Imperiled | 05 | What do carbon and cows have to do with lesser prairie-chickens?

In the heart of America's grasslands, a battle for survival is unfolding. The lesser prairie chicken, an iconic species of the Great Plains, is on the brink of extinction.

If you imagine Native Americans and European settlers traveling across the southwestern Great Plains through this endless sea of grass, feeding themselves on lesser prairie chickens, they never could have imagined the day that all that would be left is postage stamps of prairies and an endangered species. But that's where we are.

And yet there's a growing network of producers and partners across the plains looking to change that.

The only places they are left today are where these caring ranchers are stewarding the habitat and stewarding the landscape and stewarding these native prairies, keeping them there.

And today we're gonna meet a few of these stewards.

I think everybody that ranches knows that, uh. If done in the right way, if grazing is planned in the right way, that it is nothing but a benefit to the landscape. I can't dictate what

a chicken's going to do, but I can build them a home, and I can build a habitat, and I can make it, you know, desirable for them to be there. I think if we would open our eyes as a society and look at who's going to be the one that's going to lead this, This ecological revolution, it's going to be the producer.

And in a landscape that is 90 percent privately owned, the conservation challenges we face today demand new solutions, like how do we fund this important stewardship?

And how do we work to recover a species while supporting the communities that are on the ground doing the work?

In this time when we're trying to address a lot of conservation problems across the country, that kind of innovation, I think is where we need to go.

Welcome back to Working Wild U, a show about the people and wildlife of the American West from the crossroads of culture and science. I'm Hallie

Mahold, Chief Programs Officer at Western Landowners Alliance. We are a network of landowners, managers, and partners dedicated to keeping the working lands of the American West. Whole and healthy for the benefit of both people and wildlife.

And I'm Jared Beaver, assistant professor and extension wildlife specialist at Montana State University. My work focuses on identifying and improving conservation efforts in areas where people and wildlife share the landscape, a place many folks call the working wild.

Today on the show, can ranchers and partners work together to save the lesser prairie chicken while supporting their livelihoods and communities?

We're headed to eastern New Mexico to find out.

Our show continues after the break. Charlotte - UF: Working Wild U is a proud part of Natural Resources University, a podcast network delivering science based information for your natural resource management. Other current network series include Timber University, Fish University, Deer University, Fire University, and Habitat University. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

The best known conservation stories often involve a sudden and very visible threat to a species survival. One of the most well known examples is the case of the bald eagle, and the widespread use of the pesticide DDT.

DDT, introduced in the 1940s, was used extensively in agriculture to control insects. However, its impact on wildlife, particularly birds of prey, soon became apparent.

DDT accumulated in the food chain, causing bald eagles and other birds to ingest high concentrations of the chemical. This led to reproductive problems, including thin eggshells, which often broke before hatching.

As a result, bald eagle populations plummeted. Prompting a listing under the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1967. This was a predecessor to the Endangered Species Act.

Soon after, DDT was banned by the Environmental Protection Agency. This ban, coupled with conservation efforts mandated by the Endangered Species Act, Allowed bald eagle populations to make a remarkable recovery.

It's a textbook conservation success story, with a beginning, middle, and end. It's simple, the cause DDT, and the effect thin eggshells. Easy for us to wrap our heads around.

But as we are discovering this season, what if the cause and effects impacting a species are less clear? What if there are a hundred causes and a hundred different effects? And what if the story is in slow motion, every day happening right before our eyes?

That is the conservation challenge of our time. Not grabby headlines or juicy sound bites, no quick and simple solutions. Multifaceted problems often call for multifaceted solutions.

This is the story of the Lesser Prairie Chicken. Bear with us, there are a lot of threads to this story. The approach to saving the bird is so holistic that at times it may be difficult to see just how everything connects back, but we will get there.

And be warned, you'll find no quick fixes or simple answers in today's episode. Instead, we'll witness the daily beat of collaborative conservation. The quiet, thankless work of building trust, building community.

