It's not a good time to be a bird, and especially a grassland bird. Bird lovers across North America have been sounding an alarm about declining grassland birds, and I'm afraid it's time to toll the bell in North Dakota, too.
For a long time, North Dakota has been a special place for birds and other wildlife. Partly, this is a consequence of a fairly thinly distributed human population. Although most land is used by humans in some way, much of it seldom sees human disturbance. Humans come to plant, tend the crop and then to harvest. They come to check the cattle. They may come to hunt. They may come just to get away from other people.
In any case, they don't create too much disturbance.
The state has had abundant habitat, and the Conservation Reserve Program probably provided more sustenance for grassland birds than they'd known since before European settlement.
Due to a conjunction of developments, all of that is changing.
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CRP contracts are expiring at just the time that commodity prices are at near-record highs. A long, dry fall abetted tilling and burning many thousands of acres, reducing habitat that wildlife of all kinds depend on. At the same time, the population of coyotes reached very high levels, and coyotes feed on small mammals that help sustain open country raptors.
Then there's oil. Development has pushed roads into areas that have never had anything more passable than a two-track trail. Of course, it's axiomatic that roads bring traffic and traffic brings people and people disturb wildlife.
The fragmentation of habitat is an important overlooked consequence of the oil boom.
All of this has played out in a political climate that doesn't include wildlife among its priorities.
Unfortunately for wildlife, North Dakota has little land that's protected from development. Although it has more national wildlife refuges than any other state, it has less public land than any other state west of the Mississippi -- and some east of it; Maine, for example. As a percentage of its total area, North Dakota has less federal land than one of the nation's oldest states, Virginia.
So, as development proceeds, wildlife has nowhere to retreat.
There really isn't anyone to blame, of course. Wildlife has flourished here under a policy of benign neglect. That's changed.
What species are in danger?
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The list starts with the state bird, the western meadowlark.
This is a species that benefited from the Conservation Reserve Program. It produced exactly the heavy cover that meadowlarks find most appealing. Even an overgrown ditch could harbor a pair of meadowlarks.
Although the meadowlark continues to flourish where habitat is available, these places are becoming fewer. In North Dakota, the meadowlark is now rare in the Red River Valley.
Ditch burning in the fall is especially harmful to meadowlarks, since ditches often provided the only cover. This is true for a number of other species, too, especially the vesper sparrow, once frequent enough in roadsides to be called "the ditch sparrow."
Of course, vesper sparrows are less conspicuous and less beloved than meadowlarks. This is true of other threatened grassland species, too. Sprague's pipit is one example.
This species has a place in North Dakota's history. Sprague's pipit was discovered and named by John James Audubon when he visited Fort Union in the 1840s.
In many ways, it is a signature species of the short-grass prairie -- the habitat now fragmented by oil activity.
Probably, few people have seen a Sprague's pipit. It's a specialized resident of short-grass prairies, and it's cryptically colored. The pipit seldom flushes, preferring to run when disturbed. The birds are much more often heard. In courtship displays, they give a kind of rasping whistle that's a kind of anthem of the prairie spring.
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At least I think so.
Some species -- burrowing owls and sage grouse, for example -- have been declining for decades for reasons that aren't completely clear. What's clear, however, is that these species, and other grassland birds, will have less refuge in the new reality that's settling over North Dakota.
Jacobs is editor and publisher of the Herald. Reach him at (701) 780-1103; (800) 477-6572, ext. 103; or send email to mjacobs@gfherald.com .
