State wildlife officials on Thursday informed eight regional groups tasked with safeguarding the largest, most important population of sage grouse remaining in the world that their funding and existence had run its course.
Word of the working groups’ dissolution was conveyed by a letter emailed to their roughly 105 members and shared with WyoFile. Wyoming would be “forever grateful” for their “hard work and dedication on behalf of sage grouse,” Game and Fish Deputy Chief of Wildlife Justin Binfet wrote to the volunteer cohort before delivering the news that “the time has come to conclude the work.”
The letter described changing times as the reason for the groups’ termination. Funding for the groups, which supported annual conservation projects, once came from the Wyoming Legislature’s general fund, but since 2018 has come from Game and Fish. Last year, the agency spent $295,000 on the effort. Policy work is handled primarily by the statewide Sage Grouse Implementation Team, though the local groups have helped identify proposed changes to Wyoming’s protective sage grouse “core areas” in recent years.
“While there is still work to be done with sage grouse and their associated habitats, it is time to rethink how we incorporate local involvement and knowledge into our management process,” the letter stated. “We are also a more connected society than we were 21 years ago, allowing for multiple avenues to include local knowledge in our processes.”
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department declined an interview for this story.
Tom Christiansen, a former Game and Fish sage grouse coordinator and longtime member of the Southwest area working group, had heard rumblings of the groups being disbanded for a couple of years. The retiree remarked they had a “good, long run,” and he wasn’t upset about the decision, though he does worry it ultimately will hurt sage grouse.
“The biggest concern is … this will be one less source of funding,” Christiansen said. “Also, the research dollars that the groups provided to keep the science going was significant. I don’t know that it’s going to get backfilled by anybody.”
Joe Bohne, a former Game and Fish biologist who sat on the Snake River group, shared similar thoughts. He wasn’t in favor of the state’s decision, but also wasn’t surprised. Many of the local groups’ functions were redundant to the statewide Sage Grouse Implementation Team. But not all, he said.
“A lot of the working groups coordinated the lek surveys,” Bohne said. “Who will do that coordination if there isn’t a working group?”
Former Gov. Dave Freudenthal convened Wyoming’s eight local sage grouse working groups in 2004. At the time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was weighing whether to protect the embattled bird with the Endangered Species Act, which could have had major implications for Wyoming energy development and the state’s coffers.
Five years earlier, in 1999, Wyoming signed a memorandum of understanding with eight other western states that ultimately led to more than 60 local working groups across sage grouse range, according to a 2017 peer-reviewed paper about the groups authored by Christiansen.
The local groups’ mission was to implement regional sage grouse conservation plans. They were described as a critical component of achieving Wyoming’s overarching sage grouse conservation plan.
“The statewide plan is largely reliant on implementation by local working groups,” the statewide conservation plan says. It described the groups as “essential to conservation of sage grouse in Wyoming.”
Over their 21 years, the eight groups steered funding for 377 projects, and “played a crucial role in sage grouse conservation,” Binfet wrote in the termination letter.
Apart from directing funding on-the-ground work and scientific research, the groups at times strategized big picture conservation. The Snake River working group, which oversees the small, isolated Jackson Hole population, once helped draft plans for emergency import of birds after numbers dwindled to less than 50 males, though it was later halted by a statewide working group.
In the heavily drilled and disturbed Powder River Basin, the local group’s efforts would have assisted in strategizing ways to keep an especially vulnerable sage grouse population viable.
Wyoming houses nearly 40% of all the birds remaining on the planet, and the species has been in persistent decline — numbers fell 81% over a recent 53-year period. Especially western parts of the state are considered a stronghold.
“This is the most contiguous habitat available range-wide,” U.S. Geological Survey research biologist Peter Coates told WyoFile in 2021. “It’s a lot of uninterrupted habitat.”
The economic stakes of sage grouse conservation in Wyoming are high. Fossil fuels and other extracted resources that have buoyed the state’s economy for generations often overlap with sagebrush-dominated areas, including the best of the best grouse habitat. That reality “poses many challenges,” Christiansen stated in the 2017 paper.
“Given these pressures,” he wrote, “undisturbed landscapes in Wyoming are unlikely to persist without proactive conservation planning.”
To help offset the loss of its sage grouse working groups, Wyoming will begin hosting an annual “sage grouse summit” that “may rotate across the state,” according to the Game and Fish letter. The state agency is also exploring ways to “meet and incorporate public feedback” into its policies, ”honoring the spirit” of the working groups.
Not all members are sad to see the regional groups disbanded. Retired biologist John Dahlke, who’s been a part of the Upper Green River Basin group since its formation, told WyoFile he was incidentally preparing a resignation letter Thursday when he learned of the news. Over the years, he’d grown “disappointed” with how the volunteer body lacked infrastructure to achieve its conservation plans.
“I think the local working groups in general are a sham,” Dahlke said. “They give the impression that all ideas are on the table. They’re actually not, because it only takes one dissenting vote to kill any project.”
