 Sarah Simmers is with Meadowlark Consulting. Sarah grew up on a family farm and ranch in Grant County, North Dakota. She has a bachelor's degree in biology from Jamestown College and a master's in conservation biology from the University of Minnesota, St. Paul. Her graduate research took place on the Little Missouri National Grasslands in western North Dakota. After grad school, she returned to North Dakota and has worked as an environmental consultant and starting her own company with a coworker in 2020. Sarah has worked on issues related to Dakota Skipper since its listing in 2014 from assessing habitat to figuring out regulatory requirements to surveying for the species itself since 2018. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Sarah for Dakota Skipper Habitat. Well, I was asked to talk about assessing Dakota Skipper habitat and I just couldn't help myself. I wanted to talk a little more broadly about the species and also kind of talk about some of the current things going on with it in our state in particular. So if you have never heard of the Dakota Skipper, you're in the right place. And if you have heard of the Dakota Skipper, it's possible that you wish that you hadn't. But I'd just like to give you a little more background on the biology of the species and perhaps a little more perspective on it as a whole and you can take that information with you and use it as you need to. So here it is. It is a very small butterfly that lives only in higher quality native prairie and we'll talk a little bit more about the details and characteristics of that prairie in a few more slides. But it was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 2014. And so hence a lot of regulatory requirements came about because of that. It's probably why many of you are aware of it and why we're talking about it today. It's not, as you can see, it's not a very colorful, bright, shiny butterfly. Very, very basic. And I have a little story to tell you about this. A couple of years ago I was out on a construction pipeline monitoring project and I was talking to one of the construction guys one day and he was in his equipment, just had his window open and was leaning out talking to me. We were just chit-chatting and this guy's name is Pedro so I'm making assumptions about that. He was a lifelong Montanan and we're just chit-chatting and we ended up talking about Dakota Skipper as you do with pipe liners. And he's asking me questions about it and pretty soon I'm showing him photos on my phone and he just takes a look at it and he's like, simple, practical, straightforward, perfect for North Dakota. And I just, I got a kick out of that. And I will add to that that it is very straightforward but as you get to know it more, it is very beautiful as well. And I think that's similar to North Dakota. You just have to get off the interstate and we have some beautiful, subtle, it's not grand and majestic but it's very subtle beautiful landscapes in this state. So just a couple of things to point out. As you can see, the male and females have different markings and these two photos, part of the difference in coloration here is just a matter of the light and how the light is hitting the critter. The other thing to note is that the markings are different depending on if the butterfly has its wings back where you can see the underside, there's different markings to look for compared to when they have their wings down, then you're going to be looking for different aspects of it there. And the other thing to note is, unlike a lot of butterfly species, the skippers in general, including the Dakota Skipper, hold its wings at two different angles and so they kind of look like a little fighter jet. Now Dakota Skippers are part of a large group of butterflies of skippers in general. It's a whole group of butterflies and this is just a cross-section of some of the skippers that are in our state that fly at a similar time as the Dakota Skipper. We're not going to go through these in any detail but you can just see that there's a whole variety of them and they all have slightly different markings and that's what we're looking for when we're identifying between the different ones and between males and females and that sort of thing. I guess, yeah, I was going to also mention skippers in general, their flight pattern is, as the name suggests, they're not up-fluttering and flying around in the air. They're low to the ground, close to the vegetation and they kind of skip around on the vegetation hence their name. All right, we're going to cover the life cycle of the species. The big thing to note here first is that the Dakota Skipper is only complete one generation per year. You think about a lot of insects and other butterflies there. They have multiple hatches during the growing season. It's not the case for Dakota Skippers. They've got one chance each year to breed and lay their eggs and get larva to the next spring. So their adult flight period is anywhere from mid-June to mid to late July and it's pretty much a two-week timeframe within that period and it depends on the year. It depends on what's going on with the weather that year as to when they will start to emerge and fly around. So it's a fairly limited time period when we can actually see and identify them. The females lay one egg at a time. Now they can lay multiple eggs, but it's just one single egg at a time. They lay primarily at the base of grasses, but they can also lay on forbs or broadleaf plants and those eggs hatch in about 8 to 12 days. Then they enter the stage where they're at the longest, the larval stage. They go through about 6 or 7 instars or stages during that larval development where they molt into the next instar. So just a couple photos here. So you can see a little newly hatched guy there, the final here. And then the other thing I wanted to point out is these little shelters that they build as larvae. So they build these little shelters at the base of grasses and bunch grasses in particular. If you see this kind of darkened area here and just this cluster of material surrounding the base, that is a larval shelter. So before hibernation happens, which is in that fourth or fifth instar, typically those shelters are actually in the upper soil surface, whereas