In Klickitat County and Douglas County CRP (Conservation Reserve Fields) I have found the White-tailed Jackrabbit to be quite common in these areas in the past 5-10 years (see animals or scat about 80% of the time I'm in suitable habitat for any length of time). While during surveys during the day, you only occasionally flush them, their scat is often readily apparent, especially in lithosol areas that border the CRP grasslands. As others have stated there appears to be a clear separation between white-tails and black-tails in habitat preference and I may noticed far less black-tails than white-tails in my frequent surveys on the Columbia Basin while doing field work. I have only encountered black-tails occasionally, maybe 10-15 times a year despite being in their habitat a decent amount of time.

How does this apply to birds? Simple, the CRP lands have been directly responsible for not only keeping the white-tailed jackrabbits from major declines in my (and many others) opinion, but have also been responsible for keeping many grassland passerines like grasshopper sparrow from suffering major declines. Grasshopper sparrow is heavily tied to these CRP fields (especially in areas where minimal amounts of native grassland habitat remain) and can be quite common in certain areas of them, again especially in Douglas and Klickitat Counties where both counties have large amounts of CRP. CRP is an AG based program that pays farmers to plant native habitat instead of dryland wheat. Much of the CRP is up for renewal now and the federal government has decided to not renew much of the CRP in Eastern WA sighting that many counties are over their allotment. Rough numbers I've heard is that Klickitat County could loose as much as 30% of its CRP and Douglas County as much as 50%. Farmers aren't required to plow it up, but if they aren't being paid by the CRP program, most are not rich enough to leave the land alone. If these areas do loose that much CRP, I suspect we will see drops in species that rely heavily on it like grasshopper sparrow and white-tailed jackrabbit.

Scott Downes
downess at charter.net
Yakima WA