The North Dakota Game and Fish Department will allow sharp-tailed grouse hunting in Grand Forks County north of U.S. Highway 2 this fall, an area that has traditionally been closed to sharptail hunting to reduce the risk of hunters accidentally shooting prairie chickens.
Brad Dokken
The lifting of the sharptail closure is included in the proclamation of small game, waterfowl and furbearer regulations Gov. Doug Burgum signed July 19. North Dakota’s season for sharp-tailed grouse opens Sept. 14.
While sharptail hunting will be allowed, the area will remain closed to prairie chicken hunting along with the rest of the state, said Jesse Kolar, upland game management supervisor for Game and Fish in Dickinson, North Dakota. The department will launch an awareness campaign to educate hunters and help them learn the difference between sharptails and prairie chickens, Kolar says.
“We are going to be putting out some ID pages on the website, on our webcast and then also when we print out our new small game hunting guide,” he said.
The proclamation doesn’t specifically address sharptail–prairie chicken hybrids, but hunters should avoid any bird that doesn’t look like a pure sharptail, Kolar said.
“If a hunter mistakenly harvests a hybrid, they’d be safe because the hybrid would be considered part of (their) sharptail limit,” he said. “People have harvested hybrid prairie chicken–sharp-tailed grouse in other parts of the state, and they were always considered part of a sharptail bag, so that hasn’t changed.”
The department’s decision to lift the closure results from declining prairie chicken populations in Grand Forks County. As the population declined, recent spring booming ground surveys have shown increasing numbers of sharptails and sharptail-prairie chicken hybrids.
A hybrid prairie grouse, showing both the pinnae feathers of a male prairie chicken and the purple air sacs and pointed tail of a male sharp-tailed grouse.
Contributed / Jesse Kolar, North Dakota Game and Fish Department
Male prairie chickens produce the booming sound by inflating air sacs in their necks in an effort to attract a mate. Last spring, a survey crew led by Susan Felege, UND professor of wildlife ecology and management, documented only five male prairie chickens on four leks, or breeding grounds, on either side of Highway 2 in Grand Forks County.
All of the leks also had sharptails. Simply put, the sharptails are outcompeting the prairie chickens and have taken over the area, which includes pockets of the tallgrass prairie habitat that prairie chickens need to survive.
The area north of Highway 2 had been closed to sharptail hunting for more than 30 years, Kolar said.
Historically, it’s not known if North Dakota had prairie chickens before European settlement but the population increased from 1880 to 1930 before numbers declined, according to the Game and Fish Department.
Prairie chickens were “pretty much considered extirpated” from Grand Forks County in the late 1980s, Kolar said, but the abundance of habitat available on the Ed Bry and Prairie Chicken wildlife management areas and Oakville Prairie, along with Kellys Slough National Wildlife Refuge and other federal lands, made the translocation of birds a viable option.
According to a Herald story published in June 2021, Game and Fish and several partners, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Prairie Chicken Society, translocated 357 prairie chickens from Minnesota, South Dakota and Nebraska over a six-year period between 1992 and 1998.
Jesse Kolar, upland game management supervisor, North Dakota Game and Fish Department
Contributed / North Dakota Game and Fish Department
The abundance of private land enrolled in the federal Conservation Reserve Program at the time added to the habitat offerings, and the population grew to the point where the department offered a limited prairie chicken season from 2004 through 2009.
“There was a lot of good habitat in Grand Forks County” at the time, Kolar said. “The population did really well. Even after we stopped translocations, it continued to grow.”
As CRP contracts expired and available habitat declined, prairie chicken numbers dwindled. Game and Fish discontinued the Grand Forks County prairie chicken season in 2010 because the population was no longer viable.
“They continued declining, and sharptails have slowly moved back in and taken over the area,” Kolar said. “We don’t have any prairie chicken booming grounds left anymore. They’re only found occasionally on sharptail leks. Without the CRP and without a good sign showing that area can be sustainable for prairie chickens, we decided to reopen (the area) to (sharptail) hunting instead of trying to maintain a supplemental population where we’d always have to add more prairie chickens.”
Sharptails, Kolar says, tend to do better in the fragmented shrubby cover that remained in Grand Forks County as CRP grassland acreage declined. Also, sharptails are better adapted to northern climates than prairie chickens, he said.
“Geographically, sharptails occupy a farther northern range than prairie chickens,” Kolar said. “So, we were always at the northern edge of the prairie chicken range in North Dakota.”
That leaves the Sheyenne National Grasslands area in far southeast North Dakota as the only part of the state with a viable prairie chicken population.
There was little, if any opposition to opening the area north of Highway 2 to sharptail hunting during a public comment period that began late last fall. In addition, Kolar said, the last booming grounds that remained before disappearing in recent years were south of Highway 2, where sharptail hunting was allowed.
“That was another thing that helped us confirm our decision,” he said. “So, it doesn’t appear that the hunting closure had any impact.
“I think everybody was kind of on the same page. They saw that we did make a good effort to do a translocation and see if that area had enough habitat to sustain prairie chickens and found out that it likely doesn’t, as is, so they were all open to the fact that, based on what we know now, it’s not going to hurt anything to open the season to sharptail harvest and see where we go from there.”
The biggest concern was that the department was “giving up” on prairie chickens, Kolar says.
“I guess from the department standpoint, I would say it’s just out of our control,” he said. “With the limited amount of acres we have for habitat there, I’d say we just don’t have an option, and we don’t have the acreage to have that population there.”
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Publish date : 2024-08-02 11:01:00
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