Dear HCN,
This is a follow-up to a
couple of articles on sage grouse (HCN, 2/4/02: Last dance for the
sage grouse?). Sagebrush is an important species and vital to
rangeland ecosystems, but there is a limit to how much sagebrush is
enough before it begins to bring down the overall condition of
rangelands. When sagebrush reaches 10 to 15 percent canopy cover,
those plants begin to limit the grass and forb understory in the
plant community. To get rangelands back into the condition where
sage grouse will flourish, sagebrush plant communities need to be
managed to decrease sagebrush plant density and allow the grass and
forb understory to have access to needed moisture. Then the grass
and forb understory will provide the soil erosion protection
benefits, wildlife food and cover, and plant diversity needs of the
ecosystem.
While sagebrush rangelands have
decreased over time with human development and agricultural
cropping, the number of mature plants in the system has gotten out
of hand over the past 40 years because of the lack of disturbance.
The Gunnison Basin has the opportunity to do treatments and provide
management to get native plant species back into the
system.
The articles also gave the impression
that the Gunnison Sage Grouse Working Group is not doing anything
to implement the conservation plan that was developed. In
actuality, there are many different efforts going on. Just about
everything that is done by anyone in Gunnison has the words sage
grouse associated with it.
There is much progress
being made in this area for the good of sage grouse, and your
articles did not help local efforts toward that end. In the future,
it would be nice to have articles that expand on the positive work
being done by people to improve the Western
landscape.
John M.
Scott
Gunnison, Colorado
The writer is district conservationist for the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sage grouse articles mislead.
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