after winter, in the last few instars after hibernation, they are building more at the base of grasses here. And the larvae come out at night, actually, or typically come out at night, clip off the base of a leaf of a blade of grass that they want to eat, and they crawl back into their shelter and just bring the blade of grass in and chomp it down. So it's a pretty good way to protect themselves and get them through the next stage. So as you've already seen, the next stage is the puva. Their final step before then emerging as an adult. So just a step back and think about the bigger picture of the species here. This is the graph or a figure of the current range of the species. There are a few populations in Canada right now. There's now only one remaining population in Minnesota. There's several populations in Northeast South Dakota. And then as you can note here, North Dakota is really the heart of the remaining population. We have multiple known populations in the state, which we'll be talking about more. The other thing I wanted to note is the historical range that we know of used to go down into Iowa. There was a lobe that came down. There were multiple populations throughout Iowa and even a couple populations in Illinois and Wisconsin. So this has retracted the populations in Western Minnesota, which used to be all along the Western Minnesota prairies. There were multiple populations. Those were pretty well studied by the Minnesota DNR over the years through the 70s, 80s. They did fairly regular surveys of those populations, typically in remnant native prairie in Minnesota, which Minnesota has a lot less remnant native prairie than we do. And in the early 2000s is when they noticed that a lot of those populations started to drop out. They weren't finding Dakota skippers there anymore in these prairies. And that was part of the reason for the listing of the species, just that retraction of that eastern edge of the species. So habitat. Habitat has been described in the literature as type A or type B habitat. It's not a clear distinction between the two. There's kind of a gradation between those two habitats. It's all mixed grass to mixed to tall grass, high quality native prairie with bunch grasses and nectar, a nectar source. The type A habitat tends to be more rolling prairie with a little bit drier conditions, whereas the type B habitat, which you'll find in the north central part of North Dakota, is just very very low relief and more of wetland depression areas surrounded by just slightly raised areas with with the bunch grasses and forbs. This photo is a really prime photo that shows bunch grasses. The main one that you can see visually, which is easy to pick out is little blue stem, which is this brownish reddish brown color here on this photo. Just because you have a little blue stem doesn't mean you're going to have to go to Skipper because it's everywhere, I get it, but there's other things to look at. The topography, the other, the quality. We have learned that Dakota Skippers can tolerate more shrubs and policies in grass invasion than we first thought and what's published in the literature. They can tolerate a little bit more than what we originally thought. And then just the other thing to notice on here, just the continuous prairie going on. It's a nice large expanse all together in one area. And I just wanted to give you a visual areally of, this isn't the exact location of that photo, but just to point out when you look at aerial imagery, you can see the little blue stem again is a nice visual indicator. Again, not, it's not totally cut and dry, but it gives you an idea of what to look for if you're looking on aerial imagery where you have this reddish purplish tinge is little blue stem. You might need to flip through to a certain year of your Google Earth imagery to find, to really see that pop. But I'm going to be looking for just nice, gently rolling prairie with, you know, native prairie areas and those that blue stem is a nice indicator. This is just another photo with another site of habitat. This one has a little more woody shrub encroachment in these draws here in between, but you still see these nice hill slopes and ridges of high quality prairie coming back here with nectar sources. And I guess I should mention I forgot that echinacea or purple coneflower is one of the main nectar sources for sure in type A prairie and across the state. Black Eyed Susan tends to be more of a nectar source in some of the Minnesota areas and the north central part of North Dakota. And just an aerial view of that same kind of idea where you do have woody draws in between, but you still, you've got these nice ridges and areas of native prairie. So it's a little more steep here, but still great for Dakota skippers. Okay, now we'll step back and talk about some of the things that have been done for the species as a whole. When the species got listed, Minnesota Zoo got right to it in 2014 and started to try to figure out if they could breed and rear Dakota skipper at the zoo in a captive situation. And sure enough, they were able to. They figured it out. Basically, they collected some in the wild and were able to bring them in and allow, you know, pair them up. They were able to mate, lay eggs, buyable ones. And sure enough, they can get through to the adult stage in the lab. So after that, Minnesota started to look into doing some reintroductions. They started out at Hole in the Mountain Preserve, which is in the southwest part of the state near Lake Benton, Minnesota. The Dakota Skipper was last observed there in 2009. They started doing reintroductions of those captive bred populations from the zoo in 2017 and through 2022, they did releases anywhere from 200 to 1,100 per year. And they did see, as they released individuals, they would see males and females breeding, laying eggs, that kind of thing. So they should have been doing their thing. And they do think they documented some wild individuals in 2020 and 21. However, in the last two seasons, they have not seen any Dakota Skippers at Hole in the Mountain now. That was at the Nature, there's a Nature Conservancy Preserve, but there's also, they also did releases in adjacent DNR WMA areas. In the meantime, they started looking at a