Tracking Wildlife’s Ups and Downs

PHOTOS: TOM DICKSON

LOOKING AT LEKS In the early morning light, Conrad-area FWP wildlife biologist Ryan Rauscher tallies male sharp-tailed grouse seen on a nearby lek. Below: Later he scans another lek for dancing grouse, which perform their mating ritual at the site each spring.

Tracking Wildlife’s Ups and Downs STEVE MITCHELL

What FWP biologists learn when they monitor populations and individual animals. By Tom Dickson 16 | MONTANA OUTDOORS | SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2021

“Listen.” Ryan Rauscher leans out his pickup window and tilts his head. It’s a half hour before sunup in late April, about 15 miles east of the Rocky Mountain Front near the tiny town of Bynum. Rauscher, the FWP wildlife biologist in Conrad, has driven through darkness

across private land, with permission, to monitor a sharp-tailed grouse “lek.” On these open areas amid sagebrush and shortgrass prairie, males and some females gather at dawn each spring for the prairie birds’ lively mating ritual. At first the only sound I discern is a flying

snipe’s eerie winnowing. Then I hear it: the staccato chittering of dancing sharp-tailed grouse males. Rauscher leans farther out the window, binoculars trained on the distant commotion. “One, five, eleven…sixteen males, and two hens,” he says after a few minutes of watching.

I squint, unable to see a thing in the predawn gray. Finally the white triangles of the male birds’ tails appear, 100 yards off, poking up from yucca and grasses. Before heading for several other leks scattered across the county, we stay a bit longer, watching these birds perform a mating rite that has taken place here every spring for tens of thousands of years. Sharp-tailed grouse lek counts are among the dozens of wildlife surveys that FWP biologists and other scientists conduct across Montana each year. The surveys range from calculating the size of vast elk and deer herds to tracking individual grizzly bears and pronghorn fawns. This monitoring is essential. The Montana Legislature requires FWP to manage all of the state’s 500-plus wildlife species, especially game animals pursued for meat or fur and those with declining numbers that, if not effectively conserved, could end up under federal protection. Wildlife “management”— making sure healthy populations stay healthy, reducing numbers of species causing problems (like eating too much hay on ranches), and restoring struggling populations—requires making decisions based on

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