Saving the sagebrush: Nature Conservancy springs a radical idea in Eastern Washington

By Lynda V. Mapes
Seattle Times staff reporter

from http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=sage02m&date=20010702&query=nature+conservancy

MOSES COULEE, Douglas County 7/2/01 - This landscape is best savored slowly, best of all by standing stock still to hear the wind and breathe deep the pungent fragrance of sagebrush.

Meadowlarks call to each other across this vast, open country. It's a place to hear the Song Dogs, or coyotes yip and sing as the sun slants low, and watch the nighthawks swoosh after bugs as the stars begin to come out.

Drive through sage country on the interstate, and it may not look like much worth saving. But sagebrush steppe is every bit as rare in Washington as old-growth forest, and more biologically diverse.

On Friday, the Nature Conservancy of Washington recognized that value when it made its largest-ever acquisition: a 16,000-acre expanse encompassing some of the state's last, best sagelands, to keep it protected.

It's a young landscape, full of secrets biologists are just beginning to understand.

"There is so much we don't know; it's like a library we don't want to lose," said Nancy Warner of the Wenatchee office of the conservancy.

And, she added, there's a cultural importance as well: "Eastern Washington's shrub steppe landscape is so altered there isn't much reference left for where we came from." Sagebrush has been fought nearly to death by farmers and settlers all over the West.

Almost two-thirds of the 10.5 million acres of continuous shrub steppe habitat in Eastern Washington present in the 1800s is gone today, and only 5 to 10 percent of what's left is in good condition.

Most of the state's original sagelands were ripped out or burned to convert the ground to farmland, usually to dryland wheat. The big specimen sagebrush plants, 13 feet tall and 100 years old, were often the first to go: They indicated good soil.

Out of cell-phone reach

The conservancy is purchasing the property from Contran of Texas, for $1.7 million.

The land is bisected by McCartney Creek, north of Ephrata, and is deliciously isolated. Cell phones might as well be doorstops here; there's no signal for miles. Just finding a regular telephone requires a trip into town.

The purchase links public land and other land already protected by the conservancy together in a significant swath of habitat, covering more than 20,000 acres.

Together, the sites offer a diversity of topography: gently undulating hills, spires of basalt columns and craggy outcroppings, streams, coulees and miles of open sagebrush steppe.

There is shoulder-high Great Basin rye, with its seed heads firm and white as pearls. Delicate needle-and-thread grass; stiff and rugged bluebunch wheatgrass; silky-plumed squirrel-tail grass and nubby Indian rice grass.

Wildflowers glow in the evening light: yellow buckwheat; amethyst-purple sego lilies; hot-pink talinum and snowy-white mock orange, wafting a sweet perfume.

Then there is the sage: big sage, with its flat, lobe-shaped leaves, pungent and sweet. Stiff sage, with its sour aroma, and three-tip sage.

A member of the sunflower family, sage is botanically distinct from the sage used to cook with, or ornamental sage used in the garden for its brilliant purple-blue flowers. Those sages are in the mint family.

Repeated ice-age floods beginning some 12,000 years ago cut the sagebrush steppes. Torrents of floodwaters sculpted the basalt covering much of the Columbia Basin into an elaborate cutwork of coulees and badlands, tinted bronze and mauve by the iron in the basalt.

The shape of the basalt formations depends on how the ancient lava flows cooled: Basalt that cooled fast, in water, is softly pillow-shaped. Angular columns indicate a slower, air-cooled pace. Huge, so-called steamboat rocks, named for their shape, once parted the floodwaters that carved them.

Sagebrush steppe is big-sky country, with cloud sculptures poised atop basalt pedestals. McCartney Creek blasts fresh and green down the middle of the conservancy property, ruffed by willows and rushes.

It's not hard to imagine what it could have looked like instead: The conservancy purchased development rights on 2,800 acres on neighboring sagebrush steppe that last year subdivided into 1,000 building lots.

Nearly all of the land purchased Friday is leased for ranching and farming. The current leases will be honored while the conservancy comes up with long-term plans for management of the land.

Those plans will be made in concert with other work already under way locally to protect water quality and quantity and threatened and endangered species.

For starters, the conservancy will begin an inventory of the property to determine areas most in need of restoration and weed removal. Opportunities for public use are also being explored.

The habitat is important to several fragile populations of native birds, including the sage sparrow, sage grouse and loggerhead shrike. It is also home to the Townsend's big-eared bat and two of the largest-known roosts in Washington for the spotted bat, believed to be one of the rarest on the Columbia Plateau.

Pygmy rabbit, proposed for protection on the state endangered-species list, may also be here.

Preservation of the remaining sagebrush steppe in Washington is preferable to restoration, biologists believe, because restoration is difficult.

Sage is propagated from seed and slow growing. Weeds, especially cheat grass, easily out-compete it. Cheat grass is the nemesis of native sagebrush steppe. Once established, it easily spreads and threatens native plants by providing abundant fuel for wildfire hot enough to burn sagebrush to ash.

Native grasses, especially bluebunch wheatgrass, don't carry fire as well. Spaces between the grass slow its progress, and the grasses remain green at their core.

When fire destroys sagebrush - such as at the 77,000-acre Arid Lands Ecology Reserve near Hanford, almost entirely burned in a 164,000-acre wildfire last summer - it is difficult to restore. Sagebrush seed is hard to come by; germination is chancy and growth slow.

The Nature Conservancy may want to partner with farmers to grow sagebrush for restoration work.

Even the idea of preserving sagebrush is new in farm country, let alone deliberately growing it. That attitude is changing: Recent seminars in Wenatchee on sagebrush steppe habitat drew more than 150 people, said the conservancy's Warner, who helped give the seminars.

But an all-out effort to save the sage? It's still a new notion to many.

"A lot of people are still in shock about it," Warner said. "They worked so long and hard to get rid of sagebrush. It was the less you have, the better off you are.

"We went too far; we almost lost it all."

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