• IMPORTANCE TO LIVESTOCK AND WILDLIFE
• PALATABILITY
• NUTRITIONAL VALUE
• COVER VALUE
• VALUE FOR REHABILITATION OF DISTURBED SITES
• OTHER USES AND VALUES
• MANAGEMENT CONSIDERATIONS

IMPORTANCE TO LIVESTOCK AND WILDLIFE:

Needle-and-thread grass is widespread throughout the West and can be important to livestock and wildlife, especially early in the spring. The plant is preferred forage of black-tailed jackrabbits [4,38], black-tailed prairie dogs, northern pocket gophers [124], and desert cottontails [75].

PALATABILITY:

Needle-and-thread grass is moderately palatable to wildlife and domestic stock. The plant provides highly palatable early spring forage in Utah and fodder in fall and winter, but the summer fruit has a sharp awn that may injure grazing animals, especially domestic sheep [21,78,85,128,130]. Throughout the West, needle-and-thread grass is moderately important spring forage for mule deer, but use declines considerably as more preferred forages become available in summer [48].

Animal use of needle-and-thread grass is as follows [11,38,51,67,69,72,81,94,107,117,126]:

Animal	UT	MT	CO	NV	WA
Cattle	----	low-medium	low-medium	good	----
Domestic sheep	medium	----	----	good	----
Bison	----	----	medium	----	----
Elk	----	----	medium	----	medium (in Oct.)
Mule deer	----	none-low	low	----	----
Pronghorn	low	low	----	----	----

NUTRITIONAL VALUE:

In general, needle-and-thread grass' nutritional value is considered fair to deficient for cattle [61].

Nutritional content of immature needle-and-thread grass is as follows [102]:

Nutrient	Content
Ash (%)	12.3
Crude fiber (%)	29.0
Ether extract (%)	2.6
N-free extract (%)	44.1
Protein (%)	12.0
Calcium (%)	0.93
Cobalt (mg/kg)	0.051
Phosphorus (%)	0.16
Carotene (mg/kg)	88.2
Vit. A equiv. (IU/g)	147.0

Late in the season, protein content drops as low as 2.9% [102].

COVER VALUE:

Needle-and-thread grass is an important component of nesting sites for sharp-tailed grouse in southwestern North Dakota [68] and in Wyoming [103].

VALUE FOR REHABILITATION OF DISTURBED SITES:

Needle-and-thread grass is useful for stabilizing eroded or degraded sites [79,94,115]. The presence of the long and tough seed awn on needle-and-thread grass reduces is usefulness as a commercial seed [78], but needle-and-thread grass hay has been used successfully in revegetation projects. In Saskatchewan, needle-and-thread grass and Canadian needlegrass (Hesperostipa spartea) mulch was used as a seed source and erosion blanket on a steep south-facing slope [47]. At a mining revegetation site near Colstrip, Montana, needle-and-thread grass successfully established on plots covered in native hay harvested locally on July 6. Ninety-two percent of the cover at the site from which the hay was harvested was needle-and-thread grass[40].

A south-facing slope on a sodium chloride contaminated mine site in North Dakota was vegetated with a mix of native grasses including needle-and-thread grass. Establishment of needle-and-thread grass after 2 years was still very low and insignificantly better on the actively reclaimed site than on the control [71].

OTHER USES AND VALUES:

No entry

MANAGEMENT CONSIDERATIONS:

Needle-and-thread grass greens up early in the spring [65,78] and may be subject to overgrazing if other forage is not available [128]. The plant goes dormant in summer, but given sufficient moisture, needle-and-thread grass will green up again in the fall [91]. The plant is particularly sensitive to defoliation from June 1 to July 31 [104]. Clipping treatments in an Idaho study caused the highest mortality in July and August [134]. Needle-and-thread grass is considered a decreaser under domestic livestock grazing pressure by most authors [8,13,23,25,26,28,33,45,84,113,120,], although others claim needle-and-thread grass increases under or is unaffected by grazing pressure [2,3,25,50,85,86,88,97]. At the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory Site, relative cover and density of needle-and-thread grass significantly (p<0.05) increased over 10 years of cattle grazing in a big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)/Indian ricegrass (Achnatherum hymenoides)-needle-and-thread grass habitat type [3].

Prairie dog activity can have a profound effect on needle-and-thread grass communities. Only 2 years after the establishment of a black-tailed prairie dog colony on a South Dakota buffalograss (Buchloe dactyloides)-Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis)-needle-and-thread grass site, needle-and-thread grass no longer dominated. By 4 to 6 years of colonization, needle-and-thread grass had dropped from 97% frequency to less than 10% frequency [5,6].

Related categories for SPECIES: Hesperostipa comata | Needle-And-Thread Grass