Five full moons for me

in this western wild basin: this dusty shrubby sagebrush country

of bunchgrass and saltgrass, saltbush and greasewood, rabbitbrush and winterfat,

of purple sage, black sage, silver sage, big sage.

Tucked among these glaucous shrubs

you just might find plants so scarce, so rare,

they exist nowhere

but here.

Speak softly, step lightly, don’t turn them into ghosts.

Feel the life

of a Wild thing

emerging from cracked clay, gravelled sand, saline playas.

Tiny leaves opening sunward, shy blooms twirling outward,

fuzzy stems,

reaching.

Sit long enough. Soon,

every flower will fade,

crumble to crisp, brown husks,

yield to wind and release, let go,

snag on mammal fur and bird feathers, whisk away.

A few handfulls I will coax

into paper bags,

rustle on gentle screens with gentle hands,

tuck goodnight into artificial winter held fast at 10 degrees.

Saving seed

for another spring.

 

The sagebrush steppe of western North America is vast. Some have called it “the big empty,” though from the perspective of an ecologist (or any local critter), the terrain is teeming with life. Once extending across 320 million acres, today the sea of sagebrush is fragmented by human industry and agriculture, occupying only half its historic range.

Within the western rim of sagebrush country, the Oregon BLM Vale District manages 5.1 million acres of public lands. I am a migrant mammal here, calling this sagebrush basin home for the next 5 months. My primary duty is to collect seeds from the 70-80 state-listed sensitive plant species of eastern Oregon. While I’ve been waiting for these rare flowers to bloom, I’ve had opportunities to assist with other BLM duties: surveys of Golden Eagle nests and Sage-Grouse mating leks and a visit to Lucky Peak Forest Service nursery.

The first field outing I took was with a wildlife biologist to survey Golden Eagle nests along the Owyhee River canyon. This giant raptor constructs nests high up on clifftops and rocky outcrops. Mating pairs may build several nests and use a different one each year. Although we confirmed locations of several nests, we could not determine if any are actively being used this spring.

More endemic to sagebrush than Golden Eagles are the Greater Sage-Grouse. These ground-nesting birds are entirely dependent on open expanses of sagebrush habitat. As the habitat has declined, so have the sage grouse. Conservation of this classic sagebrush species is a top management priority for BLM. To learn more about sagebrush ecosystem and life history of the sage grouse, I highly recommend watching the 1-hour PBS documentary The Sagebrush Sea. 

Surveying a Sage Grouse Lek

In the pre-dawn light, I found myself bumping over deep, dusty divets in a tiny utility-terrain vehicle. I hiked through the scrub in a pair of borrowed puffy coveralls to keep the biting wind from my bones, heading through uplands to a historic sage grouse lek. Straight ahead to the west, a magnificent full moon was setting over the Steens Mountains. The snow-covered slopes gradually grew brighter as the sun, in all its scarlet-gold morning hue, rose in the eastern sky behind. As we hiked, my ears ached from the cold wind and my torso dripped with sweat inside the insulated coveralls. We approached slowly, whispering quietly, listening. No sage grouse. That particular lek site has not revealed birds in years.

Another lek site yielded better results. The hike in was littered with two types of sage grouse “sign” (meaning poop): the grassy pellets typical of non-mating sage grouse and the black-tarry patches indicative of active mating (a good “sign”!). As we got closer, I could hear a soft boing-ing tapping and drumming sound. Soon, I spotted a flash of white in the distance. I pressed binoculars to my eyes and began counting: 40 sage grouse in total, mostly males in full display, strutting around, inflating their white-feathered chest air-sacs, slapping them empty, with erect, fan-shaped arrays of white-spotted tail feathers. Around and around they strutted, small tussles breaking out between competing males, a few more birds joining.

The sage grouse mating lek is a courtship ritual of male display and female selection. Typically, only the few “most attractive” males will be selected by the females. Most males will strut to no success. Such is the life of sage grouse. Most leks, including the one I saw, are situated on upland open meadows without tall shrubs or trees.

Visit to Lucky Peak Nursery – U.S. Forest Service

An innovative botany project of the Vale District is the creation of a sagebrush seed orchard. Through a public-private partnership, BLM will be germinate wild-collected Wyoming Big Sagebrush seed (Artemisia tridentata subsp. wyomingensis) and grow the shrubs into a 15-acre “orchard” where seeds will be collected for post-fire restoration. The project will compare two sagebrush restoration methods: planting seeds and planting seedling plugs grown by Lucky Peak Nursery. The Lucky Peak Nursery grows thousands of sagebrush seedlings each year for restoration projects across the Northern Great Basin.

Why so much sagebrush? In recent years, massive wildfires fueled by highly flammable invasive grasses like Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) and Medusahead Rye (Taeniatherum asperum) have decimated hundreds of thousands of acres of sagebrush habitat, leaving bare soil that is quickly recolonized by invasives. Sagebrush seedlings are in high demand by managers seeking to restore these post-fire landscapes. Sagebrush is a slow-growing, wind-pollinated shrub that acts as a nurse plant for other native forbs and grasses. Historic wildfires were small and infrequent; bare soil patches of biotic crusts throughout the steppe prevent spread of fire and most of the native shrubs are slightly fire-resistant. Invasive grass that fuels wildfire is a major land management challenge and a severe threat to all species that depend on sagebrush habitat.

Lauren Bansbach

Bureau of Land Management

Vale, Oregon