Brushland Dervishes

Every spring, sharp-tailed grouse put on a pageant for those willing to get up before daybreak and sit in a hayfield.

By Gustave Axelson
Photography by Layne Kennedy

Blinded by predawn darkness, I stumble into the 4-foot-high canvas blind like a tardy theater-goer grasping for an empty seat—creating a clamor that I fear might irritate the actors.

When I finally get settled and silent for a moment, I can hear that the show has already begun—hoot, hoot, hoot—though I can't see who's doing the hooting.

I'm seated in a hayfield about a quarter-mile from a Carlton County road, a few miles north of the Kettle River. And I've come to see one of the Midwest's most spectacular spring mating shows: the dance of the sharp-tailed grouse.

It's 5:30 a.m., and the mid-April sun won't rise for another hour. The hoots continue, and now I detect they're followed by a rapid-fire thump, thump, thump, thump that sounds like the machinations of a repeating water sprinkler.

There was a time when some people thought these mating sounds might not be heard in Minnesota in the 21st century. Sharptails suffered dramatic population declines during the past 50 years. Today, these brushland grouse are promenading to a comeback of sorts—though it's too soon to know if their modest recovery can be sustained.

Brushland Grouse

Sharptails need brushlands—transitional areas between grasslands and forests—with tall grasses and scattered shrubs. Until the 1880s, the range of sharp-tailed grouse spanned most of Minnesota—wherever natural disturbances such as wildfire, windstorms, or insect infestation created openings in forests.

Massive human disturbances to Minnesota's landscape during European settlement sprouted ideal sharptail habitat. Logging and homesteading turned vast stretches of forest in central and northern Minnesota into brushlands. Sharptails abounded in these regions well into the 20th century. In 1949 happy upland bird hunters bagged about 150,000 sharptails, the most ever in Minnesota.

But by 1995 Minnesota's sharptail harvest had dwindled to just 10,000. Most of the bird's prime brushland habitat in the northern two-thirds of the state was gone. Some brushlands gave way to forest succession as people extinguished wildfires. Others were planted with row crops, such as corn and soybeans, or conifer trees. The prevailing attitude among landowners was that brushlands were useless; better that they be farmed or put into timber production. Remnant sharptail populations survived only in the peat bogs and parklands of northwestern Minnesota, and in the few remaining pastoral lands of east-central Minnesota.

Lifted Curtain

At long last, daybreak has lifted the curtain on the sharptails' show.

About 25 yards before my blind, 10 males engage in a frenzy for the benefit of eight hens standing on the perimeter of the dancing ground. In exaggerated motions, the males enact their stuttering dance—bowing, extending their necks, stretching their wings, fanning their tail plumage to display the two prominent tail feathers that are their namesake. They stomp their feet, creating the rhythmic thumping I'd noted earlier. And when they do so, they turn about, shimmy, and shake like a child's wind-up toy. At unknown intervals, the males all mysteriously freeze. Then, as if rewound by an unseen hand, they simultaneously resume their shuddering and shaking.

The more I watch, the more I see. Bright rays from the rising sun illuminate the males' yellow eye-combs and purple neck sacs, which stand out flamboyantly against the sharptails' mottled, brownish bodies. Then I notice the birds seem to be skirmishing between bouts of foot stomping, charging each other and stopping abruptly at territorial lines. It seems there's a pattern to their dance, an organizational hierarchy on the dancing ground. It's invisible to me, but obviously real to them.

According to DNR grouse research biologist Mike Larson, there is indeed order to the chaos—and it's circular. Each male assigns himself a small territory on the dancing ground. The most dominant males take the spots closest to the center. That is their space to defend, and also to dance within. For most males, dancing is strictly ritual—only a few central, dominant males will do most of the mating for the season.

The sharptails' dancing ground is called a lek, a general term among biologists for a communal breeding area. The word lek may be derived from the Old Norse word leika, which means "to play." But sharptail leks are more than recreational—they're essential. Sharptails will not live in an area unless it has an open spot of about 40 acres where they can stomp down the grass and dance.

