Sharptail tale leads to plenty of grousing

Some new faces appeared at the annual dance in Lincoln County this week.

For centuries, male Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, the rarest of the nine sharptail subspecies, have been accustomed to congregating before dawn this time of year. They bow, spread their wings and tails and stomp the ground in a captivating dance to attract females for breeding.

But the pickins have been getting slimmer in the past few decades. Development and fragmentation of sage-steppe habitat over the past 150 years or so has shrunk the Columbia sharptail’s range by 90 percent throughout the West.

The species was first documented on March 1, 1806, in a Lewis and Clark Expedition journal notation entered at Fort Clatsop, Ore. Sharptails were so abundant that pioneers described them as darkening the skies when huge flocks flushed.

Nowadays, there’s barely enough birds at many of the spring mating grounds, called leks, to attract the attention of a hungry passing hawk.

The Washington Fish and Wildlife Department, U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Colville Confederated Tribes sent workers traveling thousands of miles this week to capture and bring back some new blood to help revitalize sharptails in Washington.

Much of the ground work, so to speak, has been underway in Lincoln County since the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife used Bonneville Power Administration mitigation funds in 1993 to buy a ranch that became the core of what is now the 20,000-acre Swanson Lakes Wildlife Area.

Separately, BLM has been acquiring acreage in the area as part of a plan to consolidate its land holdings from small scattered parcels into big manageable blocks.

Combined with Washington Department of Natural Resources sections, public land managers now control nearly 50,000 acres in the area south and east of Creston.

While dozens of wildlife species are benefiting from the Conservation Reserve Program on private lands, much of the public land is being groomed for this attempt to bring back the sharptails.

Livestock grazing has been eliminated on the Fish and Wildlife Department lands, where plots of shrubby winter cover and aspens have been planted. The BLM is writing grazing restrictions into new 10-year leases to help accommodate the sharptail recovery effort.

At sunrise on Tuesday, Swanson Lakes staffers Juli Anderson and Mike Finch, who’s also a local farmer, released five sharptails that had been captured Monday near St. Anthony, Idaho, and transported by vehicle to their new home.

The 20-hour, 1,150-mile round trip was repeated Tuesday so three females and two males could be transported with minimal holding time and released on Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, the workers doing the trapping down in southeastern Idaho hit the Mother Lode on Wednesday morning. They captured 15 sharptails in the wire funnel traps the birds enter as they come into their leks before dawn, said Howard Ferguson, WDFW biologist from Spokane.

“We have to put some back because we can only take 20 total from Idaho,” he said.

“We got a little nervous when a white-tailed jackrabbit ran through the trap, and then there was an elk, but luckily they didn’t hurt the traps,” said Glenn Paulson, who normally is stationed at BLM’s station at Coffeepot Lake.

One female and one male sharptail arrived Wednesday night to complete the releasing at Swanson Lake this morning. Eight more were delivered to the Wells Wildlife Area near Bridgeport.

Up to 20 sharptails being captured this week in British Columbia are scheduled for release at Wells along with another 20 headed for the Colville Indian Reservation. “We’ve been gearing up for this for a couple of years,” said Dave Hays, Washington biologist from Olympia who’s coordinating the trapping in Canada.

The idea is to mix the genetics and jump-start the breeding season.

All of the released birds are wearing transmitters so researches can plot their movements. But there was no question where the birds wanted to go when they were released south of Creston.

The first group of birds was turned loose a couple of hundred yards from one of three active leks, a number that’s decline from about 10 active mating grounds in the 1970s.

While two of the released birds initially veered into the nearby sagebrush, five of them, including the hen, flew directly to the lek and settled among a small group of about seven displaying males that seemed thrilled to have their sunrise party crashed.

They hopped and fluttered above the prairie grasses. You could almost hear them saying, “Wanna dance?”