This isn't the end of the story for the Lesser Prairie Chicken. This is only the beginning. Before dawn on the high plains of eastern New Mexico, Megan Nastow, a research scientist with Working Lands Conservation, was on a mission.

I really wanted to see a chicken.

We're talking about the Lesser Prairie Chicken, a species of prairie grouse endemic to the southern and central plains of the United States.

So, before even starting our 10 hour workday of collecting soil. You know, we woke up at like 3 a. m. or 4 a. m., got in the truck, Um, packed up, you know, a thermos of coffee and just went searching for leks.

Leks are areas where male birds congregate to attract and compete for females during mating season in the early spring.

We would just choose a dirt road, drive down the dirt road, and then stop, kill the engine, roll down the windows, and see if we could hear that characteristic booming sound that the chickens make in the morning. And of course, the first day we did this, we didn't hear anything, but I was determined so that we went out the following morning and did the whole thing over again. And this time we actually did hear the booming.

So we've talked a lot this season about the plight of our grasslands, the most imperiled ecosystem on the planet. And that slow motion decline of lesser prairie chickens? For the most part, it's driven by habitat loss.

This habitat loss originates from the patterns and policies of land settlement history in the United States. Think of the Homestead Act. As a result of that history, the plains are largely privately owned.

And we're not just plowing up the plains for farming. Development of homes and cities, oil and gas, and more. and poor land management have contributed to the decline of America's grassland biome, down to just 40 percent of what we had a century ago. And much of that remaining grassland is fragmented.

In essence, we humans derive a lot of our basic needs from the plains. Food, fiber, fuel, and shelter are all at the top of that list.

It's no surprise that a lot of species that depend on grasslands aren't doing well. And that includes prairie grouse species.

Historically, we had six prairie grouse species in North America. And today, three of them are either extinct or endangered, and the other three are declining.

That's Ted Cook. He's the executive director of the North American Grouse Partnership. And before he retired a few years back, he worked for 30 years as an endangered species biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Of the six prairie grouse species, you know, heath hens in the east have been extinct for over a century.

Prairie grouse, including lesser prairie chickens, need wide open spaces. And according to Grant Beaupre, a lesser prairie chicken biologist with New Mexico Game and Fish Department, habitat fragmentation to a chicken can be as subtle as a telephone pole.

A prairie chicken evolved with just really not even trees on the landscape. And so research has shown that prairie chickens exhibit avoidance behavior. So you stick a tower up in the middle of the prairie, even if it's shorter than a wind tower, say it's a, it's a telephone pole or line, um, they will avoid that by a certain distance and won't use the habitat surrounding it, whether that habitat is good or not.

So a few structures that seem spaced out and unobtrusive to us may make an entire section of land uninhabitable for lesser prairie chickens.

And it's not just development and fragmentation that have impacted the bird. Poor land management such as overgrazing and a century of fire suppression have allowed for woody encroachment of plants like shinery oak and mesquite to dominate huge sections of what was once a sea of grass.

There's some very good research that Sean, if you remove the mesquite, prairie chickens will move back in and use that habitat again, but they won't tolerate more than like one tree per acre.

So all of these changes, oil and gas development, cultivated agriculture, homes and roads, and poor land management have put the lesser prairie chicken in the crosshairs.

While historic estimates suggest the lesser prairie chicken numbered in hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions. Surveys today indicate there are now around 30, 000 to 40, 000 birds.

If you imagine Native Americans and European settlers traveling across the southwestern Great Plains through this endless sea of grass, feeding themselves on lesser prairie chickens, they never could have imagined the day that all that would be left is postage stamps of prairies and an endangered species. But that's where we are.

So when it comes to lesser prairie chickens, we have an understanding of the problem and the many contributing causes. For So what about the solutions? Where are lesser prairie chickens doing well, and how can we support more of that?

