Fifty Or So Years Ago

Daybreak With 'Prairie Dancers' At The Edge Of A Sage Grouse Lek

Birding The Apocalyspe:

Sure, equipment has improved drastically over the past fifty years, but what good is some swank-ass, gyro-stabilized, digital camera and lens, or the featherweight laptop upon which to process the images if there are no more birdies left to picture with it all?

This handsome, male, Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), was determined to win all the girls’ hearts at the sunrise dance competition.

My old wildlife adventure pal, Gary from high school and I drove for six hours into the wee-est of those wee, dark, chilly hours to get there, hours before first light, to set up our tent blind just beyond their lek, their traditional strutting grounds …by flashlight, and then doze for a bit before his Timex alarm watch went off, before those magnificent, mysterious, Greater Sage Grouse glided and fluttered in on silent wings from every direction and began their stunning, bewildering, air bladder, ‘plopping’ and strutting.

Showtime!

Given fifty years of hindsight, I understand now that we probably broke several soft rules of wildlife viewing etiquette; young, eager, wildly fascinated and teenage stupid, we likely became part of the problem without really understanding that there was a problem. We were careful, but not as careful as we’d be now.

What regal looks like.

I am told that although this particular lek continued to function as a meeting and mating venue for decades after that last, daybreak visit, it no longer exists in that capacity, that sadly, it, like so many others has fallen on hard times, or shifted to someplace as yet undiscovered. There are certainly still sage grouse in the area, I saw a few crossing a gravel road in that region just last spring, though there are, without question, substantially fewer now than back in the mid-late seventies.

And so, even with generous attempts to offer my younger self forgiveness for being a little over-eager, for probably setting up a little closer than I might now, knowing what I’ve come to understand about the accumulating pressures on these magnificent creatures and how they have, often through careless oversight of their very specific and solitary needs, found the odds stacked against their way of life over the past half-century. (According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, populations of Greater Sage Grouse declined by almost 3.5% per year between 1966 and 2015, resulting in a cumulative decline of 83% over that period.) Ten more years have passed since that was published. Good grief!

It’s hard not to look at these images made by that kid (me), of fifty years ago without feeling little pangs of unease and maybe even regret, atop the nostalgia, pride and fascination. Alas, more than one thing can be true at the same time. I’m willing to feel all the feels, the good, the bad and the careless.

“First, do no harm;” so says The Hippocratic oath, “to help or at least to do no harm” from the Latin axiom "primum non nόcere." Obviously my buddy and I weren’t oath-sworn doctors, we were just a couple of earnest nature nuts on a wildlife adventure, but the principle is and should be the same for any wildlife observation. Don’t be a dick. Don’t casually, carelessly or selfishly add stress or harm the very thing you’ve come to admire and observe.

Easy enough, right?

Though we were concealed within our little blind, these strutting poets knew we were there, but honestly, didn’t much seem to mind.

And so, I now offer you, belatedly, a few, never-before-shared glimpses of these magnificent ‘prairie dancers,’ captured by a ‘bird-goofy’ kid who’d borrowed his dad’s old, Minolta SLR and a 300mm telephoto lens back in the mid-late, nineteen seventies and then drove half the night to be in just the right place at just the right time. And who, these five decades later, recently copied these Minolta-made slides and Tri-x negatives into digital files with the help of an old slide copier bearing a new Canon mount and an old Nikkor lens that used to belong to another, dear, adventure pal (also named Gary), who left us way too soon and whom I loved like a kid brother.

I look at these pictures from way back when and can still feel the chill of early morning, still smell the sage, still hear the clicking of our cameras, the whispers and giggles of incredulity at the wondrous oddity of these early morning courtships.

Some love affairs manage to last a lifetime.

A pair of competing, “prairie dancers” in faint, early morning light.

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