But Dahlke also cited good work achieved by the Upper Green group. Its members helped talk Sublette County into fighting cheatgrass, he said, and they supported effective projects that reduced sage grouse fence strikes and helped improve wet meadow habitat critical to sage grouse chick survival.
And yet, the severe overgrazing of our landscape, much of it public land, occurs. Many of us have cried out in vain over it, yet the powers that be gloss it over. Mule deer are in peril, too. Who runs this State, the Wyoming Welfare Stockgrowers and their 4 1/2 cents per day cow-calf grazing fee?
While these working groups (sage grouse, mule deer, inter-agency ect) were started with good intentions, they have ultimately digressed to a way to make bad decisions palatable and have created a space where the majority of field personnel have zero voice and are rarely acknowledged. It is asinine to have these groups that are mostly full of people who spend very little time on the landscape observing habitat loss and wildlife population dynamics in real time. It is time to let wardens, biologists, and range managers do their jobs without endless and unproductive bloviating around a table. We know why Sage Grouse are in decline. Habitat, habitat, habitat. Let’s start there.
Where is the data on what these working groups actually accomplished?
Before just bashing the Trump administration along with the oil & gas development. Why not mention the greatest threat to sage grouse? It’s cheat grass. But you never want to address that issue.
Sage grouse numbers cycle up & down. You always say they are endangered when the cycle is down but say nothing with their numbers are up.
And it’s always the same narrative. These sage grouse numbers are the lowest they’ve been in the last fifty years. Did they actually do surveys before that? I’ve never seen that data. It’s because they don’t have that data.
Hi Martin! We’ve reported on cheatgrass several times. Here’s our most recent story on the subject from Dec. 1, 2025: https://wyofile.com/inside-wyomings-fight-against-cheatgrass-the-most-existential-sweeping-threat-to-western-ecosystems/
Thank you, I did read that article & we all need to understand more the threat cheat grass is to wildlife habitat. Instead of blaming everything on oil and gas.
I would also like to mention and wish it was included in more WyoFile articles…
Everything thing we need to survive is either farmed or mined.
This decision meshes well with Trump/Burgum push to eliminate any “obstacles” to drill-baby-drill. The Republican Congress is (or has already?) planning to make listing of the sage grouse impossible. Having groups studying sage grouse makes it more likely that declines and harm from drilling will be observed and reported so they want to prevent that happening and Wyoming is going along with the Federal effort now led by Nesvik.
When something is not working, an organization usually gathers information from the public and looks for ways to make it better. But just canning the entire organization does not benefit anyone and actually waste money and time by putting the work back at stage 1. Say goodbye to the pretty little sage grouse Wyoming.
Figure it out :stop destroying their habitat and start killing ravens and end the hunting season on them.
I was once part of the Sage Grouse working group when it first began. It had great value. It is important to understand the State now has a full time Sage Grouse Biologist. It didn’t back in the day. A full time dedicated employee can easily help direct research needs and coordinate and evaluate survey needs and results. All regional wildlife biologists and game wardens are or should be involved in data collection and have input in management decisions. Consolidation of management decisions is not always best. Allowing those on the ground in their districts or areas of responsibility to be more involved giving them more ownership will result in improved management in my opinion. 30yr. retired game warden.
“While there is still work to be done with sage grouse and their associated habitats, it is time to rethink how we incorporate local involvement and knowledge into our management process,” the letter stated. “We are also a more connected society than we were 21 years ago, allowing for multiple avenues to include local knowledge in our processes…” If you ever sat through a Travel, Recreation and Wildlife Legislative Committee Meeting as I have, you will appreciate how laughable Game and Fish’s statement is. Public hearings are a joke, input is neither heard nor welcome, and Game and Fish is less “connected to society” than ever.
Excellent article on the state of sage grouse conservation in Wyoming. It opened my eyes to the need for local upland conservation, which I think we often take for granted. The main thing the article lacked was a person/group/agency to contact regarding opportunity for local conservation efforts
Once again, G & F department head Anji Bruce is showing that she’s not leadership material. This very poor move will push the Sage Grouse right into the endangered category
Along with deer and pronghorn.
Yes, I agree about the sage grouse needing to be listed as an endangered species, because it truly is highly endangered. However, seeing how hard the trump administration is
fighting the listing of any new species, I have very little hope for the sage
grouse. Who will speak for the sage grouse now? This latest move is a travesty.
If the habitat destruction doesn’t kill them off, climate change will. Fossil fuels will get them one way or the other.
“A penny wise and a pound foolish” this is a really bad call on Wyoming. It is also a call to the Feds to list the species under the ESA.
Please put them on the ESA, I’ll get a picture of a sage grouse under every wind turbine.
Have you ever walked under a wind turbine? I have, never seen a sage grouse and seen very few birds. Don’t buy the rhetoric.
There is no ‘perfect’ energy source. You might consider putting the photos of the 5 to 8 million people that die prematurely, caused by the burning of fossil fuel.