Two hundred years after Lewis and Clark first catalogued the sage-grouse, the high-stakes controversy over the effects of natural resource development upon its habitat has reverberated throughout the West. However, through a unique collaboration of industry and government with land-owners and the state’s philanthropic community, these birds may continue to thrive among gas and oil fields into the coming centuries.

Since 2005, the Tom Thorne Sage-grouse Conservation Fund (TSG) has given out $1,000,000 under the stewardship of the Wyoming Community Foundation (WYCF) for the conservation of the sage-grouse in the Upper Green River Valley.

Created through an initial private gift by Shell Exploration & Production Company, at a time when the federal government was considering a possible endangered species listing for the grouse, TSG’s funds have sustained the efforts of organizations as diverse as the Wyoming Stock Growers Agricultural Land Trust and the North American Grouse Partnership (NAGP).

Under a $28,000 grant through WYCF, the Stock Growers partnered with the RL McNeel land trust to create an easement for 640 acres of sage-grouse habitat on private property outside of Daniel, Wyoming, allowing for its conservation in perpetuity. The habitat is immediately adjacent to a working cattle ranch and is smack in the middle of BLM land. Dan Stroud, a biologist for the Jonah Interagency Office, calls the future benefits of this partnership “far-reaching.” The easement will be managed by the state’s Game and Fish Department.

Wildlife debates are often tumultuous, and the stereotyping of green activists and the agribusiness can come all too easily. Scientists from NAGP, which received the largest grant of more than a quarter-million dollars, and the ranchers whose land they study, have proved this thinking wrong. Amid the willows, clover patches, and hay meadows of the Upper Green River Valley, landowners met with researchers Courtney Skinner and Natalie Macsalka from Wyoming Wildlife Consultants, contractors for NAGP, to discuss typical matters, such as bird habitat enhancements, but also to see how they could maintain good relations.

As Charles Price from the Price Ranch told Skinner and Macsalka in November of 2007, “Keep doing exactly what you are doing,” while Maggie Miller of Grindstone Cattle, who has ranched her land for over thirty years, said the researchers were welcome there “any time.”

Courtesies like these, while familiar to most rural westerners, were not the limit of the partnerships that the Tom Thorne Sage-grouse Conservation Fund has encouraged over its course, but the beginning of a network of stakeholders working to honor all interests regarding the sage grouse and its environment. In fact, during the 2007 study, almost two dozen ranchers agreed to take notebooks with them to record their own observations of the territory.

By the end of the their two-year study, NAGP identified eighty-five nests and thirty-seven successful broods throughout Ryegrass, Bench Corral, and Soap Holes in the Upper Green River Valley.

From the outset of the TSG funds establishment, the reassurance and participation of all stakeholders was a priority, with a mission to “promote science, education, and cooperative management actions to benefit sage-grouse in the Upper Green River Basin,” according to WYCF’s Senior Program Officer, Samin Dadelahi.

Other grant recipients included Craighead Beringia South that received $42,000 to study the whereabouts of ravens and other scavengers around grouse nests, and the University of California, Davis that received $17,000 to assess how increased noise from energy development affected sage grouse stress and physiology.



Written by Jason Stenar Clark, WYCF Grants Administrator.