{"id":162537,"date":"2025-09-17T06:12:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T06:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/162537\/"},"modified":"2025-09-17T06:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T06:12:09","slug":"as-wyoming-sage-grouse-near-their-cyclic-high-northeastern-population-tumbles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/162537\/","title":{"rendered":"As Wyoming sage grouse near their cyclic high, northeastern population tumbles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wildlife ecologist Chris Kirol has spent time of late surveying what used to be some of the last big tracts of sagebrush left in the Powder River Basin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The veteran researcher<\/a> has been looking for native vegetation like sagebrush, and also for the chalk-colored cylindrical droppings that are a telltale sign of where one of the biome\u2019s icons, sage grouse, have been spending their time. On a Friday afternoon survey, Kirol took a call from WyoFile and described the landscape all around him, which had been completely transformed and for the worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost completely dominated by cheatgrass and Japanese brome,\u201d Kirol said, noting two noxious, nonnative grasses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t found a single sage grouse scat,\u201d he added, \u201cwhich is expected because there\u2019s about five sagebrush left in this quarter-mile area.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\/A researcher releases a sage grouse with a rump-mounted GPS tracker in the Powder River Basin. (Chris Kirol)<\/p>\n

Kirol was walking through a burn scar from the nearly 180,000-acre House Draw Fire. The Johnson County blaze, which ripped through grassland and shrubland<\/a> in August 2024, eliminated more than 100,000 acres of the \u201ccore\u201d sage grouse habitat in the northeast region of Wyoming, where the birds dwell<\/a> \u2014 more than a third of the best habitat<\/a> in a region where the population was already struggling. There were 20 sage grouse breeding grounds \u2014 open areas known as leks \u2014 within the House Draw Fire\u2019s perimeter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were large leks,\u201d Kirol said. \u201cWe know from years and years of research that this was one of the areas with the highest density of sage grouse left in northeast Wyoming.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the first year of post-fire monitoring, there were male sage grouse documented displaying at eight of the 20 leks \u2014 which is actually the same as during pre-fire surveys in 2024. But the tallies in the burn scar tumbled.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/Sage grouse counts in northeast Wyoming, depicted here, have been steadily declining since the turn of the century and are not cycling in tandem with more robust western populations. (Wyoming Game and Fish Department)<\/p>\n

\u201cThose leks were down 40%,\u201d Wyoming Game and Fish Department sage grouse\/sagebrush biologist Nyssa Whitford told WyoFile.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThose birds took a hit, there\u2019s no question about it,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you see the House Draw Fire out there on the ground, you can see why it\u2019s down. It burned hot, it burned fast, and in a lot of pockets there\u2019s not much [sagebrush] left.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Adverse effects of the House Draw Fire help explain why the counts assessed at the 336 occupied sage grouse leks in northeast Wyoming fell by 10% in 2025 \u2014 a year when the naturally cyclic species otherwise did well across the Equality State.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Near the peak<\/p>\n

Hundreds of biologists, wardens and volunteers who fanned out across Wyoming\u2019s sagebrush-steppe counted more than 30,000 male sage grouse strutting on 971 of the state\u2019s known, occupied leks in the spring of 2025. That\u2019s an average of 30.9 birds per active lek, which is a 10% increase over the 2024 counts<\/a> and nearly a doubling of the population since the last low point in 2021<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those swings are natural and part of basic sage grouse biology. Statewide in Wyoming, it takes about 9.6 years on average to complete a cycle, Whitford said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I look back at the past data, I feel like this year is the peak,\u201d Whitford said. \u201cBut we won\u2019t know that until next year.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"(Wyoming Game and Fish Department)<\/p>\n

Lek counts last crested in 2016, when there were 35.6 birds tallied per active lek, according to Game and Fish data. Before that, numbers topped out in 2006 when nearly 42 strutting males were documented on the average lek. If 2025 does go into the record books as the next peak, sage grouse abundance will have fallen nearly 36% since the 2006 peak.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whitford pointed out that back in 1999, there was a lower peak: 30.7 birds per lek.<\/p>\n

Other metrics suggest the state\u2019s population remains in a long-term decline. The number of occupied leks statewide has fallen about 6.5%, from roughly 1,840 to 1,720, since the 2016 peak, Game and Fish data shows.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"(Wyoming Game and Fish Department)<\/p>\n

