscape health, we are improving opportunities for grazing as well.”

But to Bronstein, putting millions more into habitat restoration without limiting grazing is a losing investment.

On a recent trip to the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, an area within the restoration landscape area, Bronstein said he saw more sage grouse than he’d ever seen, but not because of the bureau. Rather, he said, federal rules for protecting the refuge include banning cattle.

“They stopped allowing grazing there 33-years ago,” he said.

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