ANYBODY worried about America’s ability to settle political arguments should consider the greater sage grouse. Better still, as the May sun warms the western plains where it lives, go and watch it dance, as Lexington recently did in Wyoming. There are few stranger sights in nature.
After spending the winter huddled in sage brush, a twiggy shrub that carpets the plains and is the backdrop to a thousand Westerns, male grouse gather on patches of open ground known as leks. There, for several hours a day, starting at sunrise, they fan their tail-feathers into a speckled halo and emit a peculiar warbling sound by dilating air-sacks in their feathery breasts. The unearthly chorus this makes—think of a mobile orchestra of chicken-sized didgeridoos—rises up from the vast and glorious Wyoming steppe. In the lee of the snow-covered Wind River Mountains, it is a New World Eden, an expanse of yellow and green dotted with distant herds of pronghorn and wild horses.
It is exceptional, however....Continue reading
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