The Sage Grouse Initiative was a huge ecological experiment across 11 western states when it launched in 2010. But participants say it has proved to be an unprecedented success in conserving the iconic species, which was at risk because of habitat loss due to wildfire and other factors.

Through 2022, SGI has used a voluntary conservation approach to work with ranchers to conserve 9.7 million acres of working lands that provide habitat for the greater sage grouse.

That’s more than 4-1/2 times the area of Yellowstone National Park, said Tim Griffiths, western coordinator for the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Working Lands for Wildlife, a broader initiative based on the SGI model.

“So you’re talking massive geography,” he said.

SGI was begun as a new paradigm for conserving at-risk wildlife and the western rangelands where they live.

“Our underlying premise of achieving world-class wildlife through sustainable ranching, that manifests itself in the sagebrush ecosystem under the banner of Sage Grouse Initiative,” he said.

Sage grouse are endemic to western North America and currently occupy about 186 million acres of rangeland in the U.S. West and two Canadian provinces.

“The current range is still huge, but it is roughly half what it used to be,” he said.

Sage grouse are found in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and the Dakotas.

Population cycled up and down in past 100 years

While scientists have noted a decline in sage grouse populations over the years, it’s tough to pin a historical number on how many birds existed before the West was settled.

“We’ve never come up with a population estimate that has any basis in science,” said San Stiver, sagebrush coordinator for the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

A figure of 16 million is often quoted, but that was a number thrown out by preeminent sage grouse scientist Clait Braun with the Colorado Division of Wildlife to see if it would stick, Stiver said.

In an August 2004 Federal Register notice regarding findings on three petitions to list sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it had stated in an August 2000 notice the bird’s population was between 1.6 million and 16 million before European settlers expanded into western North America.

While the historical count is unknown, it was clear the sage grouse number was “unbelievable” in the 1880s, he said.

In 1883, a newspaper article reported about 800 sage grouse eggs had been collected in the Tuscarora, Nevada, area to supply miners with food.

The sage grouse population cycled up and down in pre-settlement times, but the birds were “incredibly” abundant, Stiver said.

The population declined by 1900, however, and Nevada legislative leaders in the late 1910s worried the bird would be extinct in the near future and closed the hunting season. By the 1930s, many states had prohibited hunting the bird.

In the early 1900s, William Hornaday — a zoologist, conservationist and the first director of the New York Zoological Park (now the Bronx Zoo) — was also warning of the bird’s impending extinction due to overhunting and the loss of habitat and range.

Populations began increasing in the 1940s, and hunting seasons were reopened in several places in the 1950s, he said.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, sage grouse numbers were “pretty amazing,” he said. The last peak in population was in 1978, when nearly 100,000 birds were harvested in Wyoming and about 30,000 were harvested in Nevada, he said.

“After 1980, they continued their significant downward trend,” he said.

The population cycled up and down after that but never equaled the peak of 1978.

Between 1966 and 2022, the population maintained about a 3% annual loss if measured by the bottom of each cycle, he said.

“In 2015, we estimated a minimum population of about 435,000 birds,” he said.

The population was probably double that, but that’s just a guess, he said.

“We know we have less habitat,” he said.

The U.S. Geological Survey, Western Association of Fish and Game Agencies, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, other federal agencies and scientists released a report last year showing 1.3 million acres of high sagebrush habitat are lost annually, he said.

Significant blocks of habitat are being lost to fires and degraded by invasive annual grasses — which go hand-in-hand — as well as by conifer invasion, he said.

Reviving the species

Sage grouse need sagebrush, and that means nonfarmed grazing lands. That’s why probably 99.9% of SGI’s on-the-ground partners are ranchers, said Griffiths, of the NRCS.

“First and foremost, we try to keep large, intact working rangelands large and intact. And so we use conservation easements as a tool where we can permanently restrict the conversion of those working ranches to a noncompatible land use” such as a housing subdivision or a gravel mine, he said.

That’s done primarily through the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, or ACEP.

SGI also addresses other major threats to the ecosystem — conifer encroachment, invasive annual grasses such as cheat grass, and degraded wet meadows. Those threats are primarily addressed through the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, or EQIP.

NRCS has 2,813 ACEP and EQIP contracts with ranchers covering 9.7 million acres.

Of that, 298 contracts are permanent conservation easements with private landowners, protecting more than 800,403 acres. Most of that is ranches that aren’t “broken,” he said.

“They’re like the best of the best. And so what those are is more of a preventative measure where we just simply want to help that ranch to stay the best of the best and maintain … those values long term,” Griffiths said.

Very rarely does NRCS or the government hold the conservation easement. NRCS provides roughly half to three-fourths of the cost of the easement to eligible partners — such as land trusts — to purchase the easement.

With EQIP, NRCS works with landowners to implement beneficial conservation practices and pays them a specific amount once the practices are certified as implemented. That amount is typically about 75% of the cost.

Through 2022, NRCS has invested nearly $616 million through SGI — about $334 million of it in easements and $282 million in EQIP. Those are 100% farm bill investments through the conservation title, he said.

That doesn’t include matching contributions from hundreds of partners, including the private landowners, state governments, corporations, conservation nongovernment organizations and philanthropic foundations. Those contributions bring on-the-ground investment to more than $1 billion.

