Defenders Magazine

Biodiversity: Planning for Prairie Wildlife

by Mark Matthews

Near the border of the Little Missouri National Grasslands in northwest North Dakota, the prairie breaks into deeply furrowed badlands. Spiderwebs of deep trails, carved into the dusty soil by generations of thirsty cattle, lead to solitary water tanks. Here and there, the heads of oil rigs continuously pump up and down like sandpipers pecking on a beach.

Until recently, no one cared about this vast "wasteland" —- except ranchers and wildcatters who sweated to squeeze a profit out of the hardscrabble soil. But that's all changing, according to U.S. Forest Service officials who have written a new management plan for ten federal grasslands covering 2.9 million acres across the Dakotas, Wyoming and Nebraska.

"In the past, things have been commodity-driven," says Jeff Adams, the National Environmental Protection Act coordinator for the Little Missouri Grazing Association. "This management plan is based on multiple-use."

Most parties that took part in the drawn-out public process agree with that assessment. "It's a monumental philosophical shift for the Forest Service," says Jonathan Proctor, grassland program associate with the Predator Conservation Alliance. "Traditionally, the grasslands have been nothing more than glorified cattle pastures with oil wells on them."

Even ranchers say they are laying out the welcome mat. "We believe other people have a right to enjoy the land as much as we do," says Ray Clouse, president of the Little Missouri Grazing Association.

Unfortunately, the general goodwill quickly fades once one gets to the nuts and bolts of the plan. Oil and gas companies that already own leases claim they don't have to follow any of the new rules. Ranchers say erroneous science has soiled the plan. Conservationists argue the plan doesn't go far enough to restore the integrated web of prairie wildlife. "There are still huge deficiencies in the plan," says Kirk Koepsel, Northern Plains regional representative for the Sierra Club. Sodbusters who began stringing barbed wire across the prairie in the 1880s quickly came to regard many of their wild animal neighbors as "pests." Grizzly bears and bison were exterminated, and coyotes and prairie dogs were shot on sight and poisoned. But a scant 50 years after settlement, the harsh environment sent many homesteaders packing. During the Dustbowl years of the 1930s, the government bought back many deserted homesteads and turned them into the grasslands of the Dakotas, Wyoming and Nebraska, while reclaimed lands in other states, like Montana, fell under the administration of the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Researchers never really got a chance to study the intricate prairie ecosystem before human development fragmented it. The few who tried often couldn't see the whole picture. For instance, in 1924 scientists reported in the U.S. Agricultural Bulletin that the black-tailed prairie dog was "one of the most injurious rodents of the Southwest and plains regions" because it "removed vegetation in its entirety from the vicinity of its home."

Biologists estimate that prairie dog towns once occupied more than 98 million acres —- an area larger than Montana. The majority of them disappeared under the farmer's plow and development. Those that didn't fell to federally orchestrated poisoning programs that covered an estimated 20 million acres. Today, black-tailed prairie dogs are limited to less than 1 percent of their historic range.

Craig Knowles, a wildlife consultant in Boulder, Montana, who has mapped many prairie dog towns across the West, says the animal got a bum rap from the early researchers. "Even though prairie dog towns appear to be desolate, they are full of plant life," he says. "The animal's digging activity disturbs the soil, and weedy plants take over, much like in a cultivated field. When closely cropped, these plants become higher in protein and nitrogen content and are sought out by cattle, bison, antelope and elk."

Bison herds would seek out prairie dog towns and, in turn, prairie dogs would follow bison trails to found new colonies once a town became overpopulated. Free ranging cattle later took over the bison's role. The idea that prairie dog towns provide good grazing remains a hard sell to ranchers. "I have prairie dogs on my ranch and all they've managed to do is reduce the amount of grass I can produce," says Clouse.

Despite the grass issue, the vocal, football-sized critters found other ways to irk Westerners. Their burrowing can undermine fence posts, and they sometimes chew into underground power and phone lines. And since they, like other rodents, sometimes carry fleas infected with bubonic plague, some health officials consider them a menace. Ranchers like Clouse don't feel that anything should be done to save the species. "We have way more prairie dogs than are necessary. They're a prairie rat. That's what they are."

But where some humans could do without the "pest," other critters can't seem to survive without them. Modern scientists have identified more than 165 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and insects that depend to some extent on the prairie dog for survival. Some find it easier to locate prey in the areas of closely cropped grasses, others live in the shelter of the burrows and some regularly dine on the prairie dogs themselves. "The black-tailed prairie dog is the cornerstone of prairie ecology," says Knowles.

Knowles first came to realize the significance of the prairie dog in the 1980s while studying the mountain plover. The bird was once so common across the northern plains that one hunter recorded shooting 126 mountain plovers in one day. Today, biologists estimate that only 4,300 to 5,600 plovers remain. Knowles noted that about 90 percent of his mountain plover sightings occurred in prairie dog towns.

Other frequent denizens of prairie dog towns have suffered as well. The black-footed ferret, which dines exclusively on prairie dogs, is now one of the rarest mammals on earth and is only surviving because of an aggressive reintroduction program at a handful of surviving large prairie dog towns. Burrowing owl, feruginous hawk, swift fox and golden eagle numbers have also plummeted over the decades in conjunction with diminishing prairie dog towns.

In 1998, after being sued by three conservation groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that the black-tailed prairie dog warranted protection as an endangered species, but the agency could do nothing for it because it lacked funding and other species took a higher priority.

