On the short-grass steppe prairie where every bit of grass for livestock matters and grassland birds are the fastest declining group among all birds, Bird Conservancy partnered with NextEra Energy Resources, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, USDA-Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and USFWS-Partners for Fish and Wildlife, to provide ranchers with project funding to install fencing for Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) fields so pastures can be managed into a more diverse grazing operation with the added benefit to move livestock into multiple pastures and enhance habitat, over the alternative of potential conversion to cropland. Ranchers are gaining pasture while implementing managed grazing, birds are discovering more habitat options, and the grasslands are re-discovering their lifecycle processes. The prairie is teaching us about collaboration and partnerships and agencies across all sectors – energy and conservation – are responding!
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- A wildlife friendly fence.
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- A completed fence for pastor rotations.
The short-grass steppe is a community of perennials. It is built on both shallow and deep roots, on persistence and adaptability. It is resilient in dry conditions and productive in wet seasons because of its diversity; warm and cool season grasses and forbs all with different mechanisms to handle a spectrum of unpredictable precipitation. This ecosystem was also built on the disturbance of grazing and fire. These diverse plants co-evolved to be at their best under the pressure from ungulates and grazing rodents such as the keystone species bison and prairie dogs.
Illustration of a healthy grassland ecosystem.
Recently, I travelled from Denver to Virginia. I had the “good fortune” to sit in the middle seat and leaned into my neighbor’s space to watch the eastern plains of Colorado zip under the fuselage. She was kind enough to slide over and, unfortunately to also comment on the “fly over” parts of the country beneath us as she then closed the shade to better see the movie screen in front of her.
That is a common misconception about the Great Plains and for centuries this perspective ensured the presence of the plow. Then came the Dust Bowl and we learned new things about plowing grasslands and leaving soil to the wind. In response to the Dust Bowl, President Roosevelt created the Soil Conservation Service within the USDA in 1935. This program became our modern made NRCS and in partnership with the FSA, over 3 million acres of former crop fields in Colorado are currently enrolled in CRP. In exchange for a yearly payment, farmers are incentivized to return crop fields to rangelands, to native grasses and forbs, and the wildlife that recognize these systems as habitat.
A biologist visiting the herd on a landowner visit.
Driving across the plains it is easy to distinguish CRP fields from original intact rangeland. The vegetation is dense and clumpy with tall stalks and layers of decomposing litter. For some birds, like a Grasshopper Sparrow or a Scaled Quail, CRP makes a significant difference; it IS habitat. For other species, like the Thick-billed Longspur, which depends on much shorter, heavier grazed lands that CRP often doesn’t provide, it’s “fly over” country. While CRP locked down the soil it didn’t provide for disturbance. The health of the system was better, but not optimal. This project helped bring back some of that natural disturbance to the landscape to optimize success.
Thick-billed Longspur a grassland bird and Species of Greatest Conservation Need in Colorado has declined in population upwards of 90% due to loss of or conversion of grasslands.
The great news is that we keep learning and adapting. We now know that to conserve biodiversity we need a good balance between grazing and rest, that birds and grazers are compatible and they need each other to support grassland health, the infiltration of water, the production of food, fiber, forage and nesting areas, some of which are on bare ground and some buried in dense thickets. Bird Conservancy works with many partners across the prairie ecosystem to enable options for ranchers to improve their grazing operations, enhance native grasses and forbs and create habitat for many of our imperiled grassland birds.
This article was written by Rachel Belouin, Program Manager for the Southern Great Plains.
