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.
“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.