Wildfires blacken key sage grouse, pronghorn habitat in northern Wyoming

Even some pronghorn, the fastest land mammals in North America, could not outrun the blazes burning across northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana. Wildlife biologists don’t have a final tally, but right now they’ve documented as many as 50 antelope died recently while trying to navigate fences to escape one of northern Wyoming’s four raging wildfires.

“This was a really fast-moving fire that covered a lot of ground in one day,” Tim Thomas, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Sheridan regional wildlife coordinator, said about the House Draw Fire east of Buffalo that has burned more than 170,000 acres.

The carnage raised enough alarms that the Game and Fish Department issued a press release on Aug. 22, the day after the fire began, telling people to report injured animals that may need to be euthanized. It was an unusual step taken in response to unusually destructive fires. The Flat Rock, Remington, Constitution and House Draw fires have burned almost half a million acres in slightly more than a week, taking with them untold acres of native sagebrush, grasses, fences and other infrastructure.

Wildlife in the West have historically benefitted from fires burning across the landscape, with blazes creating opportunities for new growth. But in an era of climate change, on a rangeland fundamentally changed by invasive species, coal-bed methane development and other fragmentation, biologists worry the aftermath of these fires could be grim. With the four fires still burning, wildlife managers and researchers weigh the benefits and drawbacks of these kinds of blazes, highlighting that when the final embers die out, some species may win, and without human intervention, species like sage grouse and pronghorn may lose.

‘It’s just a blackout’

On a spectrum of winners and losers, Thomas guesses northeast Wyoming’s mule deer, sage grouse and pronghorn could lose. While estimates are still underway, an early look shows that the House Draw Fire burned 32% of the Buffalo region’s sage grouse core area, he said. And the area that burned was the “best of the best,” added Chris Kirol, a research biologist in the Buffalo region who has studied sage grouse there for more than a decade.

Wyoming hosts more sage grouse than any other state, and the northeast corner has seen its grouse numbers decline precipitously over the last few decades. The Buffalo core area is one of the last strongholds for sage grouse in the Powder River Basin.

Unlike lodgepole pine forests, which require fire to regenerate and quickly produce hearty seedlings, sagebrush struggle much more to recover from fire. For much of the sagebrush steppe’s evolution, when a fire moved through, it burned in patches, charring some sagebrush and leaving other plants untouched. But we now live in a vastly changed world. Invasive annual grasses like cheatgrass fill much of the sagebrush understory, which means when a fire begins, it burns through hotter, faster and leaves little in its wake.

“It’s just a blackout,” Kirol said of the area where he’s been studying sage grouse. “Everything is gone. And sagebrush takes a long time to reestablish and get to pre-fire size. It could take up to 50 years.”

Cheatgrass and other invasives like the newest arrival, ventenata, grow fast and offer little if any nutrition to wildlife and livestock. They start growing in the fall and are some of the first to poke through soil in the spring, stealing space, water and nutrients from other plants then curing and quickly going to seed. That means invasive grasses not only replace wildlife forage, but because they dry so early, they tend to fuel bigger fires, further compounding the problem by creating even more space for invasive grasses.

And sage grouse require sagebrush to survive, both for food and shelter, with their dusty, feathered backs perfectly camouflaged to the brushy plant.

“Removing sagebrush and wondering why sage grouse aren’t doing well is like draining a reservoir and wondering why it is no longer supporting fish,” Kirol said. “And they need large expanses. Their whole world is based on sagebrush.”

But it’s not just grouse. Scores of species from songbirds to pronghorn depend on sagebrush. And viable sagebrush habitat continues to shrink under a barrage of threats, particularly in northeast Wyoming. Burning hundreds of thousands of acres will just add to the hurdles already facing species like mule deer, Thomas said.

But even among the very real threats of invasives and the devastation brought by fires to sage grouse and other species, biologists still see glimmers of hope.

‘It’s also an opportunity’

As fires in the West increase in size due to invasive species and warmer and drier conditions from climate change, land managers and researchers have also learned more about ways to regenerate sagebrush and keep invasive species at bay. Ian Tator, Wyoming Game and Fish’s statewide habitat biologist, recently reached out to habitat specialists in Nevada to ask about aerial planting of sagebrush seeds as something that could potentially help regenerate these vast swaths of high plains.

Federal, state and county agencies have also had luck spraying burned areas for cheatgrass to give native plants a head start.

But all of these efforts, from sagebrush seeding to cheatgrass spraying, cost money. A lot of money. In January, Gov. Mark Gordon asked the Legislature for $20 million to fight invasive species, saying “Wyoming is currently losing the battle against invasive annual grasses.” Lawmakers ultimately allocated about $9 million for efforts , money that can go fast, especially when considering the vast expanse of burned area and other projects around the state, Tator said.

Some areas could potentially benefit from the fire, like those where juniper trees spread out into the plains, sucking up water from other native plants. Their removal could improve habitat, Thomas said, especially for species like elk.

And while the fires burned untold miles of fencing, landowners could work with government agencies and nonprofits to rebuild ones more friendly to wildlife, Tator said.

On a landscape comprised almost entirely of private land, cooperation moving forward will be key, biologists and wildlife managers said.

“It’s easy to paint these fires as doom and gloom, and this is a little more doom and gloom than others,” Tator said, “but it’s also an opportunity to scale up invasive annual grass treatments, reseed sagebrush and bring partners together to provide more connectivity for wildlife.”

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