Imagine this: 50 chainsaw crews fan out over carefully selected areas of Owyhee County in southwest Idaho. For eight hours a day — all they do is cut down hundreds of juniper trees. Then in the spring, more crews go out and burn those fallen trees.
This is the BOSH Project. BOSH stands for Bruneau Owyhee Sage Grouse Habitat and in six years, crews have cleared 140,000 acres of encroaching junipers. Those trees, though native to Idaho, have been taking over the landscape since 1860.
And it’s our fault, according to Conner White, BOSH Project coordinator for Pheasants Forever and the Bureau of Land Management.
“We got very good at suppressing fire for over a century. We basically put every fire out,” White said. “Fire is the main thing that kills these conifers, and we completely removed it from the landscape.”
The goal of the BOSH Project is to take out those junipers, restore native plant species like sagebrush, recover more streams and wetlands and bring back sage grouse and other animals to the land.
The project is huge, covering around 600,000 acres in Owyhee County alone, says Jeremy Maestas, National Sagebrush Ecosystem Specialist for Working Lands for Wildlife and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“We're probably going to be pushing up towards a million acres once this project's fully completed,” says Maestas.
Turns out, sage grouse don’t like to hang around Juniper trees and won’t nest in an area that has even four trees per acre.
“The theory is that the trees provide perches for predators or cover for ground based predators to be able to go in there and get them,” said White.
Similar work has shown results for the return of sage grouse in the Warner Mountains Project in southern Oregon.
“Grouse immediately started nesting in areas once the trees were removed. And then over a decade, we were able to show that it actually bent the curve on their population growth rates over areas that were untreated. So we saw a 12% increase in the population growth rate, which is the first time we've ever documented in the literature that we can benefit grouse at a population scale through active restoration,” Maestas said.
Taking out junipers isn’t just good for sage grouse. Other birds, like Brewer’s Sparrows and Sage Sparrows, also come back along with native plants. Junipers also drink a lot of water and when you remove them, the landscape changes.
“They're seeing springs come back to life and creeks come back to life and more water for aquatic life and spotted frogs and things like that,” says Steve Stubner, writer and producer of the “Life on the Range” series sponsored by the Idaho Rangeland Resource Commission.
Ranchers and other private landowners are partnering with up to a dozen federal, state, and local agencies to make the project happen. And ranchers are liking what they see.
“They're loving it,” said Stubner. “A lot of times, what's good for sage grouse is also good for livestock and wildlife. And that's definitely the great combo we've got going here.”
Maestas says they’re fighting against the clock to save sage grouse, with 1.3 million acres a year of sagebrush ecosystems disappearing thanks to things like conifer encroachment.
“So any time we can set the clock back and keep these lands healthy and resilient for current and future generations it really brings a lot of pride to the work that we do,” said Maestas.
Sage grouse can be the canary in the coal mine for areas like these.
“There's a whole arc of peril happening with over 350 species of conservation concern, plants and animals that will probably never have their own initiative. They're not sexy enough or interesting enough for that kind of investment. But when we do things for sage grouse we are seeing benefits for other sagebrush dependent species,” Maestas said.