Chestnut-collared Longspur. Photo by Rick Bohn / USFWS.

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies: Conserving North America's Grasslands

Grassland birds are in trouble and it’s not hard to see why. The most recent State of the Birds report didn’t mince words: grasslands are a biome “in collapse,” consumed by row-crop agriculture, woody-plant encroachment, and drought. Half of the bird species that depend on them for breeding habitat are facing steep declines. The United Nations has declared 2026 the “International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists” to focus attention on this imperiled ecosystem, and the awareness couldn’t come sooner.

Lark Bunting. Photo by Thomas Meinzen.

But Brandt Ryder, the chief conservation scientist at Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, is not downbeat. His Colorado-based organization is leading initiatives across the Central Grasslands, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to not only protect what’s left of those grasslands but to restore millions of acres through partnerships with government agencies, Indigenous Nations, and landowners. “We’re building momentum and a movement to protect grasslands,” he says.

Ryder joined Bird Conservancy of the Rockies in 2019 and oversees its science and stewardship programs. Since 1988, its biologists have monitored the status of bird populations in the Intermountain West through banding and surveys, and  leveraged that data for conservation. Over 80 percent of North America’s remaining grasslands are privately held, so those efforts inevitably lead to working with landowners, particularly ranchers, to manage them in a way that will better their lives and help birds.

Brandt Ryder (right) holding a Bullock's Oriole at a banding station. Photo courtesy of Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

That hierarchy—first the bottom line, then birds—is intentional, says Ryder. “Our message to them is that what’s good for the herd is good for the birds.”

Ryder was part of the Science committee that wrote the State of the Birds report, and it offered that silver lining: “Private lands conservation programs, and voluntary conservation partnerships for working lands, hold some of the best opportunities for sparking immediate turnarounds for birds.”

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies currently employs 11 biologists in six states who are having those conversations in rural communities where they live and work. They help landowners find financial incentives from federal and state programs to make a change. This might include switching from growing soybean or corn to grazing cattle on newly-seeded prairie grasses, or improving water retention on their ranch, or setting aside a parcel in a conservation easement. The goal, says Ryder, is to introduce practices that keep carbon in the ground and increase the land’s forage production while providing habitat for grassland birds.

Thunder Basin National Grassland, WY. Photo courtesy of Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

Through this outreach, Bird Conservancy of the Rockies has restored over a million acres of grasslands since 2008. “I can tell you that these people are the best stewards of their land,” Ryder says. “They want to keep their livelihood intact, and the only way for them to do that is to use practices that are going to sustain the vitality of that land. If they run it into the ground, it’s not there for them next year or not there for their child who might inherit that ranch.”

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies began life as the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, but grasslands conservation has always been essential to its work. Mike Carter, the founding director, had studied Northern Harriers and was inspired by bird observatories in Point Reyes, California, and Manomet, in Massachusetts, that focused on science and public education. Carter’s office was in the nature center at Barr Lake State Park, but after he received a donation of a trailer, he was able to add staff. In 1999, four biologists were hired to begin outreach to landowners. Tammy VerCauteren, now the executive director, was one of the hires of this new “Prairie Partners” program.

“There was this acknowledgement that grassland birds didn’t seem to be doing well, we didn’t know much about them, and they were predominantly on private land,” VerCauteren says. “We needed a program that could start getting to work with landowners and understand what was going on.”

Baird's Sparrow. Photo by Rick Bohn.

VerCauteren grew up in rural Michigan, a couple hours north of Detroit, but during college she had the chance to work in grasslands in the American Southwest. In graduate school she studied Sandhill Cranes along the Platte River in Nebraska, a place where buffalo once roamed the endless prairie. She had to request access from private landowners to do her fieldwork, and it was that experience that landed her the position.

“It certainly wasn’t my birding skills,” she says, “because I remember Mike Carter pointing at a hawk and asking, ‘What is that?’ And I said, ‘That is a hawk.’” She laughs. “It was a Ferruginous Hawk, but I didn’t have those in Michigan. They figured I could learn the birds, whereas either you're good with people or you’re not. They took a leap of faith, and I think it worked out.”

Burrowing Owls. Left photo by Jose Hugo Martinez Guerrero; right photo by Ryan Parker.

VerCauteren was assigned to northeast Colorado and Wyoming, where her job was to knock on doors and look for Burrowing Owls. Ranchers weren’t always pleased to meet her. She was there to survey their attitudes on prairie dogs, a ground squirrel native to North American grasslands, that digs the burrows used by those owls. Over time, though, she gained their trust. She listened to them discuss their land management and she pitched in to fix fences and pull calves. Sometimes she slept in her car, wondering whether she was making a difference. But she ultimately introduced ranchers to the government programs and land trusts that could help them conserve their land.

VerCauteren was able to expand her surveys to more grassland birds. One was even harder to find than the Burrowing Owl, and that was the pale little Mountain Plover. The Mountain Plover is poorly named; it nests on flat, open plains in western North America, and, unlike other shorebirds, nowhere near water. But its nickname is better—the “Prairie Ghost”—for its ability to squat and turn away from danger to virtually disappear into the dry, shortgrass prairie it favors. Like the Burrowing Owl, it is a companion species of prairie wildlife like prairie dogs and bison, herbivores that once created those plains of low vegetation.

Mountain Plover. Photo courtesy of Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

But with so much of the shortgrass prairie lost to agriculture, the species was in trouble. How badly was unclear; the population needed to be surveyed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was considering a petition to list the species under the Endangered Species Act, and VerCauteren was one of the biologists tasked with finding out.

One day in 2001, she was driving around cattle country near Karval, a little town in eastern Colorado, when she pulled her Toyota pickup truck off the road at a large ranch.

