By Alison and Justin Brown
As we watch, the scene in a singles club unfolds. Males strut confidently. Fights break out, fueled by testosterone and the scarcity of females. Indeed, males outnumber females 5:1 here. You may be thinking that you would never set foot in this club and you would be right. Here, the dance floor is reserved for sage grouse. Suddenly, we catch a quick motion. The pairing between one of the hopeful males and stoic females has occurred. It lasts just seconds leaving the female fluffing her feathers, shaking off the encounter. She came to this club for the sole purpose of mating and it is done.
This experience is part of a field trip hosted by HFWA. We are joined by two local sage grouse experts including Tim Swearingen, Regional Biologist for the IDFG Upper Snake Region and Caitlyn Wanner, whose graduate work focused on sage grouse. The scientific term for the behavior that we witness is lekking. The dance floor, usually set in a large open area, is a lek. While lekking, optimistic males splay sharp tail feathers while strutting in circles. Balloon-like air sacs on their necks inflate and rapidly deflate producing an otherworldly layering of sounds resembling a metal saw blade being flexed rapidly punctuated by popping.
Over breakfast at El Jaliciense in St. Anthony our group chats with Swearingen and Wanner. We learn that lekking starts in March and continues into May. Since the field trip occurred mid-April, many females had already visited the lek and moved on to tending nests. This explains the overabundance of males that we observed. The female takes sole responsibility for the fate of her offspring. In a nest built under sagebrush she lays 6-8 eggs over so many days, incubates them for 25 days, and then guides her chicks to food.
Sage grouse require sagebrush and native herbaceous vegetation for feeding, breeding, nesting, and protection from predators. Fortunately, the Sand Creek Desert, where this lek is located, has some of the highest quality sagebrush habitat in Idaho and supports a healthy sage grouse population. Even so, risks remain. Loss of quality habitat can slowly creep in with invasive species (e.g. cheatgrass), overgrazing, development, unauthorized roads, and increased predation.
The Sand Creek Desert is also an important winter habitat for elk, deer, and moose and is home to roughly 170 bird species and 30 mammal species. Despite the patchwork of land ownership that characterizes the area, private landowners, IDFG, and BLM work collaboratively to preserve this land so vital to maintaining the wildlife populations that we enjoy in Island Park and we thank them for it.