It was eighteen degrees outside and five-something in the morning when we pulled up to a clearing in the sagebrush, joined by a dozen feral horses clattering over the sidehills that framed the wet meadow across from us. We quietly shut the truck off, grabbed our optics, and picked our way down to the meadow under a full Great Basin moon.
We heard the birds before we saw them, as daylight splashed weakly onto the lightening sky above. It’s not a sound that can be easily described or one that has any other close analogues in the animal kingdom. Somewhere between a whoosh and a whistle as the air sacs on their breasts dance and sing with a timbre that’s been ringing here for thousands of years. One could call it a drum, but it’s nothing like that of their more familiar forest-dwelling cousins.
This is a lek, the ancestral breeding grounds of the sage grouse. They return to this exact spit of land each spring guided by some primordial memory for a chance to pass on their genetic material to a choosy hen. Often likened to the mean strut of a big tom… but much more arcane. This is also the time of year where science occurs, and lekking grouse are carefully counted.
There’s not much good news for the greater sage grouse as a whole, including those throughout the Sagebrush State. This unit used to have a short season for the sagehens years back. No longer. Nothing open statewide for non-residents, and even resident hunters see the writing on the wall. A draw system has been bandied about and might be the way to go, although hunter mortality has a negligible impact on sage grouse numbers. The problem is more expansive.
We know that ravens are, in general, the most impactful depredators of eggs, with some areas now holding over 1,600% as many ravens compared to their historical numbers. Due to federal red tape surrounding these “migratory” birds, they exist largely unchecked. Fences and telecom lines — anthropogenic structures — as well as encroaching junipers provide perfect perches for avian predators that were never there historically.
Coyotes numbers are up too, bolstered by that manmade edge habitat that works so well for them. Runaway populations of feral horses pound natural springs and wet meadows, and strip vital forage down to the root. The meadows degrade, become channelized, and disappear entirely. Prolonged drought hammers food sources and reproductive vitality of the animals. Roads fracture the sagebrush sea and in many places solar panels completely replace it.
This slow conversion of the West marches on. A guerilla network of conservationists, ranchers, and biologists form the only bulwark to this juggernaut, and piece by piece we do what we can, where we can.
When we heard the drumming we stopped in our tracks for a few minutes, until the iconic, beachball-sized outline of a puffed-up boomer was discernable. And then another. And another. Over thirty of them spread across this wet meadow on a frigid March morning. The males with their tails fanned out, swaggering with their sage-colored air sacs pulsing with challenges and responses. They stand out like nothing else in an ancient middle finger to Progress and the Modern World.
The hens are smaller — drab colored and incognito, blending in perfectly with the small rocks and the brush itself. There were a few sliding in and out of view of the spotting scopes, but due to their effervescent nature, it’s harder to get an accurate count of the females.
We verified our tallies and headed back to the truck as if stalking a bedded mule deer. On to the next one. From the truck, those bleachwhite breast feathers caught the sunlight shining from the East and lit up like a lighthouse from a quarter mile away as we left them and moved on to the next site.
Where there used to be hundreds… there are now few.
Have pity on a dinosaur, indeed.
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