I mean, honestly, we wouldn't have prairie chickens in this state in the numbers that we do today if we didn't have private landowners doing the conservation measures on their private property.

The only places they are left today are where these caring rangers are stewarding the land. The habitat and stewarding the landscape and stewarding these native prairies, keeping them there.

And native prairies are important for other reasons. Not only do they support wildlife such as lesser prairie chickens, but grasslands support human communities as well. And well managed grasslands have the potential to sequester carbon. This has implications for not only our planet, but for the economics of land stewardship and conservation going forward.

And that's what's coming up next, after the break. We're exploring a collaborative conservation success story in the making. Western Landowners Alliance: We're in a new chapter of conservation. In the first chapter of conservation in this country, you had wilderness and then you had city. But today, more and more, we understand that there's this very important piece in the middle that we call the working landscape.

In eastern New Mexico, a group of ranchers, non profits, state and federal agencies, all these partners are coming together to strengthen the connections of land stewardship, healthy souls and supporting wildlife habitat.

Let's kick off by meeting one of the ranchers at the center of this collaborative initiative.

I'm Bryce Peterson. I'm a rancher in eastern New Mexico. I grew up in ranching. Uh, my ranching family comes from Colorado. Moved here in 1999 to the Mill and Sand area. My grandpa acquired a ranch there, um, in the prairie chicken habitat that we didn't even know was there. And, uh, I have since managed three, three ranches and, uh, now Jamie and I, my wife, are, uh, on our own. And, uh, have acquired our own property and doing our own ranch.

The Mill and Sand area is often called the Lesser Prairie Chicken Capital of New Mexico. The center of Lesser Prairie Chicken habitat in the Southern Plains. Though Bryce and his family ranch south of Mill and Sand, they are well within chicken habitat. And the bird remains a key player in his family's ranching story today.

The Lesser Prairie Chicken and the listings and things have, uh, It has brought a lot of attention to our area and to the ranching community.

And with that attention, some much needed funding, including funding for this project we're learning about today, which includes three ranches, Working Lands Conservation, Western Landowners Alliance, as well as state and federal agencies. Jesse Juen is a Western Landowners Alliance advisor. and natural resource consultant. Before retirement, he was the director of the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management.

So we have worked on a grant that took a large landscape to look primarily at carbon in the soil and whether that carbon is affected through different management strategies and could that be applied Looked at on local ranches, but then also applied out to a much broader landscape. And Megan Nastow explains

further.

The idea of the project is to build a capacity. Um, for all of these groups to come together to develop better land management practices that can solve some of the critical issues of this region, of the Southern Great Plains. And one of the main issues, um, I think that this region is facing is how to conserve habitat for the endangered lesser prairie chicken while still maintaining the economic livelihoods of ranchers and ranching communities in the neighbourhood. And we kind of came at it.

One indicator of healthy soils is carbon.

There are a number of reasons why soil carbon can be important. From a land stewardship perspective, more carbon in the soil typically means there's more water holding capacity, allowing for more resilience during dry times. So, more water equals more grass.

And from a global perspective, studies indicate that while forests sequester more carbon than grasslands, in an age of increased fire and drought, Grasslands and rangelands could be a more resilient carbon sink because they store carbon underground.

And that brings a third angle to this equation. Ecosystem service markets. Paying someone, like a rancher, for ensuring that their land produces something we all need, like clean water or clean air, or as in this case, sequestered carbon. Basically, you find a way to measure these ecosystem services and generate credits that can be bought and sold in a marketplace.

Now we're still in the early days of developing these markets, and it really feels like the Wild West out there. There are a lot of sales pitches, big promises being thrown around. Western Landowners Alliance is committed to ensuring ecosystem service markets are equitable for land stewards and actually reflect good stewardship on the ground.

If we get this right, ecosystem service markets have massive potential to incentivize and fund conservation and compensate land managers for benefits and costs. they already provide to society.

