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Endangered species of Hanford Reach . . . the sagebrush

Crew caught illegally bagging seeds of plant prized for ecosystem role

Friday, December 8, 2000

By SOLVEIG TORVIK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF

A federal worker stumbled upon a strange sight last week in the Hanford Reach National Monument near Richland.

He surprised a crew of eight people busily -- and illegally -- wielding knives to hack the seed tops off sagebrush plants. They had bagged 1,500 pounds worth, which was confiscated by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents called to the scene.

"We think it's the tip of the iceberg," Greg Hughes, project leader for the monument, said of the sagebrush seed theft. "It was being done illegally and that raises our suspicion that it could be being done elsewhere."

Sagebrush, that pungent, ubiquitous emblem of the arid West, is not nearly so ubiquitous after the devastating wildfires that have become an unwelcome hallmark of summer. Last summer 6.5 million acres burned, roughly half of them sagebrush habitat.

Sagebrush seed has become a hot commodity because the plant is losing the battle for survival -- first to wildfires that easily kill it, and then to fast-growing weeds such as cheatgrass that crowd the slow-growing sagebrush out of its home after fires. Sagebrush seed is in high demand to repair burned areas.

A private landowner near the site of last week's attempted theft in the Hanford Reach notified the Fish and Wildlife Service that sagebrush harvesting also was done on his lands without permission, Hughes said.

Although most public attention has been focused on the damage done to forests during wildfires, fire and other abuses also have triggered a less-noticed environmental catastrophe across huge swaths of the arid West such as Utah and Nevada's Great Basin. Land managers are in a desperate race to reseed sagebrush to stave off collapse of the region's fragile ecosystems, which are anchored by the humble sagebrush.

If sagebrush goes, even hotter fires, more severe wind storms and soil erosion will follow, experts say. And creatures such as the vanishing sage grouse that depend on the plant will disappear.

Cheatgrass is the bane of land managers because it spreads rapidly and makes fuel for bigger fires. Sagebrush can be expected to burn every 200 years, but cheatgrass-infested areas burn every four years, experts say.

Because it manages most of the federal government's holdings in the region, the Bureau of Land Management is the biggest customer for sagebrush seed.

Barbara Bellio, contracting officer for BLM's seed purchases for Idaho, Utah, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado and Wyoming, said that so far this year she has bought 296,300 pounds of various sagebrush seed at prices as high as $18 per pound. Most of it was destined for the Great Basin.

The harvesters apprehended at the Hanford monument told officers that they were being paid 65 cents per pound to deliver the seed to a local contractor who planned to resell it to seed companies, Hughes said.

Bellio said BLM, which bought 6 million pounds of native seeds last year, has no way of determining whether the seed it buys is legally harvested.

The eight individuals, some of whom did not speak English, may have been harvesting on off-limit lands in ignorance, Hughes said. They were not charged pending further investigation. They face fines as high as $5,000 and six months in jail.

"I'd just like to see it stopped because it reduces the genetic vigor of the sagebrush stands," Hughes said.

The suspects told officers they had been harvesting the same area the day before, and it appears other native seeds such as rubber rabbit brush were illegally collected last year.

FWS biologist Heidi Brunkal said, "As a result of this illegal operation, many healthy sagebrush plants were damaged and much of the harvested seed is unusable."

Typically, sagebrush seeds are harvested by whacking the bush with a tennis racket because this does the least amount of damage to the plant. A tarp is spread under the bush to catch the tiny seeds, the size of ground pepper flakes, as they are released.

Although the sagebrush seed is being stolen, Hanford land managers have their own troubles with vanishing sagebrush.

Before white settlers came to farm in the Columbia Basin, it was 15 million acres of shrub-steppe lands filled with sagebrush. Now 60 percent of it is gone, mostly turned under by the plow. And what's left is under siege.

Something is killing sagebrush in 4,500 acres in the center of the Hanford nuclear site, said Larry Cadwell, a Pacific Northwest Laboratories scientist who is monitoring the die-off area for the Department of Energy.

And last summer's Hanford wildfire burned the entire 76,000 acres of the prized Fitzner-Eberhardt Arid Land Ecology Reserve Reserve. "The last best remaining shrub, all the sagebrush, was consumed," Hughes said. "It looks like a big black eyesore right now."

But the agency is replanting 81,000 sagebrush seedlings in the hope that they will replace the old-growth sagebrush in the reserve, some of which was 100 years old. The agency chose seedlings rather than seeds, Hughes said, because "there's a low success rate with seeds."

Still, Hughes said, there may be a lesson in all this for farmers who are hoping to make money by tearing out more sagebrush to plant crops. Given the demand, sagebrush seed may be a more promising cash crop than farm crops.

"What's wheat going for -- $2.50 a bushel?"

 

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