Sharptails Return To Their Oregon Home

Vic Coggins, Fish and Wildlife Department biologist in Enterprise, has a couple of visions for Oregon’s wildlife. Both are guided by the past.

The first plan, already well on its way, is to re-establish bighorn sheep to their traditional range in Hells Canyon of the Snake River. About 500 bighorns already are roaming the canyon and 48 wild sheep from Alberta, Canada, recently were relocated into three new areas.

The second, still in its early stages, is to reintroduce Columbia sharp-tailed grouse, Oregon’s oldest, and newest upland bird.

The sharptail once was common in Oregon’s vast grassland prairies east of the Cascades. But as native bunchgrass and shrubs began to vanish beneath cattle hooves and plows, the grouse began to disappear also.

By the late 1940s, sharptails had disappeared from Wallowa County. By the early 1970s, they were gone from Oregon.

In 1985, government biologists, private organizations and landowners formed a committee to bring sharptails back. In 1991, Coggins released 33 of the feathered emigrants from Idaho onto private ranch land in Wallowa County.

Since then, more than 100 birds have been captured in Idaho and released in northeastern Oregon.

“There’s miles and miles of good habitat for them out here,” Coggins said.

Thousands of acres of private land in Wallowa County are in the Conservation Reserve Program. This federal program is used to encourage ranchers to leave erosion-sensitive land out of agricultural production and re-establish native grassland.

Presently, the program is under fire from Congress as a farm subsidy and is in danger of the budget ax. But Coggins defends the program as essential to rebuilding wildlife habitat (especially upland bird habitat) hammered by a century of intense agriculture and grazing.

“There are tremendous public benefits from the program,” Coggins said. “Jackrabbits, deer, ringneck pheasants, even songbirds benefit from the CRP program, as well as trout and salmon from riparian protection.”

Coggins emphasized that the sharp-tails have picked private ranch land (mostly CRP land) near Enterprise as their preferred home.

“The ranchers out here have been really supportive,” he said.