Nov. 13, 2005 - 19:07 MST

NOW SO-CALLED

There is a man I delight in reading, and admiring his photographs of land I love. His Journal is: Grousin' In The Sage and mightily worth reading he is.

He inhabits an area quite north of where I live in Metro Denver, a place where the spaces are so wide and open, but now filling with oil patch stuff. I am not sure if he is a game warden or wildlife biologist, but he is intimately connected to the wildlife up there in whatever job he holds.

He made an entry recently, the url is:

http://grouse.diaryland.com/051110_56/html

I shall attempt to insert the part I want to be read and thought about. It follows:

Grouse Meeting

"The most interesting, and important, talk came from the researcher just finished with a long-term study of gas field impacts on sage grouse. A few high points:

Currently, there is supposed to be a protective two-mile (3.2 km) buffer around strutting grounds during the strutting season. A circle where no drilling or other disruptive activity should occur. But he documented declines in birds on leks up to 6.2 km from active drilling rigs. Almost twice the protection currently supposedly given.

Gee. What a surprise. Yet the recent initiative of the current administration is to eliminate even the current 3.2 km buffer. All the better to help the profit margins of the suffering oil and gas companies.

He found there is greater impact if the drilling rig is northwest or southwest of the lek. Since his study area has 62 percent of its winds from the west (like my country), that's no great surprise.

It made no difference if the grouse could see the drill rig or not. The problem is the noise, not the rig.

Even producing wells, the little platforms with a pump shed and a couple storage tanks, have negative effects on strutting grouse numbers within the two-mile buffer. Not surprisingly, the impacts were significantly higher when there were wells on three sides or more.

Now, here's the interesting part: while male sage grouse deserted the impacted leks at rates two to three times higher than leks away from wells, grouse that strutted on leks close to gas developments survived better than those out in the wilds.

Fewer predators in the gas field, you see?

Similarly, the adult hens stayed and nested in the same areas when the gas wells came in. And had higher survival of their chicks than those outside the gas field, again presumably because predators tend to shy away from people.

That should be good, right?

But basically, the old birds were unable or unwilling to adapt and move away. Old hens stayed and nested where they always had, and old cocks strutted where they always had.

But the next generation, the yearlings, do not. They have no fidelity to the noisy places they grew up, and move out. To strut on leks away from the field, and to nest away from the wells.

Problem is, most of that country already has as many grouse as it can support, so you don't really get more birds in the areas outside the fields. But after a couple years, you've got an obvious drain out of the gas fields. When the older birds are gone, they're not replaced. Grouse populations there grow about 8 percent slower than those outside the wells.

That's 8 percent less, every year.

You do the math and see how many years before you get down to almost zero. When you got gas fields projected to run 20 to 50 years, what are you going to have left when the gas is gone?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So that is the gist of it, seems to me that there should be a valid way for companies to drill for oil and leave room for wildlife to exist where it always has. The elk and pronghorn antelope suffer from being hemmed in too.

Grouse is worth reading, oh well worth reading, he is. Most of his entries have fantabulous photos, many from the air taken while he is on duty flying to track elk and things like that.

I don't know if photos of oil fields up there are often shown in newspapers across our country, but recently in the Rocky Mountain News was an aerial picture of the new drilling on the Roan Plateau, just north of where I-70 runs.

The amount of space taken up by human activity on the wells, the space graded and the roads running every-which-way seem to leave little room for wild life to exist.

And the Sage Grouse, poor things had their strutting grounds, used from time immemorial, every year during season the males strut which of course leads to mating and propagating the species. But they are being severly messed up.

I remember seeing from the highway, those broad vistas of nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles, sage brush and more or less flat or rolling land, seemed as if I could see clear to the end of the earth -- and for this kid, it was enough. My land, where the cowboys had held sway a few years before I was born. There are still wooden corrals and loading chutes, long unused, alongside the rail road tracks which I-80 now parallels, used in the days when cattle were big business in the west. A place where jack-rabbits moved about freely, and still do if they don't cross in front of an 18 wheeler.

Guess I'll always love the West, and the South-west, if for no other reason than a person can draw a free breath, away from cities and hullabaloo. A place where one can hear the silence, smell the sage, and see unimaginable distances and then see a skyfull of stars at night.

So, anyhow, wild life is trying to survive, doing the best it can in the Wild Wild West NOW SO-CALLED . . . . . . .

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