second location to do reintroductions at Glacier Lake State Park. Dakota Skipper was last observed there in 2008. And this time around, they decided to try to increase the chances for success by doing a little bit of work on the habitat first. They did not do that at Hole in the Mountain. So they started doing some things like they introduced grazing. They did some woody vegetation removal. And they also, they didn't low it up and plant floral resources, but they kind of overseed it on hilltops and stuff, nectar species, particularly coneflower. Just trying to make sure it was prepared for a reintroduction. And last year, they reintroduced about 1200 adults. So we will see this year if anything survived. And that'll be good information. In North Dakota, there have been a couple of different, few different things going on. One of them being some initiation of more of a comprehensive survey effort for the species in the state by the North Dakota Natural Resources Trust. And we'll talk about that in just a second. I want to point out on this figure here on the top left, this figure of North Dakota represents what we knew about the populations in the state in 2014. So this is when the species was listed. We knew about these areas of Dakota Skipper. And this is an approximation. Okay. It doesn't have every single population on there, but just showing the main areas where we knew that it was in the state. Well, by 2019, we had a little bit more information on that. Big part of finding a lot of new, a lot of the populations here were because of industry-required surveys from its listing. Oil and gas, wind companies were required to be doing some surveys, and indeed more populations of Dakotas were found throughout the state. So that's what you're seeing in this figure. The trust started their surveys in 2019. They'll be year five this year. And they basically started looking across the state, primarily at states and federal-owned lands so far. Just trying to get a good idea of where are places that haven't ever been looked, or that perhaps have been looked at, but haven't been looked at for a while. Over 70 individual sites have been looked at, and four new populations have been found. And then there's also kind of a monitoring of known populations going on with this effort. So this is what's been learned from the period of 2020 to 2022. I also want to point out these brown areas that there's also been kind of an attempt to keep better track of negative surveys. So where we think it could be, and we go out there and then look for it and do not find it. And that is actually critical information that hasn't always been tracked the best in the past. So they're trying to do a better job of that to understand why it's not in some of these places where we think it should be. And then just this final one showed the additional areas that were looked at in 2023. Another big effort that has happened recently is an attempt at a more comprehensive model. Now, there have been many models that have been developed for the Dakota Skipper and Habitat. I guess I should say specifically trying to get a gauge on habitat that's out there for the species. And those other models have worked for other purposes and for their time. But basically with some of the new survey information and just our increasing knowledge about the species and where it's at, this model now that the Fish and Wildlife Service put together is an even better attempt at that. They used, I have to look at my little note here of everything that went into it. So aside from just kind of the updated population information, there's land cover. And again, many of these things were also used in previous models. It's not that these things weren't looked at, but they've tried to bring it together more comprehensively. Land cover, disturbance history, biomass, surface reflectance. So that's like infrared imagery. Native prairie tends to look a little different on infrared compared to really highly invaded areas by cool season grasses. And soil conditions, topography and climate normals. So what you get is this is the output and this is available to anyone. You can go online and you can download this data and ideally it's going to be updated on a regular basis. The big point here is this is a probability of finding Dakota Skipper as an output of this model. The red are the hot spots. So that's over 90% probability of finding that the species and then just going down from there to the light blue 40 to 50% probability of finding Dakota Skipper. So it's a pretty functional tool that we have now. And it's starting to be applied in a few different ways that I will briefly touch on. If you want to just picture it here, this is the model output downloaded into a GIS program. You can see the same coloration here put onto the landscape with an aerial image behind it and then land ownership information. We can really start to pinpoint. And again, this isn't saying for sure Dakota Skippers are going to necessarily be there. We also have the population information, but it just really helps us to focus on areas that have the highest chance and then down from there. So, as I said, a few ways it's being applied. So in the first few things here, these are actually this is through the natural North Dakota Natural Resources Trust. There are different programs going on and some different initiatives basically available for private landowners. And it's basically a way to provide some funding to them for various things. So one thing that's happening is restoring grassland and in particular areas that are have high probabilities of Dakota Skipper. Surrounding or let's just say a farmer wants to reseed a chunk of their fields back into native prairie. They can actually get help with funding specifically. And if they are in a high probability Dakota Skipper area, they can get funding to help pay for that seed, help pay for a higher diversity mix, that kind of thing. Basically, you know, puts grass back on the landscape. And then a couple other options that are just starting to get worked out are for ranchers that basically are doing a great job already. Obviously have Dakota Skippers or potentially have them out there. They can, there's some initiatives to basically get them funding to just do