Sharp-tailed Grouse of the Pawnee National Grassland
This past Saturday I was up early after (or during, depending on how you want to frame it) a terrible night of sleep, and so I decided to take a drive and look for a target bird I meant to try for last spring: Sharp-tailed Grouse.
Sharp-tailed Grouse are one of the five lekking grouse species found in Colorado. The others are: Greater Prairie-chicken, Lesser Prairie-chicken, Greater Sage-grouse, and Gunnison Sage-grouse. Lekking, for those unfamiliar, is a mating system characterized by males of a species gathering within close proximity on a "lek" to engage in competitive, ritualistic behaviors and displays like dancing/singing in order to entice females to mate.
It's a very interesting behavior to observe, and last year I was fortunate enough to have the time and financial resources to take a Greater Prairie-chicken tour put on by the Wray, Colorado Chamber of Commerce and Colorado Parks and Wildlife. That involved getting up very, very early and sneaking into a big trailer blind at a lek on private ranch land before the male birds arrived in the early-dawn twilight and displayed until about an hour after sunrise.
On Saturday I was not concerned with finding a lek. It's unclear to me if there are any publicly-accessible Sharp-tailed Grouse leks in Weld County anyway, and besides that late February is still probably a touch early for lekking. What I was banking on instead was finding a bird (or birds) observable from the roadside. eBird records for this species indicate that this is very much a possibility this time of year, particularly in the northern reaches of the eastern unit of the Pawnee that are spitting distance from the Wyoming/Nebraska state line, primarily along Weld County Roads 136 and 134.
And so I set out. The drive north from Denver was stereotypically traffic-ridden - even on a Saturday morning before 7 AM. And there are plenty more subdivisions east on Highway 14 between Fort Collins and Ault than I ever imagined there would be. But once you cross Highway 85 and get outside of the Ault town limits, everything falls away seemingly immediately, and you are basically alone, with only the occasional farmer or fellow passer-through to interrupt your solitude.
To get to where I was going I turned left at Briggsdale, and drove past Crow Canyon Campground, still a productive migrant trap and summer birding destination for those coming out to these parts, largely owing to its being the only considerable concentration of tall trees for miles around. As I was making may way from there to Hereford, Colorado, I spotted what my brain thought was a likely candidate for a perched grouse on a powerline next to an old abandoned homestead. I stopped and made a U-turn to get back to the dirt road the powerline bordered. The bird spooked, but after 5 minutes of observing the field it absconded to, it was readily apparent that my "grouse" was actually a pigeon.
I made it to the small farming community of Hereford and kept going east until the blacktop turned into a dirt road. This is where I really began to pay attention, as within a few miles of this changeover is where prime Sharp-tailed Grouse country begins. And I was richly rewarded at the first sign of human habitation I approached. From the windbreak near the corner of roads 136 and 99, a Sharp-tailed Grouse was making its way across the road directly in front of me to an adjoining field. I pulled up to within 20 feet of it, close enough to make an identification (and eye contact to boot), and observed it solidly for what was likely less than 30 seconds, but what felt like 30 minutes. An identifiable chicken, before 9 AM! Chasing targets rarely seems to work this easily. Unfortunately, as I reached behind my seat to where my camera was stowed, the bird bolted and took off flapping into the field, soaring over to tall cover about 100 yards away to disappear from sight.
I got out of the car and scanned the landscape, looking for sign of the bird with no luck. I did hear the ubiquitous cheeps of Horned Larks from all directions, and as I got ready to go after a few minutes (it was cold and very windy, pretty typical Pawnee weather from my experience), a Merlin soared into the trees from the east.
I had a choice to make - to turn around having "made" my bird, or to keep seeking more. I decided since it was early to keep going and maybe run into a few more grouse. That was not to be. Aside from many Northern Harriers, many many more Horned Larks, and some surprise Mountain Bluebirds, I didn't see much at all besides the wide expanse of shortgrass prairie and ag fields, and the massively tall windmills on the wind farm out there.
A passing impression about those windmills: The wind farm made me feel as conflicted as ever about our society's search for "renewable energy." Undoubtedly such farms help us to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, which is something we undeniably and demonstrably need to do. But wind farms from an aesthetic consideration are just as ugly as the smokestacks of a coal plant, and I think carry the same message about our concern for the landscape. They are a true visual blight on the prairie out here, but the prairie as a landscape in itself has never figured very highly in anyone's estimation of value since the before days of the Homestead Act. It's a paradoxical feeling to have, but it's one that's very real. I hope we can move toward a future where the "intangible" values of our natural environments are accounted for. As things stand, it feels that if we ever do, it won't be soon.