A lek is a visible indicator of a resident sharptail population. Today, two-thirds of Minnesota's sharptail leks are in the northwestern part of the state, many on wildlife management areas and other public lands. The other third are in east-central Minnesota, where sharptails thrived after the 1894 Hinckley fire cleared land and where they have survived into the 21st century as dairy farms maintained big, open pastures—which sharptails accept as a substitute for brushlands.

The lek I'm watching this morning is on the farmland of Karl Schatz. For the past 15 years, Schatz has allowed the DNR to conduct prescribed burns on his property and operate a blind for public sharptail viewing.

"Sharptails have been there a lot longer than the DNR's known about it," says Schatz. "Used to be, in 1976, good grief, I would see sharptails by the hundreds on my land."

Bill Berg, retired DNR wildlife biologist and a longtime sharptail advocate, is cautiously optimistic about the state of sharptails today. "I wouldn't call it a full-blown successful recovery," he says. "On most DNR-managed areas, the population is stable or increasing. The first thing you do with a declining sharptail population is identify some core populations and stabilize those first, and we've done that. "But across the sharptails' entire range today, we've only slowed down the decline."

Thirty years ago Itasca County had as many as 12 sharptail leks, Berg says. Today, there are two, and one appears to be failing. "We've gradually counted fewer and fewer grouse on that lek over the last three years. This past year, we counted zero."

Sparring Mood

It's 7 a.m., and the dancing has slowed considerably. Things got quiet when the hens flew off. Now the order of the circle has broken down. The males have paired up, and they seem to be in the mood for some sparring.

With heads held low, the grouse stare eyeball-to-eyeball. Each bird's tail quivers like a cowboy's itchy fingers dangling over his six-shooter. Suddenly, one bird thrusts with his beak, and the other leaps to parry and kick with his feet.

The birds rarely hurt each other in this mock fighting; like the dancing, it's mostly for show.

While the sharptail may be a legendary showman, the bird was saved in Minnesota because it is considered game. When sharptail populations were dwindling and the outlook was dim, Berg points to 1986 as a turning point in saving the grouse. That was the year he and his friend Roche Lally gathered a handful of hunters and founded the Minnesota Sharp-Tailed Grouse Society.

Lally loved to hunt sharptails near Warroad in the late 1970s. But as the hunting soured due to the bird's population decline, he headed farther north into Canada for his favorite quarry. When he became a father, he pondered what was happening in Minnesota.

"When my son Reid was born, I thought, 'Geez, he'll never be able to hunt sharptails in his home state,'" Lally recalls.

During the past 20 years, the society has lobbied for more than $700,000 in state funds for brushland management. The money has been used to conduct prescribed burns and shearing that prevent forest encroachment on public and private brushlands, such as Schatz's farm.

Private brushland management may be most important, because in east-central Minnesota about 87 percent of the sharptail leks are on private land. The future of sharptails in this area undoubtedly lies in the hands of their human neighbors.

"I would say that about 80 percent of the landowners that I work with want quality wildlife and hunting habitat," says Jodie Provost, DNR private lands wildlife habitat specialist. "The other 20 percent work with me because they raise cattle and, as a business decision, this is a great way to improve their pasturelands."

The DNR Wildlife Private Lands Program is such a success that Provost and her colleagues are overwhelmed. "Every one of us DNR private lands specialists is swamped," she says. Ideally, with more money and more staff, she says the DNR could be managing two to three times more brushland acreage for optimal sharp-tailed grouse habitat in northern Minnesota.

More resources will be essential if the DNR is to meet its goal for reversing the statewide trend in sharptail habitat decline. As for the sharptail population, harvests today are still around 10,000—about where they were in the mid-1990s.

"Things are looking better now, though we certainly haven't fully turned it around," says Larson, the DNR grouse research biologist. "It takes a long time to convert habitat into birds."

Coffee Time

By 8 a.m, about the time I'd be pouring my first cup of coffee at the office, the day's dancing and fighting on the lek has ended. About 10 sharptails mill about, pecking at the ground like barnyard chickens.

I figure it's time to go, so I sneak a foot out the door of the blind. Before my foot touches the ground, the sharptails erupt into flight and flush across the hayfield and over the horizon.

It's good to know they'll be dancing again tomorrow morning.

Gustave Axelson is managing editor of Minnesota Conservation Volunteer.