“Our birds on the prairie are the same thing as a canary in a coal mine,” Shade said. “If we lose them, something’s wrong.”

Curlew territory has been slowly shunted westward in North Dakota following the retreat of the state’s dwindling grasslands. That’s bad news for conservationists, who are trying to salvage one of the country’s most threatened habitats, which has been hit hard by industry and traditional crop development. It’s also a problem for ranchers, whose cattle rely on the health and sprawl of prairie as much as the curlews.

So over the past year-and-a-half, scientists strapped GPS backpacks to 15 curlews in North and South Dakota to figure out whether and how far they are being pushed from their remaining pastures. Researchers already have this and last year’s migration data, which tracks the paunchy bird’s journey south to Texas and Mexico.

As the data grows with each year’s migration, the scientists will have a clearer picture of where the curlews stop to nest. The bird is an indicator species, they say, which means the curlew flight map will also help identify areas of importance to a host of other grasslands-reliant species, including cattle.

“What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,” said Kevin Ellison, program manager at American Bird Conservancy and point person for the North Dakota part of the curlew project.

Private ownership

Most remaining grassland is privately owned, which leaves it unprotected and open to development, Ellison said.

Only about a quarter of North Dakota’s original grasslands remain unfarmed or undeveloped. More than 2 million acres are plowed up each year in the Great Plains, which stretch from southern Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada south to the Gulf of Mexico, according to a 2021 World Wildlife Fund report.

Farmed cropland isn’t good enough for many grasslands birds, because traditional agriculture destroys biodiversity in the soil and pesticides rob the ground of the tiny invertebrates that feed the birds.

But ranchers own or use a lot of the remaining grasslands, which makes them de facto stewards of curlew country and crucial partners to conservationists.

“These birds are just using their land,” said Sandra Johnson, conservation biologist for North Dakota Game and Fish, which uses state tax checkoff donations to fund the curlew-tracking project at about $20,000 each year.

And it is good land where there are cattle, said Johnson, because the animals imitate the grazing habits of bison that used to roam the region in the millions. Healthy grasslands need regular grazing and hoofs kicking up the dirt, or they wither, she said.

When ranchers go the extra mile to move their herds before they overgraze a field, or to plant and tend native grasses, “it’s really showing a lot of great benefits for birds,” Johnson said.

A fierce protectiveness of the land

Sheryl Turbiville, 70, has herded roaming cattle in the northwest corner of North Dakota since she was a kid on her dad’s ranch.

“Yes, we are stewards of the land,” she said, after an afternoon spent hanging a new gate. “You have to be to be a farmer-rancher. Because if you don’t take care of your land, the land isn’t going to take care of you.”

So when a scientist from southern Idaho asked Turbiville if he could check out the curlews on her 4,000 acres, she agreed.

Jay Carlisle, the scientist, has been tagging curlews since 2008 as research director for Intermountain Bird Observatory at Boise State University.

“There’s a lot of attention on curlews as a grassland-reliant species,” he said, because grassland birds have declined more drastically than any other habitat group: Their numbers have decreased more than 40 percent since 1966, according to the National Audubon Society.

Still, curlews are impressively adaptable.

The small birds are able to twist their “Pinocchio-like” beaks into animal burrows to gobble up wolf spiders, Carlisle said, when their preferred foods — beetles, grasshoppers, caterpillars and the like — aren’t plentiful.

So adaptable that curlew numbers have stabilized in the past 20 years, excluding them from the U.S. endangered species list. There is no recent curlew-specific population study, Carlisle said, so the best estimates come from the U.S. Geological Survey’s North American Breeding Bird Survey, which tallies them at anywhere from 50,000 to 123,000 birds.

What’s more revealing than a head count is where the curlews migrate and nest, hence the tracking project, Carlisle said. Curlews used to breed as far east as Indiana. Now, the southwest corner of North Dakota marks the easterly edge of their breeding territory.

Audubon climate models predict a further retreat. With a 1.5-degree Celsius global temperature increase, curlews could lose much of South Dakota and start to push north. With a 3-degree increase, they could move almost entirely into Canada.

Preserving land for curlews and their ilk now is essential, Carlisle said.

That means asking ranchers to practice rotational grazing, to plant native grasses or to reduce tilling land. Those practices keep the soil nutrient-rich and full of insects instead of sun-bleached and flood-prone.

Ranchers such as Chad Njos are all in. Njos’s bird-friendly, Audubon-certified ranch in Bowman is covered in conservation projects. He seeded fields with native grasses, leaves them cattle-free for longer than other ranchers might and conspicuously leaves his hay bales rolled up for the cattle to feed on.

The results of that last experiment are big polka dots of rich soil areas all around his fields, where cattle ate from the bales and dropped nutrient-rich excrement and urine into the earth.

Njos dug his hands into one of those spots.

“You pick it up and it just crumbles. … The biology has gotten so healthy that earthworms have moved in,” he said.

The native grasses on the next field over are struggling a bit to compete with the persistent nonnatives. But the annual reseeding will be worth it, Njos said. Native prairie grasses have 15- to 20-foot roots that hold a lot more carbon than nonnative grasses. Because of those roots, they won’t die out in wildfires, and they’ll absorb heavy rainfall that could otherwise flood Njos’s fields.

The hay bales, the regular visits from Audubon and the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, his second-generation post as president of the North Dakota Grasslands Coalition and his tolerance for outsiders’ questions set Njos apart from many of his peers.

“It’s not normal. It’s not traditional,” he said, and that can rub other farmers the wrong way. “I don’t have a lot of neighbors that talk to me anymore.”

But soil health and conservation go hand-in-hand with ranching, he said. It just takes some tweaking to the old ways of doing things.

Regardless, Njos’s animals like to eat the native grasses first, so he’s not bothered by the critics. And he’s sure that most ranchers are conservationists — if less vocal about it than he is.

“If you talk to a majority of ranchers, conservation is very important,” Njos said. “It has to be, or they won’t survive.”