“What are you doing?” asked Russell Davis, the owner of the ranch, who came upon VerCauteren’s truck. He thought it was someone looking to hunt prairie dogs without his permission.

“Mr. Davis,” she said, pulling down her binoculars, “they’re everywhere.”

She was talking about the Mountain Plovers. The ranch’s overgrazed grasslands suitably mimicked how the bison might’ve once left the shortgrass prairie.

Mountain Plover chicks. Photo courtesy of Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

Davis said he had seen the birds on his ranch before but hadn’t given them much thought. He told VerCauteren to leave. He didn’t know what their existence meant for his property, but none of the possibilities seemed good.

Other ranchers in the county began to hear about this bird that the federal government wanted to protect. But after talking it over, they decided to invite back VerCauteren and other researchers. Over the next two years, their surveys showed that Mountain Plovers were doing better than anyone had imagined. They liked to nest on these Colorado ranchlands. In 2003, the federal government decided not to list the species.

For the locals, they could see that their town was like the Mountain Plover capital. Karval has a post office, community center, two churches, and a cluster of buildings and homes. The nearest grocery store is an hourlong drive.  With that much interest in the Mountain Plover, they figured birders might want to come see it. They created the Karval Community Alliance, and one of its first acts was to create a Mountain Plover birding festival. The idea came from Davis, the man who had once kicked VerCauteren off his ranch.

Attendees at the Karval Plover Festival 2024 search for Mountain Plovers. Photo courtesy of Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

VerCauteren remembers bringing her daughter, who was one at the time, to the first festival 19 years ago. Ever since, for a weekend in late April, local ranchers open their homes to attendees, cook for them, and tour them around in school buses to look for the ghost of the prairie. And they share what it takes to continue making a living on these grasslands.

Brandt Ryder sees Karval as a catalyst for a new kind of conservation, one that moves away from “random acts of conservation,” in which biologists help whichever landowner enters their office that day, to one where neighbors collaborate to create contiguous tracts of protected land. But for every Karval, there are far more places where grasslands continue to be lost in North America: three to four million acres per year. In the southern and central Great Plains, eastern red cedar is turning grasslands into woodlands. In southwest grasslands, mesquite is doing that work. And in the northern Great Plains, fertile soil makes grasslands ripe for agricultural takeover.

In the years after VerCauteren moved into the role of executive director in 2008, she would look out the window on her drive home to Michigan each summer and ask herself, “Will we become like Iowa?” Some states, like Colorado, still had grasslands, whereas less than one tenth of one percent of Iowa’s original tallgrass prairie remained, replaced mostly by farmland.

Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, CO. Photo courtesy of Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

The wake-up call grew louder with each passing year. Bird Conservancy of the Rockies has many local partners, but conservation on the scale that was required demanded a much larger coordinated effort. “The challenges out there are way more than any one entity can take on,” VerCauteren says.

In 2018, they introduced the Central Grasslands Roadmap, a shared vision for the many interests that work in this biome, such as governments, universities, companies, nonprofits, and landowners. The Central Grasslands, which spans 700 million acres, crosses three countries, many Indigenous nations, and 11 U.S. states, and land use planning happens at the county level.

“We all care about these grasslands,” VerCauteren says. “We might care about them for different reasons, but if they are not intact then nothing is thriving, not the birds or the communities."

Western Meadowlark. Photo by Michelle Desrosiers.

Bird conservation was failing, Ryder argues. In his opinion, a major reason was that it was not fully accounting for all the human perspectives involved in this landscape. The roadmap was born out of the wildlife community, but it quickly flipped from a top-down approach to a ground-up initiative, recognizing that a focus on specific species was losing sight of the wholeness of conservation. 

As Maggie Hanna, the Central Roadmap’s executive director, puts it, “While birds or prairie dogs are certain priorities for the science community, they aren’t necessarily always a priority for working landscapes.”

Hanna was born and raised on her family’s ranch near Colorado Springs, which she manages today. Before joining Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, she led the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, of which her late father, Kirk, was a founding member. Her ranch is a stop on the area’s Christmas Bird Count and part of the Pikes Peak Birding & Nature Festival. She has used grants from the federal Farm Bill to make improvements to the shortgrass prairie her cattle graze on, mainly through water management. Half the ranch is also protected under a perpetual easement.

“I am not a bird person,” she says. “But I’m a person who believes in an intact ecosystem and that all these pieces rely on each other. And if birds give us data and an indication of the health of the landscapes, what a wonderful tool to learn how to do this work better.”

A staff biologist bands a Thick-billed Longspur. Photo courtesy of Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

The data, of course, shows that some birds are barely clinging on. The Central Grasslands Roadmap has identified 17 species most in need of concern, and the “Fab Four,” as Ryder calls them, are those that have lost around 90 percent of their historic population: Baird’s Sparrow, Chestnut-collared Longspur, Thick-billed Longspur, and Sprague’s Pipit. Without any action, they could become endangered within a decade, Ryder says. The longspurs evolved with disturbances in grasslands, whether that came from hordes of bison or the use of fire by Plains Indigenous peoples. Sprague’s Pipits, meanwhile, seek out more mature grasslands. Mimicking that heterogeneity is an important part of their land stewardship. 

To VerCauteren, though, the success or failure of all this work will rest on the partnerships they’ve made and the trust they’ve built up. “I have a human-centered approach because humans will decide the future,” she says. “And humans have to be part of the solution.”

To learn more about Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, as well as to contribute directly, please visit their website.

Bird Collective supports Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, a nonprofit working to improve native bird populations as well as the land and lives of people from the Rocky Mountains to the Great Plains.