Greater sage grouse Courtesy of wiki

Sagebrush Sea – The “Big Empty,” an area once 500,000  square miles across North America –is actually teeming with life, including the remarkable Greater Sage-Grouse, a bird that performs a fantastical, chest-puffing mating display, with remarkable plumage designed for courtship. The biodiversity of this remarkable landscape includes eagles and antelope, badgers and lizards, rabbits, wrens, owls, prairie dogs, songbirds, hawks and migrating birds.  And it is steeply threatened from proposed oil and gas development.  Cornell Lab of Ornithology Lab took three years to produce this documentary distributed on PBS’s Nature series.

Greater Sage-Grouse Courtesy of Audubon.org

Use this link for trailer, see the full PBS Nature show (53 minutes),  overview article, photo gallery and more

Read Last Grouse Standing an online article 

Learn more about the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Greater Sage-Grouse Copyright Gerrit Vyn