A hundred years ago, sixteen million Sage Grouse danced their elaborate, fascinating courtship dance across the sagebrush sea of the western states. Today, 98 percent of these wonderful birds are gone.

America’s largest grouse, the Greater Sage Grouse, is a gentle, sensitive bird who lives among the sagebrush; a bird who, like its distant cousins; chickens, peacocks, turkeys, quail, and pheasants, lives and feeds on the ground and cannot fly more than very short distances.

The Sage Grouse and their habitat are severely threatened. This is the story of just one of these threats. As the Sage Grouse goes, so goes the west as we know it. Throughout the western states a similar pattern is being repeated, time and time again, of pressures at work to develop or industrialize wild, natural lands – an inexorable force that seems bent on turning the great open regions of the west into industrial…