Wildlife-sagebrush conflict seen

Jennifer Frazer, Wyoming Tribune Eagle

Published September 27, 2007 at midnight

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CHEYENNE - Wyoming Game and Fish habitat biologist Rick Straw stands next to a caged sagebrush on state school trust land north of Laramie.

He reaches in and pulls a three-inch shoot from its lush top. He caged the plant several years ago to show what a sagebrush plant is capable of in the absence of animal grazing.

From a stumpy sagebrush just outside the cage, he pulls a shoot a half an inch long and holds them up for comparison.

This is the difference between a plant protected from the grazing of pronghorn populations and one that is subject to their search for the 3 pounds of food they need to survive each day.

"What you're looking at is a lot of different plants," he says of the sagebrush sea surrounding him. "But you're not looking at very much food."

Straw, who monitors the health of sagebrush by studying plants across the state, would like to see just 35 percent of new shoots consumed. But this year he is having a hard time finding any to count.

They've all been eaten. There's so little left, in fact, that pronghorn are beginning to eat 2-year-old wood, which is empty nutritionally. The remaining sagebrush have been browsed so heavily that they are starting to feel like scrub brush.

In some of his study areas, a quarter of all the sagebrush plants have dying or dead limbs - and there's little seedling growth.

In short, these stands are declining.

It's not too late to save them - the plants are resilient if given a break. But there's no break in sight, and there hasn't been for decades. There are simply too many mouths to feed.

Pronghorn and mule deer populations across Wyoming are greater than what the available plants can support in the current time of drought, Game and Fish officials say. And the agency is struggling to control them.

Fewer hunters, fewer lands to hunt on and fewer hunting permits are all to blame, they say.

As a result, Wyoming's game are strangling the state's plant life, and that ultimately may lead to the loss of plants and animals alike.

Sagebrush, mountain mahogany, bitterbrush and serviceberry - all critical forage for game - are taking a beating.

Instead of bushy shrubs several feet high, many are stunted or hug the ground. They have few leaves or buds because they have been browsed repeatedly by wintering wildlife with no other choice.

If pronghorn and mule deer populations aren't brought down, Game and Fish personnel say, they could eliminate whole stands of winter range shrubs.

The damage could last for decades, leaving the land open to invaders like cheatgrass.

That could prevent shrubs from returning and cause widespread starvation and death among both game and non-game species like sage thrashers, sage sparrows and ground squirrels.

"Who knows how long we can go on this way," says Biff Burton, Saratoga game warden. "But one bad winter and we're going to lose a lot of game and have a lot of unhappy hunters."

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