South Dakota prairie grouse initiative earns award

Organizations such as TWS and the Boone and Crockett Club were created in response to the devastating impacts of market hunting and other unsustainable practices. The movement to better manage natural resources and game populations was led by local hunters not engaged in the activity for profit purposes and eventually coalesced into the formation of TWS in 1937 along with various other state agencies and local clubs upholding a burgeoning “fair chase” ethic.

Only two Wildlife Restoration Awards are given out each year, one for restoring, conserving, managing and enhancing wild bird and mammal populations and another for efforts involving wildlife research and surveys.

Travis Runia and Alex Solem from Game, Fish and Parks and Neal Niemuth and Kevin Barnes from the Fish and Wildlife Service led the research project.

GFP Wildlife Program Administrator Chad Switzer described the important efforts resulting in the Wildlife Restoration Award.

“The conversion of native grasslands to cropland, energy development, habitat fragmentation, and certain woody habitat plantings and encroachment in both Dakotas can present challenges to prairie grouse,” he said.

“This study provided a more efficient and robust method of predicting prairie grouse distribution for targeting habitat conservation,” Switzer explained.

Runia talked about some of the finer details surrounding the intense research.

“Traditionally, we survey grouse in both Dakota’s by surveying leks,” he said.

A lek is a traditional location where male prairie grouse dance and call in efforts to impress potential mates. Certain “booming grounds,” or leks, have been used for many generations and in some cases for over 100 years.

“Although the survey results may give insight into local populations, they have limited utility in estimating statewide abundances or trends because survey blocks are often non-random, biased toward high-quality habitat, and lack adequate spatial coverage,” Runia added.

Runia and his team surveyed male prairie grouse across nearly 900 randomly selected Public Land Survey Sections covering a period between 2010 and 2016. They then developed habitat-based spatially explicit density models eventually leading to the creation of accurate and greatly improved spatial mappings of the birds.

The awards will be conferred to the agencies at the society’s 29th annual conference in Spokane, Washington, on November 4-6.

More information about the prairie grouse, current conservation efforts and the event can be found at the following: gfp.sd.gov, wildlife.org and twsconference.org.