Urogallo de las artemisas

Each spring heralds a unique spectacle on the brushy western plains of North America. Year after year, male Greater Sage-Grouse congregate on ancestral display grounds known as leks. There, the males strut about, fanning spiky tail feathers and raising feathered white collars while inflating bright yellow throat sacs — all the while making a weird assortment of booming, swishing, and popping noises. Choosy female sage-grouse, the object of all this parading, look on with a critical eye.

Although male birds of other species, from the Greater Prairie-Chicken down to the Club-winged Manakin, also display on leks, the charismatic Greater Sage-Grouse is an “umbrella” species, meaning that efforts to conserve it also benefit a wide variety of other wildlife. It is one of the most prominent inhabitants of the sagebrush “sea,” which encompasses millions of acres of open lands across 16 U.S. states and small portions of a few Canadian provinces. And it’s uniquely adapted to this habitat, from its diet down to the downy fluff of sage-grouse chicks.

But the sagebrush “sea” is contested land, and the Greater Sage-Grouse’s foothold there has loosened. Over time, its habitat — among the most endangered in North America — has been lost to fossil fuel development, persistent grazing pressure, and introduced invasive grasses. Where 16 million Greater Sage-Grouse once strutted, now a severely reduced population, a bellwether for an entire, fragile ecosystem, hangs on.

Birds around the world are declining, and many of them, even iconic species like the Greater Sage-Grouse, are facing urgent, acute threats. Habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, collisions, and pesticides hinder the species, and these threats are exacerbated by policy decisions. Despite clear evidence of a decreasing population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cannot list the Greater Sage-Grouse under the Endangered Species Act due to a moratorium imposed by the U.S. Congress in 2014. This exemption makes addressing issues contributing to the population’s decline even more difficult.

ABC continues work with a variety of partners to get the Greater Sage-Grouse the conservation help it so urgently needs. Compañeros en vuelo has included this species on its Red Watch List, and considers it a Tipping Point species — one that has lost more than 50 percent of its population within the past 50 years. Conserving the Greater Sage-Grouse also protects the dozens of species that share its sagebrush steppe habitat.

The Greater Sage-Grouse is the largest of North America’s grouse species. This impressive bird is heavy-bodied, with a short, thick neck and long tail. The sexes are dimorphic (they have distinctly different physical characteristics), and the male is larger than the female. Both have mottled gray-brown plumage with yellow lores (the area between the eye and the beak), a black belly, and white underwings, which are visible in flight. In addition, the male has a large white ruff that conceals two yellow patches of bare skin, known as gular sacs, on the lower throat and breast. During courtship displays, he inflates these patches into round, balloon-like pouches. The male also has a black throat, a fleshy yellow comb above the eyes, and long wispy feathers called filoplumes that arise from the back of his neck.

The female’s plumage is more uniformly mottled gray-brown, with less flashy white underwings and a shorter tail. This more cryptic plumage allows her to blend perfectly into her sagebrush habitat while nesting. She also has yellow eye combs, but they are less prominent than the male’s.

No subspecies of Greater Sage-Grouse are recognized, but there are distinct populations in Washington state and on the border between California and Nevada. There is also the Gunnison Sage-Grouse, a closely related species, which occurs mostly in Colorado. Gunnison Sage-Grouse are significantly smaller in size, and males have more noticeably barred tails.

The Greater Sage-Grouse utters a chicken-like cackling call when flushed from cover. Displaying males make a weird assortment of booming, swishing, and popping noises, produced by rattling their stiff tail and wing feathers and inflating and deflating their throat sacs.

Greater Sage-Grouse are only found on the sagebrush steppe and are closely associated with sagebrush ecosystems in all seasons, utilizing different sagebrush habitats throughout the year.

• Revisits sites year after year for lekking, using locations with less shrub cover but proximity to nesting habitat, including sparsely vegetated sites such as dry lakebeds and broad ridgetops, and human-altered habitats such as cultivated fields, airstrips, gravel pits, and roads.
• Nests under the cover of dense big sagebrush plants and in other grassy areas. Native bunchgrasses in the sage understory are of particular importance for nesting.
• Hens and juveniles forage in wet meadows and irrigated pastures.

The Greater Sage-Grouse and the sagebrush ecosystem it inhabits are inseparable: The grouse can’t live without the sagebrush, and the ecosystem’s health hinges on the survival of the grouse. The rhythm of the grouse’s life is tied to the resources the sagebrush steppe provides — from the stage it sets for lekking males and the cover it offers brooding hens on nests to the diet of dispersing juveniles. Two particular sagebrush species, big sage and silver sage, are perhaps the most important for the Greater Sage-Grouse.