Sprague's pipit was in the news earlier this month, and the news was not good.
An article distributed by The Associated Press on Sept. 16 said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wouldn't list the pipit as a threatened species -- but not because the bird is safe.
It's just that other species have higher priority.
The pipit is in dire jeopardy, however. The population has declined by 80 percent in the past 40 years. Sprague's pipit is listed as vulnerable by Bird Life International "due to rapid population decline."
The pipit might once have been common in the Red River Valley, but there are few recent records.
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But the pipit had been relatively common in western North Dakota and northeastern Montana.
Until oil development.
Probably, a further decline in the pipit population will be one of the unintended consequences of rapid development of the Bakken and Three Forks formations. These oil-bearing layers of shale coincide remarkably with the pipit's breeding range.
The pipit has been a victim of unintended consequences before.
Agriculture drove the pipit from the Red River Valley. A very rapid conversion of grassland in Saskatchewan during the 1970s and 1980s nearly doomed the species there.
This was an unintended consequence of U.S. farm policy. An embargo on exports to the Soviet Union depressed markets in the late 1970s, and Congress responded with a program that paid American farmers to leave land idle. Canadian farmers responded by plowing up the prairie.
This was a disaster for Sprague's pipits.
Sprague's pipits are dependent on great swathes of prairie -- not small patches, but substantial tracts. These still exist in northwestern North Dakota. Suezette and I own some of it, near Blaisdell in Mountrail County.
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Much of the county north of U.S. Highway 2 has stretches of unbroken grassland. Some is protected in Wildlife Management Areas, and Lostwood National Wildlife Refuge is a large and important relict prairie.
Probably Sprague's pipits will survive in some of these areas.
Elsewhere, however, they will probably give way to oil development, which brings several kinds of disruption to prairie -- roads and drilling platforms among the most important, but more people, too.
New drilling technologies could reduce the impact on pipits. Oil companies are moving to multiple wells on single platforms, and this reduces the destruction of prairie.
But there's still the issue of fragmentation.
Ranching has a relatively low impact on the landscape. In effect, human beings are simply visitors to many thousands of acres of rangeland in northwestern North Dakota.
But oil development creates an industrial landscape. Rather than unbroken prairie, the region is dotted with oil wells and lined with roads -- features that fragment habitat for the pipits.
Canadian writer Trevor Herriot, in a heartfelt elegy for prairie birdlife ("Grass, Sky, Song," HarperCollins, Toronto, 2009), suggested that Sprague's pipit was iconic of Canada's grasslands.
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This is true of North Dakota, too.
The bird was described for science from specimens taken near Fort Union, at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. John James Audubon had come up the Missouri to Fort Union, just east of today's Montana border.
At first, the bird mystified the great ornithologist, but he finally realized he'd been looking for it on the ground -- but it was singing in the sky.
This is a courtship ritual common to prairie birds -- horned larks sing on the wing, too.
Audubon named the bird for Isaac Sprague, an artist who specialized in drawing plants. For years, it was believed that Sprague shot the first of his namesake pipits, but it's clear from a close reading of journals kept by his companions, and by Audubon himself, that two others, Edward Harris and John G. Bell, actually fired the shots that brought down the bird. Audubon had already named a species for each of them, Harris' sparrow and Bell's vireo.
So, the pipit was named for Sprague.
Audubon actually called it "Sprague's Missouri skylark," thereby increasing the errors in its name to three, since Sprague didn't take the bird, it is not a lark and it isn't limited to the Missouri River valley -- and occurs in the state of Missouri only as a passage migrant.
Mike Jacobs is publisher and editor of the Herald.
