America's Forgotten Ecosystem - Often maligned and frequently mismanaged, the country's most abundant native shrub is finally getting credit for its value to wildlife

National Wildlife, Oct-Nov, 2000 by Michael Lipske

For a relationship that began poorly, Tim Reynolds' romance with America's sagebrush country has endured exceedingly well. The ecologist has spent the past 25 years conducting wildlife research on the 900 square miles that make up the grounds of the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory-one of the best remaining chunks of a type of northwestern U.S. habitat called sagebrush steppe.

But Reynolds, reared in the Midwest, can't forget his first grim visit to the area in January 1975. "It was a gray day and there was this gray sea of snow," he says, "smothering the sagebrush" as far as he could see. With the temperature hovering at minus 22 degrees F, he recalls, "I had to ask myself: OWhy am I here?'" By the following spring, he had discovered the answer.

After spending many nights, "hearing coyotes singing, seeing the biggest moon and brightest stars on Earth, and waking up in the morning to sage grouse strutting," says Reynolds, he was thoroughly seduced by the sagebrush environment. "This place is infectious. I've been here ever since."

Reynolds isn't the first, and he won't be the last, to succumb to the subtle charms of a greenish gray native shrub that Mark Twain called "an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature." Like the coyote and the jackrabbit, sagebrush is a living symbol of America's wide open spaces. Romanticized in countless books, movies and television shows, the plant is now synonymous with the term "old West." It is also, according to some scientists and conservationists, a crucial source of habitat that has long been mistreated and misunderstood.

"The sagebrush environment represents one of America's forgotten ecosystems, one that has high value to Neotropical songbirds and other wildlife," says Tom France, an NWF attorney and western resource expert. "In the past, we've managed this ecosystem more with ignorance than with evil intent. But now that we better understand its ecological functions, we can't afford to continue managing sagebrush by ignorance alone."

More than a dozen woody sagebrush species grow from British Columbia down to Baja California and as far east as Nebraska. In all, the plants cover 150 million acres-the most abundant native shrubs in North America and an important component of the continent's vast grassland- shrub habitat. The heart of sagebrush country is the Great Basin, an immense region that encompasses most of Nevada, Utah west of the Wasatch Range, parts of southern Oregon and Idaho, and a sliver of eastern California.

In all, the Great Basin desert covers more than one-fifteenth of the territory of the United States, and sagebrush habitat accounts for nearly half of the Basin. "If you picked the right line you could move through the entire length and breadth of the desert from north to south, from west to east, always walking through aromatic sagebrush," writes Stephen Trimble in his definitive book, The Sagebrush Ocean.

Despite its name and aroma, sagebrush has no relation to the herb cooks add to stuffings. Sagebrush represents the North American branch of Artemisia, a worldwide genus that includes European wormwood, which is used to flavor vermouth.

Volatile oils in sagebrush leaves perfume the desert air after Great Basin thunderstorms. The same scent has long filled Native American sweat lodges. For centuries, humans turned to the sagebrush ocean as their pharmacy. Collected by Great Basin Indians and European settlers, the shrubs' leaves, flowers and branches have been burned, chewed, made into tea, steeped in brandy, or ground into powder to produce stimulants, painkillers, fever reducers, parasiticides, laxatives and other folk remedies.

More than a century ago, Mormon settlers in Utah judged land as fertile if it supported good sagebrush stands. Nowadays, miners seeking gold deposits assay sagebrush leaves for high concentrations of minerals absorbed by a root system that reaches 20 feet or more into the earth.

Aboveground, some sagebrush grows as tall as 15 feet. An evergreen, the plant produces two sets of small leaves every year. It is also capable of performing photosynthesis at extremely low temperatures. For wildlife, stands of the shrub serve as nursery, supermarket, even dance hall. About 100 bird, 70 mammal and 23 amphibian and reptile species in the Great Basin rely to some degree on sagebrush habitat for shelter and food. Some are sagebrush obligates-creatures such as the sage grouse, sage sparrow, sagebrush lizard and sagebrush vole that cannot survive without plenty of high-quality sagebrush and its associated perennial grasses and forbs. Pronghorn, too, depend on sagebrush for nearly 90 percent of their diet.

In winter, when snow blankets much of the Great Basin, sage grouse subsist almost entirely on the evergreen leaves of sagebrush-a neat trick. The plant's volatile oils wage chemical warfare on the digestive systems of most animals (one reason that cattle, and therefore cattle ranchers, dislike sagebrush). However, the grouse's digestive system mines the protein from sagebrush leaves-so much so that the birds actually gain weight in winter.