Take this project, which is looking specifically into carbon. It's funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which includes funding from food giants Burger King and Cargill as part of their goal to reduce CO2 emissions and support stewardship on the plains.

All of these factors made this project interesting to ranchers like Bryce and Jamie Peterson when they chose to participate, looking at how their management practices influence carbon in the soil.

What piqued my interest to start, uh, this was, was the other markets. Uh, ranching as a whole is, is, is a good business, um, but it takes other avenues, um, and, and different sources, uh, to be viable in this business. But data collection is important, and without data, we don't really know what we have. I, I feel like those that ranch with just cows, Only. Cows in mind, they're either very far ahead in the financial curve and they can focus purely on that, or they're probably falling behind.

So with this project, we're looking at how land management practices influence carbon in the soil. But how is this study actually conducted?

According to Chris Holvey and Megan Nastow at Working Lands Conservation, the first steps in co producing research like this is always listening.

One of the first things I think is always important to do in a project is figure out what everybody wants to learn. Monitoring is a term that's thrown around, and you can monitor so many things on a landscape. You can monitor how tall the grass is, you can monitor what kind of species are there, you can monitor all sorts of things. But if you don't really start by asking a question, you're gonna, Just collect a lot of data. It's not going to tell you an answer.

So all these ranchers and partners got together to determine what questions they really needed answered.

Those included, how do grazing systems affect soil carbon? How does shrub removal affect soil carbon? So we really structured our sampling based on answering those questions.

And in this project, The ranchers are using adaptive management and that includes applying intensive rotational grazing. But as Chris said, all of this listening is critical to designing a study in a way that provides practical knowledge for everyone involved.

So first you listen, then design the study, and then

It was really just a lot of digging holes and collecting soil and putting them in bags. Um, so then I could take back home to a lab to actually analyze for, for carbon. But the fun part of it was, is that, you know, I, I spent weeks digging holes, which is something I love to do, but so many other people volunteered to help me.

So getting additional help to dig that many holes makes perfect sense. But there's another benefit when you're getting a group of people who historically may not always see eye to eye. Simply getting on the land together can help build that crucial ingredient to a successful collaborative. And that crucial ingredient is trust.

I found that there's kind of this magic in doing field science and getting a bunch of people together. Everybody starts interpreting what they're seeing together, and we as scientists might put one language on it, and the ranchers put another language on it, and the land managers put a different language on it, but that's how you start. You know, all speaking the same language.

So Working Lands Conservation and Partners and a couple of local teenagers dug a ton of holes and took kilos of soil back to the lab. What did they

find? We found that in areas where there is grazing, that there was more soil carbon, uh, detectably more soil carbon than in areas that weren't grazed. Areas that The roots were not grazed, the root systems were not as deep, areas that were grazed, they were deeper. And the thing about plants is, they act as little carbon pumps. They take carbon out of the atmosphere, they, they Put it into their roots and their plant biomass. And then that carbon kind of leaks from the roots into the soil.

This finding. That well managed grazing could increase soil carbon? That was no surprise to the ranchers.

We're dropping a lot of terms here today, including adaptive management and rotational grazing.

There are a lot of working definitions for adaptive management. It's basically the willingness to change management, to meet changes in weather, climate, feed water availability, markets, predator challenges, really anything. It's about staying flexible in your management in response to new information or changing conditions.

And in addition to strategies like woody brush removal and prescribed fire, ranchers in this project are grazing cattle as part of their adoptive management.

But not all grazing is created equal. Grazing is a tool, and if thoughtfully applied, can improve overall rangeland health. The ranchers involved in this study practice a form of rotational grazing. Meaning that instead of letting cattle out across the entire range in the spring and rounding them up again in the fall, they intensively graze smaller pastures for a short period of time, followed by an extended period of rest.

Grazing in the appropriate intensity and duration for the landscape can lead to more forage availability above ground and deeper roots underground, meaning more carbon storage. But

remember, this project is trying to determine if this landscape can sequester enough carbon that it's worthwhile to participate in carbon markets, a potential tool that could support communities and their land stewardship. So what's the outcome there?