Sage grouse depend on a biome \u2014 sagebrush-steppe \u2014 that is disappearing and degrading<\/a> at a rate of 1.3 million acres per year in western North America. The continued habitat loss explains why sage grouse numbers have fallen by an average of about 3% per year<\/a> over the past half-century, according to a 2021 U.S. Geological Survey report. The chicken-sized bird\u2019s persistent struggles have led to petitions calling for Endangered Species Act protections for more than three decades<\/a>, but voluntary state plans have caused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to avoid a listing, most recently in 2015<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wyoming holds the biggest and best tracts of sage grouse habitat remaining in the world, and it possesses about 38%<\/a> of the remaining birds. The 2025 lek counts surged by double-digit percentage points in almost the entire state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Uniquely struggling<\/p>\n

Northeast Wyoming, where counts fell by 10%, was the lone exception. While the House Draw Fire was a factor, the outlier datapoint could also be related to the natural cycle duration, which tends to run shorter in the region, Whitford said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"(Wyoming Game and Fish Deparment)<\/p>\n

The number of northeast Wyoming males observed per active lek, 13, was also less than half the statewide average. Population performance in the area has consistently been the worst in Wyoming.<\/p>\n

\u201cNortheast Wyoming has always been at the edge of sage grouse range,\u201d Whitford said. \u201cThe habitat is just not like the rest of the state. It tends to run a little drier and tends to convert to grassland very easily.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wyoming\u2019s conservation plan for its northeastern sage grouse<\/a>, last updated in 2014, details a long-term decline of the habitat and species. The \u201cpatch size\u201d of sagebrush cover in the Powder River Basin decreased by more than 63% in a 40-year period, according to the report, falling from 820 acres to fewer than 300. Overall, sagebrush cover in the watershed also declined 6% as a portion of the landscape, from 41% to 35%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Leks are being abandoned as the habitat has degraded and disappeared, long-term data show.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Out of 606 documented leks in the northeast region, only 178 \u2014 some 29% \u2014 were active during the 2024 breeding season, according to Wyoming\u2019s latest statewide sage grouse report<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAverage male lek attendance in northeast Wyoming has decreased significantly over time, decreasing by more than half over the last 30 years,\u201d wrote Game and Fish Wildlife Biologist Erika Peckham, who authored the section of the report.<\/p>\n

\"\"Wildfires burned over more than a third of all the sage grouse core area in northeast Wyoming in 2024. (Wyoming Game and Fish Department)<\/p>\n

Northeastern Wyoming\u2019s 2024 wildfires, especially the House Draw Fire, are all but guaranteed to exacerbate the declines. Although surveyors detected male sage grouse at 40% of the leks in the House Draw Fire scar during the 2025 lek counts, the large interior leks near where all the sagebrush burned up are likely to disappear completely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFemales nest almost exclusively in sagebrush \u2014 99% of the time,\u201d said Kirol, the Sheridan-based sage grouse biologist. \u201cSo if the females aren\u2019t showing up anymore \u2026 there\u2019s going to be no [population] recruitment to those leks.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"A sage grouse chick in Powder River Basin coalbed methane country. (Chris Kirol)<\/p>\n

Male grouse might continue to display on their lekking grounds for the rest of their lives, he said, and that might span another five years. But after that, they\u2019ll die out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI expect a lot of the leks in the interior will blink out,\u201d Kirol said. \u201cI hope they don\u2019t, but that\u2019s what has been shown in the past.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The smaller a sage grouse population becomes, the more susceptible it is to extirpation. That\u2019s what recently occurred in North Dakota, where biologists counted zero strutting males<\/a> for the first time in 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kirol has serious concerns for the future of northeast Wyoming\u2019s sage grouse. The population, he said, has been in a steady, gradual decline for about two decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with northeast Wyoming is the birds are just constantly losing habitat, and they\u2019re never gaining anything,\u201d Kirol said. \u201cI\u2019m hopeful that we\u2019ll still have birds here in 50 years, but we\u2019re going to get to a point where, if the numbers get too low, then any natural event might wipe them out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wildlife ecologist Chris Kirol has spent time of late surveying what used to be some of the last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-162537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}