I had been looking forward to the limited sage-grouse season all year. NDOW had closed or
reduced most of the sage-grouse seasons in the Silver State this year, and with the continuing
downward trend of lek attendance and overall population decline not boding well for the
immediate future of this pursuit, I was not going to let this opportunity pass me by like it did last
year. For a limited time only. I had a Saturday and Sunday at the end of the season cleared for an
overnighter.
There was one small stumbling block in the way and it was that my mind was fully committed,
but my body voiced some reservations. A week prior I returned from a bear hunt in the Selway
with nothing to show for it but sprained knee and good memories in solitude. After a deep and
measured eight seconds of thought about the wisdom of proceeding with this I decided it was
medically sound wisdom to proceed on this next hunt with plans to hike ten-plus miles a day and
with a sprained knee and with no dog’s nose to help guide me. Alarm went off at 2:30 that
Saturday morning and away Ol’ Limpy went. That would be me.
The history and present-day status of the greater sage grouse is not a feel-good story at this point
in time. A cumulative and rough population estimate going back even 100 years ago was roughly
16 million birds. Then, “civilization” progressed and habitat fragmentation took its toll on these
animals who rely on unbroken seas of sagebrush to survive. These twisted plains of sagebrush
slowly broken up and turned into subdevelopments or monocrop agriculture. Bulldozed into
condos and highways. Springs that fed the wet meadows that these species rely on dried up and
the habitat was lost. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, sage-grouse numbers have
declined 80% since 1965 on average, with a 40% drop-off in the last 20 years. These days we’re
looking (optimistically) at only a half million birds spread throughout California, Nevada, Idaho,
and Wyoming. State game agencies look at things like lek attendance when setting regulations,
as the numbers of birds at a given lek site can be translated with science into a loose population
estimate for the area. These populations can be managed down to the molecular level – season
dates, unit borders, and bag limits can be as specific as one valley. Each season is usually a little
different and never guaranteed. We are blessed with great wildlife managers here and I do get the
feeling that they are doing all they can to keep this experience available to us for as long as they
can.
Not even three miles in and there was fire in that knee that rose with each step like the sun
spilling through the juniper on top of the range to my right. In between the twisted sagebrush I
find the first pile of Mike & Ike-shaped scat I’ve seen today. The grouse have been here. A little
validation of my instincts is always welcomed and not something I’m always used to. I pick my
right leg up and set it down stiffer than ever with every step. Never have I had an outing of any
kind derailed by something as unexceptional as joint pain, but there is a first time for everything.
Just power through it.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
Not happening.
Can’t do it anymore.
Checking Gaia, I’m about a mile and a half from the truck. Amidst the silver sea a brighter green
patch sticks out to me down south a ways. A spring. I can swing it wide, hit that one patch and
try to bump some grouse and end up back at the truck. This time of year, late September to early
October, they’re still primarily feeding on forbs, with very little of their diet actually
encompassing sagebrush leaves. That switchover happens a little later in the winter.
This is literally the last shot of the trip. Every single step that knee gets a little stiffer. I don’t
even make it to that oasis before that grouse whoosh sounds from somewhere behind me and it
appears over my right shoulder. Shot, miss, rack, shot, miss, rack, shot, miss. Forty yards maybe?
Close enough to tell it was a hen. Perhaps then it was for the best that I missed, and enough of a
poetic end to this farce for me to take it as a sign that the universe was as done with me as my
body was with it for the day. Make it back to the truck and unload the remaining shells out of the
Wingmaster one by one.
I boil up a little water and let my lunch cook in its bag as I weigh the chain of events, thoughts
and decisions that brought me here. It’s not secret knowledge that if you want to get a sage
grouse on the high desert without a dog, you need to bring your walking boots. Why didn’t I just
go for blues in the mountains next to me? That style of hunting, I know my way around a little
better, and it would probably be less walking for me by an order of magnitude for the same
amount of calories at the end of the day. It’s that temporality. I wanted that meat. It can’t be
bought, and certainly nobody will trade for it. If it’s listed then certainly I will never be able to
taste it in my lifetime. I want to be able to tell my kids that yes, I did hunt the sage-grouse and
eat them just the generations before me had. That I did observe and interact with them in the vast
sagebrush sea. That I did understand the gravity of what I was able to experience, and that I
knew it wasn’t forever.
I had a lot of time on the five-hour drive back to consider my failings this trip and their
implications. With it being October now, I had gone on two hunts for big game and now this one
this calendar year and had come home empty on all of them. You can tell yourself somethings
about learning experiences and debrief yourself until you’re blue in the face but after a while it
gets a little old and hollow. All of this is regularly compounded with each scroll down the
timeline or photo stream, with 6×6 bulls and nice huckleberry-fattened black bears and limits of
ducks and everything else staring back at me. The learning curve is not pictured, and I know this.
This is not natural or healthy, and I know this. Which is why these kinds of hunts and these kinds
of spaces are needed for every single person. Nothing else can offer this return to man’s
primordial nature that has so completely fallen away into the blockchain save these places, be
they the mountains, the high sharptail plains, the harsh deserts of the Southwest, or the mast
forests back where I grew up. One step left, right left. And on and on is all there is. Eyes peeled
and looking and listening for the whoosh, whoosh of a big bird flush. Or looking for sign on the
ground.
Tires leave the gravel of the National Forest Road and hit pavement. And so ends my ill-fated
and short-lived 2021 Nevada sage-grouse hunt, a microcosm of the species itself. The birds will
always be there in some amount, maybe not as many as we’d like. The real spirit of the West will
always be there, but we might have to start looking for it in between subdivisions and solar
installations. I’ll always be hunting, maybe not as effectively as I do now.
This trip was damned if I do, and especially damned if I do not. I get that feeling on every trip
that I strike out on. It does feel like these birds are in the same boat and I sure hope I am wrong.
I will make that drive every year.