One thing that people are really excited right now about are carbon markets. So, you know, are, is there enough carbon in those grazed areas that now we can get a profit off of that additional carbon? And in these landscapes, maybe not. It's a very small amount of carbon.

It's worth noting that this study found that rangelands that were adaptively managed by the ranchers had about double the amount of carbon in the soil compared to a nearby area of public land that had not been grazed in 15 years.

Ecologically, that's really important in our landscape, even that small amount of carbon, because these are really dry landscapes. And when carbon is in the soil, it actually binds water a little bit. So when the rains come in these areas, that carbon prevents that water from just seeping right through the soils, which are really sandy. And so there's more water for the growth of plants in those areas that are grazed. And so ecologically, those soils are healthier.

Okay, so this emerging collaborative group is studying how adaptive management practices can impact levels of soil carbon. But what does this have to do with the lesser prey chicken?

Well, it really comes down to this.

Probably more than 60 percent or 70 percent of the chickens are on private land in the state of New Mexico.

Why are the birds on mostly private lands? Well, for one, the plains are largely privately owned, right? But also, how those lands are managed is providing habitat for the birds. And simply put, ranching and chickens rely on similar habitats, healthy grasslands.

If ranch operations and the people and communities they support can remain economically viable, They're less likely to be sold and developed.

So if we as a society can compensate land managers for providing essential ecosystem services like wildlife habitat or carbon, that stacking of enterprises can keep these ranches and their communities afloat.

After all, it's the people on the ground that are maintaining and improving habitat conditions.

Now let's hear from Brett, another rancher involved in the project.

Brett Riley, um, we ranch here in Southeastern Mexico and in Western Oklahoma.

Brett is also now the Eastern New Mexico Resource Coordinator for the Western Landowners Alliance.

This ranch, you know, primarily is cow calf operation, um, you know, nestled here, you know, we're in a checkerboard ranching area, private, state, and BLM lands, um, and then, you know, we're also, um, Right in the middle of prairie chicken habitat. So, you know, that's kind of a driver always has been on this ranch and probably, you know, probably what got us into the conservation field to begin with.

We talked earlier about how the ranchers involved in this study are using an adaptive management approach to their operations. Brett helped us connect the dots between his management actions and the Lesser Prairie Chicken.

And if we, you know, we take care of the soils, they take care of the, you know, the biomass and, you know, if we can build healthy ecosystems and then we, you know, we're sequestering a little carbon along the way, you know, we're helping our water infiltration by building up the organic matter in the soils with our grazing patterns.

Brett also tells us that he's involved with the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowners Alliance. A group of about 25 landowners across New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado working with federal agencies to forge a path to chicken recovery.

Ted Cook and the Grouse Partnership helped get the alliance started.

I like to joke that I called up these landowner leaders in the different states in the southwestern Great Plains and I said, hey. Ted Cook with the Grouse Partnership, and we want to save, uh, lesser prairie chickens and ranching. And they said, well we disagree with you, we want to save ranchers, ranching and lesser prairie chickens. And so, uh, obviously our interests were highly congruent.

And the vision for the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowners Alliance? Defend the core of remaining chicken habitat across their range? What

we are trying to envision is, you know, connecting these habitats and, and building, you know, a pathway. And, you know, we talk about strongholds, right? What we're looking at doing here is building a over 110, 000 acre stronghold right here in this part of the world, you know, and trying to put some things in place and, you know, kind of use it as a model as, you know, how do we do this? How, you know, what percentage shenry do we need? What percentage? Tall grass do we need?

And according to Brett's philosophy, what's good for the ranchers comes from Good for the bird. And participating in studies such as this one helps him understand how his management actions are impacting the landscape.

