Statewide sage grouse boom, northeast bust: House Draw Fire leaves a scar

Wyoming’s sage grouse are flirting with a cyclical high this spring—but you wouldn’t know it from the state’s northeast corner, where counts tumbled after the House Draw Fire torched some of the best remaining sagebrush.

This spring, crews tallied 30,000+ male sage grouse strutting on 971 occupied leks—30.9 males per lek, up 10% from 2024 and nearly double the 2021 low. Sage grouse rise and fall on roughly a 9.6-year cycle; 2016 last peaked at 35.6 males per lek, and 2006 at ~42. If 2025 proves the top, Wyoming’s abundance is still ~36% below 2006—and the number of occupied leks has slid ~6.5% since 2016 (about 1,840 → 1,720).

Wyoming still holds about 38% of the world’s remaining birds. But long term, the species is losing ground as the sagebrush-steppe vanishes—around 1.3 million acres a year across the West—driving a ~3%/year decline over decades.

The outlier: northeast Wyoming, where counts fell 10% in 2025. The big culprit is the ~180,000-acre House Draw Fire (August 2024), which incinerated 100,000+ acres of core habitat—over a third of the region’s best sage grouse country—and swept across 20 leks.

Post-fire monitoring found males still displaying at 8 of 20 leks, same as pre-fire locations—but headcounts dropped ~40% there.

“Those birds took a hit, no question,” said Nyssa Whitford, sage grouse/sagebrush biologist with Game and Fish. “It burned hot and fast, and in a lot of pockets there’s not much sagebrush left.”

Wildlife ecologist Chris Kirol walked the burn and found a moonscape dominated by cheatgrass and Japanese brome.

“I haven’t found a single sage grouse scat,” he said. “There’s about five sagebrush left in this quarter-mile.”

Even before the fire, the northeast lagged. This year it averaged 13 males per active lek—less than half the statewide mean. The Powder River Basin’s sagebrush has been chopped into smaller pieces for decades: average patch size fell ~63% (from ~820 acres → <300) over 40 years, and overall cover dropped from 41% → 35%. Of 606 documented leks in the region, only 178 (29%) were active in 2024.

“Northeast Wyoming is at the edge of the range,” Whitford said. “It’s drier and converts to grassland easily.”

Kirol worries the fire will accelerate lek abandonment. Females nest in sagebrush ~99% of the time; without it, recruitment collapses. Males may keep showing up for a few years, he said, but interior leks could eventually “blink out.”

Wyoming’s grouse are mostly up right now, riding the species’ natural cycle. But the northeast shows what happens when habitat disappears faster than it can recover. The rebound elsewhere won’t rescue leks with no sagebrush—and as numbers shrink, even a single bad fire can push local populations toward extirpation.

Bottom line: statewide momentum is real; the northeast emergency is, too. Whether the peak holds—and whether the northeast can avoid blinking out—depends on how fast sagebrush can return, and whether future fires and invasives let it.

The original story by Mike Koshmrl for WyoFile.