Because the focus — to achieve world-class wildlife through sustainable ranching — is so narrowly defined, “it really does invite a big, broad coalition of folks that typically don’t necessarily work together,” Griffiths said.

Supporting ranchers conserving their lands

Funding is crucial, but rancher participation is integral to the success of SGI, he said.

“Simply put, you can’t overstate the importance of ranchers. They’re absolutely essential,” he said.

“Our agency owns no land and instead we rely 100% on the willingness of private landowners that want to conserve their privately owned working lands … they’re absolutely essential,” he said.

It’s not just that they own the land, it’s that they also have a desire and willingness to participate, he said.

“If we don’t have the ranchers, none of this is possible,” he said.

Of the 186 million acres of occupied range, the government owns 60%. Less than 40% is privately owned, but that is misleading in terms of relative importance, he said.

Rancher success

To see what ranchers are doing, click here.

“Private land typically is of higher quality, has more water, has more forage, has more habitat,” he said.

So even if it might be surrounded by large acreage of much drier, much less productive ground, that stringer of wet meadow down the middle is the “gold mine” owned and stewarded by a private ranch, he said.

“Private lands are just essential to the health of this ecosystem just because of how that land was settled and how those resources have been stewarded for so long,” he said.

There are a lot of studies looking at the relative sage grouse population and its disproportionate location to private lands, he said.

“The bigger leks (breeding grounds), the more resilient populations, happen to be closer to a lot of these water resources that are there year in and year out and, no surprise, almost all of it’s on private land,” Griffiths said.

The other thing is sage grouse are really sensitive to small changes in any part of their home range. If a rancher in northeast Montana, for example, decides to break out a single section of land for farming, that decision can negatively impact sage grouse populations across an area 12 times that size, he said.

“So it’s not that only are these lands more productive, the decisions those landowners make are also gravely more impactful than those of federal lands,” he said.

“You just can’t overstate the importance of private land in the sage brush biome even though it’s a minor area acreage-wise,” he said.

“Ranchers not only own some of the very best sage grouse habitat themselves but they also steward much of the federal lands sage grouse need to survive as grazing allotments,” Griffiths said.

Chris Black grazes cattle in the Owyhee Canyonlands of southwest Idaho and has partnered with the Sage Grouse Initiative to reduce invasive junipers and develop water sources on his rangeland. He’s also revamped his fencing system to avoid collisions and enhance habitat.

It’s important for ranchers to participate in SGI to help the species survive in the West and avoid an endangered species listing, he said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 designated sage grouse as a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act. In 2015, the agency determined ongoing conservation efforts had reduced threats to the species and a listing was no longer warranted.

“Even though information has come out that cattle grazing has nothing to do with the shortfall in the number of sage grouse … we can do projects to enhance habitat for wildlife,” Black said.

“The Sage Grouse Initiative evolved to help with that habitat, developing better habitat, what those birds need to survive,” he said.

SGI is a cooperative effort by anyone with interest in the species, including landowners, state and federal agencies and conservation groups, he said.

“It’s been a really, really shining example of how we can work together to get results on not only habitat but an example for the future to handle these sort of problems that come up,” he said.

New paradigm

SGI is “absolutely, unequivocally precedent-setting. … It’s really the first time in our history that voluntary conservation was put on par with regulatory mechanisms in ESA listings,” Griffiths said.

“That’s a big, big deal to where ranchers are viewed as this essential ally in the fight to conserve the sagebrush ecosystem and voluntary conservation is really recognized as a primary mechanism that’s needed to put conservation on the land,” he said.

All the actions of SGI are designed to address the major threats to the ecosystem and are guided by NRCS’ Sagebrush Biome, a Framework for Conservation Action.

“That in turn then benefits the 350 other (plant and wildlife) species that live there as opposed to kind of the old way of doing this of simply trying to meet the needs of one single species,” he said.

“SGI’s the largest coordinated ecosystem restoration in U.S. history, and the proof’s in the pudding,” he said.

Not only are there about 70 independent, peer-reviewed published articles quantifying the benefits of these conservation actions but the number of producers wanting to participate each year is consistent and robust, he said.

“It hasn’t wavered a bit even though there is really no threat of ESA listing … it’s all just a voluntary, incentive thing,” he said.

“In a lot of ways, it’s showing us what’s possible, I think, when we work with people and figure a way to do things on a voluntary, incentive base … that has enough funding and enough strategic focus where we can actually make watershed-level impacts,” he said.

SGI is what gave birth to Working Lands for Wildlife, which is now the nation’s premiere approach for conserving working lands, he said.

Working Lands for Wildlife partners with farmers, ranchers and foresters to ensure working lands are healthy, productive and resilient. It is active in 48 states, with eight national and 14 state-identified initiatives.

“The success of SGI has led to the expansion of the approach across the country,” Griffiths said.

People can find out more about the Sage Grouse Initiative’s success story by tuning into the next Conservation Outcomes Webinar on Nov. 16 at noon Eastern Time, 10 a.m. Mountain Time.

The webinar is titled “Spatial Targeting in Sagebrush Country via the Sage Grouse Initiative” and is being presented by David Naugle, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Montana and western science advisor for Working Lands for Wildlife.