what they've been doing. And if they would like to change their grazing or implement some other practice practices, they can also get funding to help with that. So those, that's what I'm talking about here with these conservation agreements. But again, to be able to focus specific Dakota Skipper conservation efforts in these highest priority areas. Another thing that's going on is the North Dakota Petroleum Council and their participating oil and gas companies are working to develop a Dakota Skipper Habitat Conservation Plan. With a lot of the impacts that have happened, if there's federal, if it's on federal lands or there's a federal permit involved, there's an avenue to go through the regulatory process called Section 7 consultation, where you can actually consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and hopefully end up with an incidental take permit for the species if you're impacting it. This Habitat Conservation Plan is essentially industry's way of trying to be proactive about impacts that they can avoid on private lands. And that avenue is in Section 10 of the Environmental or Endangered Species Act. And that course hasn't been, hasn't been traveled very often. And so getting this plan written up will, the intention is to provide some sort of insurance or assurance, I should say, to industry that as they work with the fish, Fish and Wildlife Service through this plan that they can, if they cannot avoid an impact and it's on private land that they will have a way to then mitigate for it and will get some assurance that the Fish and Wildlife Service will accept that. And so in association with this Habitat Conservation Plan, there are mitigation banks that are getting set up for Dakota Skipper, similar to like a wetland mitigation bank where if there's an impact then there's, then you pay for a certain amount of acreage of Dakota Skipper conservation elsewhere. And all the details of these are getting, nothing's done yet, but it's just going on. And again, these kinds of tools and our, our information now about the species are all being used in a much more pinpointed way, or it can be. So just my final thought on this, you know, a lot of times in life we have something unexpected come our way. And, you know, at first we want to just take it as a problem or a roadblock in what we're doing. And oftentimes it's, we realize later that it's life's way of getting us to just stop, take a moment, step back, look at things a little differently. And oftentimes it's an opportunity for us to apply ourselves differently, step up to the plate a little differently. And I just think that's the case for Dakota Skipper for us in this state. If North Dakota doesn't work to conserve the species, it's just really not going to happen. I mean, I really personally don't want to get to the point of this life support thing that's going on in Minnesota. You know, we've got, we still have a lot of good prairie out there. We have great things going on. We have great people in the agencies and in all sorts of industry and that sort of thing. And it's an opportunity for us. And I think the other thing that the Dakota Skipper has done is give us a little bit of a kick in the pants about looking, thinking more broadly about our grasslands in this state and the other benefits that they give and the other species and importance that they have. So I will take any questions if we have time. Yes, I'll repeat the question. So he's asking, as the populations blinked out in Minnesota, did they have any sense of why? And it's, there are some ideas for sure. And I will say like the monitoring wasn't an annual sort of monitoring. So they'd come back five years later and oh, wait a second, where are these guys, you know. So there was some time in between, but there has been thought of pesticides have been brought up as a possible thing. And actually the Minnesota Zoo is they are, they have some studies going on with with pesticides and not just the Dakota Skipper but other pollinators and such. There were a couple of sites where perhaps the timing of some prescribed burns weren't was questioned. Now that's not an all out thing I don't think range wide but a couple of particular situations pointed to that as a possible reason. And then just in general there's just increasing invasion of cool season grasses is a big problem and brome in particular brome smooth brome grass is a particular problem for the species we think so. And again, in Minnesota, the context of it is corn and soybeans surrounding these little remnants of native prairie it's a little different context here not that we don't have agriculture surrounding this as well but it's a kind of a different system so. Sure Brenda is asking about kind of maybe conflicting things I said about cool season grasses and how how they might influence or impact Dakota Skipper so. I think though the one thing to note. Definitely cool seasons. As they invade more and more they get to a certain point and maybe there's a threshold or depending on the site and exactly how that site is spatially laid out you know whether it could whether it affects a population enough at a certain point. But in general, when when the skipper was listed. A lot of the sites that had been looked at for the skipper and that were known, we're just really like the primus high quality. Native prairie sites and that's what we thought that they needed well, some of these other surveys that were done through industry and other. At other times, we have realized oh they can actually they're out here still now again is there a certain threshold where they blink out is is part of the question but. They can still tolerate a fair amount of shrub encroachment and and especially Kentucky bluegrass is okay I think it's partly because of the structure of that grass compared to smooth brome. Kentucky bluegrass you've got tillers and things that come up that it's not a bunch grass but it does have some more basal cover, whereas smooth brome is a. It's pretty much bear at the base of the stock, and that would not if a female laid an egg on the base of a brome probably wouldn't end up with a larva developing at the end of that so. We just we don't know a lot about it so quite yet, and I think it's an area to look into further.