We kind of look at it as a holistic approach. If, you know, what, what works for our chicken and, and not just the chicken, but the other wildlife species that are on the ranch, um, also work for our cow habitat. I mean, we've, we've just got some research data in that showed that, you know, parts of the ranch were like 35 percent less bare ground than we were 10 years ago.

But what about this project in particular? We asked Brett his thoughts about the results of this landscape level carbon study.

Certainly, this project's been very useful and been very informative. Um, do I feel like carbon's ever going to be a leader for us? I don't. I don't feel like out here in these arid environments that we're ever going to sequester enough carbon. to actually make the carbon sequestration portion of it pay.

As we mentioned earlier, improving soil health through adaptive management can lead to outcomes like more water in the soil and an increase in forage availability, which can help ranching operations be resilient to challenges like drought.

And while Brett doesn't think carbon credits could be worthwhile in eastern New Mexico, Some sort of habitat lease or biodiversity credit could go a long way to support ranching communities who are actively stewarding our remaining grasslands.

When we start talking about biodiversity and wildlife and I think maybe that's a new frontier that we're We're just kind of getting in on right now. And I think it's one that probably, especially in our part of the world, is going to be probably more significant.

In addition to ecosystem service markets, Brett thinks modifying existing federal farm bill programs could also support lesser prairie chicken conservation on working lands. That's one avenue the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance is working on right now.

But in any case There needs to be a toolbox of financial support for ranchers and communities who are proactively building and maintaining critical wildlife habitat, especially when we consider how little intact grasslands are left.

We've squeezed the margins on all these producers to the point to where, you know, you have to be bigger and bigger and bigger, and then we've gotten to the point to where there's just not many cents left over when you get done at the end of the day. And so, I think if we're gonna ask these folks to go in there and maybe improve the ecology on certain portions of this landscape, And build these habitats. There has to be an offset somewhere there to provide them with the monetary stability.

It's clear from visiting with the ranchers involved in this project that when it comes to staying in business and supporting wildlife. They're committed for the long haul.

And that's a good thing. After all, it's thoughtful ranchers like Brett and Bryce and their families and a collaboration of partners who are pushing against the decline of habitat that's slowly eating away at the plains.

I think if we would, you know, You know, open our eyes as a society and look at, you know, who's going to be the one that's going to lead this, you know, ecological revolution, you might say, it's going to be the producer.

So if we want resilient ecosystems, we need to support the people on the ground, stewarding them.

I was on a zoom call while back with some folks in the Fish and Wildlife Service, and they said, We cannot mandate or dictate our way into saving the chicken. If we don't have the, the producers on our side working with us, you know, the species is going to go into extinct and, and they're probably right. I mean, not probably right. I know they're right because, you know, producers are the ones with the boots on the ground out here. We're the ones that see it every day. We know what's going on.

At the end of the day, the collective vision emerging from the plains is a biome level model for conservation. And while the lesser prairie chicken may have been the trigger, It's not just about the bird.

Where do we have these remaining intact systems? How do we protect them? And how do we expand the central core and support what is working? This is a model of thinking that can be applied to conservation challenges anywhere, and it requires leadership from the land and people working across boundaries to make it happen.

And it's the continuous, thoughtful stewardship by communities on the ground that is supporting the Lesser Prairie Chicken. It's not setting aside land and simply letting it be. So how can we do a better job supporting those people and their contributions, whether it's a private market solution, a public funding solution, or a toolbox of both? As a society, we need to better support what we truly value.

And so while the future of Lesser Prairie Chickens remain uncertain, and the challenges we face are complex, if we work together, we can chart a path forward that supports people, wildlife, and the spaces we share. The critical piece we call the working wild.

Let's sit down at the table, everybody, you know, I'd even invite the environmental groups that don't like cows, come, come talk to us. Let's sit down at the table and visit about it and let's go out in the country and look at it and let's, let's fix this problem. I mean, it's not anything that's insurmountable. We can do it. It's just a matter of rolling your sleeves up and getting it done.