Subject: habitat protection / sage grouse (was . . .) (fwd)
Date: Jul 19 07:18:01 2000
From: Pat Little - patl at halcyon.com


Deborah,

Thanks for yet another interesting post. Some of the arguments Stan presents are
familiar to me, but many are not. The extent of the damage is truly amazing! I
was particularly surprised that grazing "produces very little of the total beef
consumed in the country" - does anyone know the background to this?

I looked up the paper Stan mentioned and found it hard going, so I thought I
might offer tweets another reference which covers grazing, along with mining,
water rights, and forestry, as adverse impacts on the land. It is Charles
Wilkinson's book "Crossing the Next Meridian" (Island Press 1992). It is
extremely well written, easy to read and scholarly (if that isn't a
contradiction ;-) While not specifically from an avian standpoint the book may
be of interest to bird lovers since it goes into detail on the history of
grazing and its impacts on rangeland, and why the laws that were right for the
time are not appropriate today (the "lords of yesterday").

Pat Little
Kirkland, WA
425.822.8064
<patl at halcyon.com>


-----Original Message-----
From: TWEETERS-owner at u.washington.edu
[mailto:TWEETERS-owner at u.washington.edu]On Behalf Of Deborah
Wisti-Peterson
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 11:04 AM
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: habitat protection / sage grouse (was . . .) (fwd)



hello tweets,

i received permission to forward this message to you. i think it
will be quite interesting for those of us who love wild birds in
our state.

regards,

Deborah Wisti-Peterson, Girl Scientist nyneve at u.washington.edu
Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash, USA
Visit me on the web: http://students.washington.edu/~nyneve/
<><><>Graduate School: it's not just a job, it's an indenture!<><><>


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 08:49:32 -0500
From: stan moore <hawkman11 at hotmail.com>
Subject: habitat protection / sage grouse (was . . .)


Ellen Paul wrote:

>That being said, there are other mechanisms for protecting habitat. Many
>of them. Federal and state governments regularly purchase land, as do
>private organizations. There are conservation easements, various kinds
>of protected areas, there are private reserves...there are all sorts of
>mechanisms. It's just hard to keep up with the need.
>
>And even if you protect it from development, you can't stop the acid
>rain from falling, the invasive species from colonizing, the acid mine
>drainage from sterilizing the streams, and so on.
>
>Well, go out and VOTE!
>

I would respond --


I have to agree with Ellen's points, but make another point or two, with an
explanation. I am heavily involved as a concerned member of the public on
the issue of sage grouse decline, which has enormous implications because
sage grouse are an indicator species and a very charasmatic one, for a vast
area of sagebrush communities across the US west. Sage grouse have declined
as much as 80% since the 1950's and distribution has decreased by about 50%
since settlement. This indicates a very serious problem for not only sage
grouse, but for sympatric species across the range of sage grouse.

An analysis of causes of the decline of sage grouse reveals a number of
seemingly complex factors such as lack of necessary vegetative structure to
provide food and cover, fragmentation of habitat by roads, fences,
industrial developments, etc., loss of sage due to agriculture and other
human uses, predation, hunting, loss of sage due to invasive non-native
grasses and plants such as cheatgrass, catastrophic fire episodes, and
several others.

The most damning component of the whole story of the decline of sage grouse,
though, is that sage grouse occur mostly on publicly-owned, BLM lands which
are used primarily for grazing and have been for many decades. In other
words, our public land managers have, for socio-political reasons, managed
our public lands in such as way as to benefit domestic livestock operations
and commercial mining operations, to the detriment of the ecosystem and with
catastrophic results for sage grouse and other species.

Just to show how poor grazing management (which benefits the livestock
industry by maximing profits at the expense of land health) affects sage
grouse both directly and indirectly, consider some of the effects of poor
grazing management on the grouse:

overgrazing has caused enormous land damage in the form of soil erosion and
destruction of delicate microbiotic crusts, fungi, and soil litter;
overgrazing has removed critical grasses and forbs that provide cover and
critical food for grouse, especially young sage grouse which are dependent
on forbs during their first few weeks of life; grazing interests have
insisted on fire suppression, which has resulted in loss of habitat; grazing
interests have used chemical and mechanical "treatments" to remove large
areas of sage brush in order to provide more forage for cattle; barbed wire
fences have caused direct mortalities of grouse through collisions;
improperly managed cattle grazing results in cattle crowding riparian areas,
trampling plants, eroding soil, and polluting water; vast areas of land have
been put into alfalfa to support public lands cattle, which removes habitat
and even more critically, diverts large amounts of water to crop production
and away from wildlife, such as sage grouse; overgrazing promotes spread of
cheatgrass, which dominates whole landscapes and is undesireable for sage
grouse habitat and other wildlife habitat and which is prone to frequent,
catastrophic fires; cheatgrass and other non-native grasses are direct
by-products of grazing, due to the fact that original transfer of cheatgrass
seeds probably were vectored into the environment by cattle and their feed;
improper grazing management results in cattle often consuming the best
forage and leaving behind noxious weeds, which then spread and proliferate;
overgrazing has opened up the opportunity for large-scale expansion of
pinyon/juniper trees, which overtake important sage environment because
overgrazing gave juniper seedlings an inappropriate advantage over normally
occurring plants; cattle grazing can result in actual trampling of grouse
and their nests; physical presence of large numbers of grouse can dislocate
grouse; and on and on.

All the above-mentioned affects of grazing on sage grouse need not have
occurred, except for the socio/political reality that economic interests
have historically been favored over biodiversity IN PUBLIC LAND MANAGEMENT
AND DECISION-MAKING.

By the time some of the mechanisms that Ellen Paul mentioned, such as
conservation easements are employed, native species are already at risk of
extinction, which brings in a whole new set of socio-political factors.

We have the knowledge to manage the public lands appropriately for sage
grouse and other endemic species. We need the public will. Voting is part
of the solution. Public education is a vital part. As the public learns
about grazing interests in the West, and how cattle grazing is a
heavily-subsidized industry that produces very little of the total beef
consumed in the country and actually contributes very little to the overall
western economy, people are starting to insist on reform of public lands
grazing policies, or even banning cattle grazing on public lands altogether!
The fabulous ecologist Aldo Leopold noted that for all practical purposes,
any grazing in the arid West amounted to overgrazing because the recovery
from grazing in arid conditions is very slow compared to grazing in mesic
conditions.

Other than sage grouse, a number of bird species and communities have
suffered in the sage brush country of the American West due to poor grazing
management by public lands managers. Ornithologists should be aware of this
already, but a good resource on this issue is the paper
"Ecological Costs of Livestock Grazing in Western North America", by Thomas
L. Fleischner, published in Conservation Biology Volume 8, Number 3, pp.
629-644, September, 1994.

There are many other highly informative, peer reviewed papers to demonstrate
the same concepts.



Stan Moore San Geronimo, CA hawkman11 at hotmail.com