Habitat is the key to sharptail management. Good quality grasslands and brush cover are essential for grouse survival. Quality habitat is a mixture of mid and tall grasses, associated with shrubs, and a scattering of crop-land. While quantity of habitat is important, it is quality of habitat that determines reproductive success, since nesting and brood-rearing cover are habitat elements which, when inadequate, seriously limit grouse populations.

Since sharptails occupy a variety of plant communities, species composition is not necessarily a prime factor in measuring quality of grouse habitat. The height and density of vegetation present are more important factors determining habitat quality.

Food

Sharptails do not rely on cultivated crops at any time of the year. Their use of crops is usually due to availability and is greatest during fall and winter. Adult grouse are primarily vegetarians, especially during the spring months before abundant insect hatches. Buds, twigs, leaves, and fruits that cling to shrubby and herbaceous plants over winter make up the bulk of the sharptail’s diet through the breeding season. The fleshy hips of wild rose are often the most abundant fruit available at this time and comprise much of the sharptail’s food.

Leaves and flowers of succulent plants, dry seeds, and fleshy fruits are important food items for adults and are used more by the young as the summer passes. Other important plant foods include hawthorn, prickly lettuce, dandelion, and western snowberry. Although the diet of the sharptail may include as many as 300 different items, the greatest bulk of their food consists of less than a dozen plant species.

Habitat Management Suggestions

Grazing management is the key to maintaining sharptail habitat. Proper range use that assures good forage production and maintenance of the best forage producing native grasses will provide adequate nesting, rearing, and roosting cover. This level of grazing use will maintain woody vegetation present in stream bottoms, draws, and side-hill draws. Virtually all the elm, willow, boxelder, plum, chokecherry, buffaloberry, and ash has been eliminated by overgrazing in many sections of the present sharptail range in North America. Habitat management should be directed toward maintaining existing habitat through grazing management programs. Such management provides a realistic and achievable means for maintaining and improving sharptail habitat.

The establishment of shelterbelts and field windbreaks, in addition to meeting their primary conservation objectives, can provide cover and food for sharptails, pheasants, and a variety of non-game birds. This is especially true if properly maintained and care is given to their design and the selection of plant materials of value to wildlife.