In theory, the new grasslands management plan should help bolster and expand existing prairie dog towns. If everything falls into place during the next 15 years, prairie dog acreage could expand from the current 37,500 acres on the ten grasslands to a range of 62,000 to 101,000 acres. The Forest Service will not poison prairie dogs unless they pose a threat to human health or are unwanted migrants onto adjacent private property. Sport shooting of the creature has also been restricted in certain areas on some grasslands —- especially where ferrets have been reintroduced. Also, the plan has identified areas for future black-footed ferret reintroduction once more prairie dog towns expand to a suitable size.

But conservationists feel the plan falls short in a number of areas. "Prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets did relatively well under the plan, but [it's] not good enough," Predator Conservation Alliance's Proctor says. "The Forest Service has to take some serious measures to actively restore the prairie dogs. Plus, the heavy level of shooting in some areas will continue to keep them from expanding."

Proctor praises the decision to stop poisoning the rodents, but during field trips to the Little Missouri, he noted many instances of illegal poisoning. Knowles also found instances of poison oats scattered upon prairie dog burrows in the same area. "Enforcement of the new policy must occur," Proctor says.

If prairie dogs do expand, then populations of other species that dwell in the unique ecosystem should also begin to rebound. Upland game birds, waterfowl and neotropic birds, as well as vegetation -- forbs like globe mallow and grasses like needle-and-thread -- inhabit the grasslands. Under the new plan, "a mosaic of different vegetative patterns" will return to the prairie, says Little Missouri Grazing Association's Adams. An easing of livestock grazing in some areas should allow taller grasses to mature, creating important cover for the sharp-tailed grouse, greater prairie chicken, sage grouse, neotropic birds and waterfowl.

"Ninety-nine percent of the tall grass prairie is now in soybean and corn," says Greg Schenbeck, the Forest Service's Northern Great Plains wildlife coordinator. That makes the remaining native sod areas even more important. "If you lighten up on grazing and encourage mid to tall grasses to grow, then species such as the prairie chicken usually follow," he says. The plan also calls for letting woody plants, or brush, grow back in overgrazed draws and riparian areas. Managers will also allow some areas to return to sagebrush.

Of course, letting good forage "go to waste" is a tough pill to swallow for ranchers. Range managers on the Little Missouri project that letting some grass grow tall over a 20-year period will result in a 9 percent reduction in Animal Unit Months (the amount of grass a 1,000 pound cow and her calf can eat in a month.) Rancher Clouse calls the effort a waste of time. "That kind of grassland structure is unattainable here. Most of this land is classified as submarginal."

But managers remain confident they've got the science right. "The stuff we put into the plan we know already works on a smaller scale," Schenbeck says. "The question is, will the funding and public support be there for the implementation of these plans."

Although conservationists welcome the philosophical change, they question whether the agency has the backbone to carry through on the plan. They say officials have already cut back, dropped or simply ignored many issues the public raised in more than 75,000 comments on the plan. In one significant instance, the North Dakota Department of Game and Fish filed a study with the Forest Service that concluded that oil and gas development on the Little Missouri severely affected the ability of a herd of bighorn sheep to expand. Officials dropped the study from the plan, apparently under industry pressure. Existing oil and gas lessees say they need not abide by any new rules of the plan. "It was completely throwing science out in the pursuit of politics," says the Sierra Club's Koepsel.

Oil and gas development should be reined in across the board, adds Defenders of Wildlife's Mike Leahy. "It should be prohibited in wilderness areas, proposed wilderness areas, roadless areas, research natural areas, and wherever it is incompatible with better uses of the grassland -- such as in important wildlife habitats."

Another agency fumble, conservationists say, centered around the creation of new wilderness areas -- which was one of the most popular requests in the public comments. Although conservation groups identified 500,000 acres that fit wilderness criteria, the agency recommended creating only two wilderness areas totaling 40,000 acres in the Buffalo Gap Grasslands. "Visitors to all of our grassland deserve wilderness," Leahy says.

The plan also omitted another issue that was heavily favored in public comments -- the restoration of wild bison herds. One alternative in the draft plan called for setting aside 5 percent of the grasslands for free-roaming bison herds, yet agency officials argued that their hands were tied because the four affected state governments classify bison as livestock, not wildlife. Consequently, the Forest Service could find no agency to sponsor wild bison.

Leahy finds the argument a cop-out. "Federal authority to manage wildlife has been continuously upheld over the past century, and is by no means limited to endangered species," he says. "The National Forest Management Act, Multiple Use Act and other laws give plenty of authority for managing wildlife to the Forest Service, and have been held to require the Forest Service to manage non-endangered wildlife."

Bison could migrate onto the grasslands in a roundabout manner. Formerly, grazing associations, which control distribution of allotments on the grasslands, forbade their members from running bison on the federal plots. The new plan prohibits those restrictions. "We weren't going to set up a bison refuge, per se," says Bob Sprentall, Forest Service planning team leader. "But if an organization or a few ranchers wanted to do it, and met all the safety and grazing conditions -- that can be permitted."

But, environmentalists aren't interested in seeing ranchers herding bison like cattle. "Bison are an integral and historic component of biological grassland communities, with great social and spiritual significance, as well as economic value -- including for tourism," says Leahy. "We recommend the restoration of wild bison to all of their historic habitat on the grasslands."

Knowles, who raises a handful of bison on his small ranch in Boulder, Montana, says introducing a wild bison herd to the grasslands wouldn't harm livestock grazing. "My idea wouldn't be to kick cattle off the grassland, but to have bison in low numbers. Ranchers could modify fencing (to four feet or lower) so bison could hop over it -- or erect taller fencing to keep them off private lands. Bison are very competitive animals. The resources would be more than adequate to support a small wild bison herd -- which could be culled by public hunting."

Mark Matthews is a freelance writer living in Missoula, Montana.