A Conversation with Vanessa Schroeder
Senior Faculty Research Assistant I for USDA-ARS at
Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center
Burns, Oregon
by
Ellen Waterston
Touted as the worst since the 1950s, the Harney County 2025 spring flood won’t be forgotten any time soon. Thousands of acres and hundreds of homes, including large swaths of the Burns Paiute Reservation, were underwater. Residents formed sandbag brigades to help neighbors and friends protect their homes. Volunteers helped others evacuate to higher ground. Along with many other civic and community events, the popular Annual Harney County Migratory Bird Festival in Burns was cancelled.
The winter was an unusually snowy one for all of Oregon, including the Aldrich Mountain Range in Harney County, which recorded some of the highest snowpack in the state. With the arrival of spring and warmer temperatures, the snowmelt made an unobstructed dash for the Silvies River that flows through Burns… unobstructed because the vegetation that normally holds or disburses melting snowpack was devastated in the 200,000 acres that burned in Harney County the previous summer.
Arriving the day after the Silvies had crested, I made my way to the sprawling Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center (EOARC), the water in flooded fields lapping the edges of the raised roads doubling as dams. Dr. Stella Copeland, Rangeland Ecologist at EOARC, greeted me with an offer of a campus tour before my scheduled interview with her colleague, Vanessa Schroeder. We explored laboratories, greenhouses, barns and shops, all purposed to forward EOARC’s mission to “provide the science for sound land and livestock management.” Circling back to the main building, home to twelve full-time scientists and support staff, Dr. Copeland led me through a rabbit warren of offices lining the narrow corridors, introducing me to and referencing others hard at work on a staggering variety of issues.
Erik Hamerlinck, who, among other areas of study, measures photosynthesis in grass heads and the role that plays in plant reproduction; Katie Wollstein includes the social impacts of rangeland fire on humans in her areas of focus; Peter Olsoy is employing drones to monitor plant and bird population health using remote sensing and geospatial technologies; Juliana Ranches specializes in improving efficiency in livestock production; Chad Boyd is making exciting gains on the restoration of an annual grass-dominated rangeland; Kirk Davies is looking into rest and rotation approaches to grazing in the high desert; David Bohnert is exploring virtual fencing as a precision agriculture technology; and my tour guide, Stella Copeland, is a dedicated plant community ecologist. The list goes impressively on.
Their individual and collective commitment is to keep their science current and help all partners reach their growth potential… not only ranchers, farmers, conservation organizations, and government agricultural agencies, but also the silent partners, the flora and fauna of Oregon’s southeastern high desert country. What EOARC’s multi-faceted areas of focus have in common is sustaining the health of the high desert for all who call it home, from bees to buckaroos, sedges to sage grouse. It’s a big job and helps explain why they report for work, even when flood waters breach the roadways.
My head spinning with all Dr. Copeland had shared, I headed into Vanessa Schroeder’s office to be met by a young woman who spoke with the exactness of a biologist, with hospital corner precision, and the enthusiasm of a high desert convert. Our discussion focused on the significance of just one of her many research projects: the greater sage-grouse. Her passion was apparent as she leaned into a discussion about this large, plump stand-in for the high desert’s canary in the coal mine of desert rangeland management. Talking to Schroeder, I came to fully appreciate that the health of the sage-grouse population is a window on the health of the sagebrush steppes in general.
Anyone who has a soft spot for Oregon’s Outback, whether rancher, farmer, birder, hunter, range scientist, conservationist, or shop owner in Burns, Oregon, has heard plenty about the greater sage-grouse of the high desert sagebrush steppes. But did they know that, as Schroeder explained, “It’s what’s called an obligate, meaning it is entirely dependent on a particular environment and the diet it provides.”? Sage-grouse don’t hook up their campers and head south for the winter. They aren’t snowbirds, unlike the flocks and flocks of migrating birds that arrive in Harney County, flood or no flood. Sage-grouse have no genetic choice but to stay in one location. They have zero ability to adapt or survive in different conditions. They are year ’rounders or what Schroeder refers to as “lifers.”
During spring mating season, Schroeder explains, sage-grouse congregate at leks—open areas of desert with less sagebrush. When the hen is ready to nest, she moves to bigger, denser stands that provide “high visual obscurity,” as Schroeder describes it, so the nest is protected both from above (“birds of prey”) and below (“meso-carnivores such as the coyote.”). After roughly a month of incubation, during which the hen only leaves her nest briefly during the day, the hungry hatchlings need insects to eat, as well as forbs and wildflowers. The hens must quickly find sage growth that offers more varied sustenance and still provides good cover for her chicks. The cock-birds have moved into dense coverage until the following spring lek rendezvous.
By June or July, when things start to heat up and go to seed, the brood will move yet again. Why not hang out and feed on seeds and nuts? “The sage-grouse, unlike most birds, doesn’t have a gizzard to grind up hard-to-digest items,” explains Schroeder (the gizzard, I learned, is a sort of secondary stomach that, with the help of ingested pebbles and grit acting as teeth, ‘chews’ the bird’s food). To find nutrition that is more digestible, the gizzard-less sage-grouse heads for higher elevations in search of mesic habitats or wet areas. In winter, these nomads make the last move of their unrelenting annual cycle to get ahead of snowfall covering the sagebrush they need for food and shelter. In this case, they seek out very tall stands of sage that guarantee the availability of nourishment extending above the snowpack. In short, Schroeder summarizes, “sage-grouse travel for each life stage.” These varied high desert habitat requirements, and the wide range of the sage-grouse’s annual travels, qualify them as an umbrella species. Their healthy presence means a variety of natural habitats and smaller species (songbirds, rabbits) must also be thriving. The opposite is also true. The common denominator? Sagebrush.
One thing Schroeder said to keep in mind is that these wanderers, when travelling from one sagebrush habitat to another, need protection to avoid predation by birds of prey or Wiley Coyote. A flock is at extreme risk when their desert migrations require crossing large exposed and unprotected areas, such as might result from a fire, persistent snowpack, a flood, large mono-crop farms, highways or roads. I had never heard of the term “anthropogenic subsidies” until speaking with Schroeder. It’s science-speak for resources (food, for example) provided to ecosystems as the result of human activities, such as the result of roadkill. If sage-grouse are run over, carrion eaters are attracted. If it happens often enough, the carrion eater might decide to stay. Free meal on Oregon Highway 20! And if they stay, they might find the sage-grouse’s nest, eat her eggs. These “subsidies” can fundamentally change the behavior, diet, and animals’ range, can alter the overall structure of ecological communities.
Schroeder’s path to EOARC began as an undergraduate in a specialized environmental program at University of Washington in Missouri. “It’s where I learned about field biology and ecology.” After graduating, she landed a job with Utah Fish and Wildlife. In 2013, her husband was offered employment with the U.S. Forest Service in Harney County and the couple headed to Burns. After working in seed amendment technology at EOARC, her current position became available and has proven to be the job she dreamed of. “My real passion was always where land management and wildlife intersect.” She divides her time between Oregon State University Extension Service outreach efforts and research for Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA-ARS). During all this, she also managed to complete her masters in wildlife and rangeland sciences at Oregon State University. “My work is not county-based but ecosystem-based,” says Schroeder. “I serve sagebrush ecosystem and wildlife.”
In reflecting on the move to this remote frontier county, she notes “Burns has a population the size of my high school in San Antonio, Texas. The county population is smaller than the number of students at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The first year my husband and I were here it got to negative 30 degrees in the winter. That summer it was 108 degrees. We’re 130 miles from a Walmart.”
Reasons not to stay? On the contrary. She and her husband were and remain smitten by this big, open land. One of Schroeder’s favorite pastimes is walking at dawn through sagebrush in spring. “Most amazing sunrises! Light hitting sagebrush, scent of sagebrush, space to roam, incredibly quiet except for the diversity of bird song, continuous song—to me that is peace. The sagebrush sea provides this.”
Schroeder and everyone at EOARC are each forwarding different aspects of high desert health per their different perspectives and skills. Regardless of weather events and job descriptions, they’re all providing the science for sound land and livestock management, and coming to work even when the roads are flooded. As Schroeder says, “There’s no such thing in any ecosystem of focusing on one thing.”
Schroeder also describes her work as “customer driven science.” That would include the sage-grouse and the high desert itself as “customers.” Another fun fact she’d like to be able to say about her home in Harney County? “Hopefully more sage grouse than people someday.”
Feature photo by Alyson Yates of OSU
Published May, 2025
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