Birders are...

Birders are a strange lot. They get up before dawn and go tramping about while it’s still cold and dark outside. Not the sort of thing we’d normally do. We’re not morning people.

Except this morning. Up at 4am. Out of the house by 4:30. At the Gunnison Sage Grouse lek by 5. Park behind the half-wall. Engine off, lights out, don’t leave the car. Blackout and silence. Grouse lek protocol. Its thirty degrees outside. No-one gets to move or make a sound until the grouse leave the lek. They are most active in the hour before dawn. They are disturbed by artificial light and human presence. The males come out of the sagebrush and congregate on the lek, the dancing ground, the bare patch of earth, and do their puffing booming strutting dance. The most impressive males get the females.

The display was a long way away, probably three hundred yards, but we have good birding binoculars and a scope we could rest against the partly open window. We got the whole show. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then suddenly at 5:45 a whole group of males broke out in the open in the dimmest light and began their strutting. Dancing shadows. The performance got clearer as it got lighter. Puffed up chests, flared tails, bulging air sacs, dancing fools. Suddenly, at 6:15 it was over. The birds just flew away to the sage highlands. Done for the day. They will be done for the season soon. Breeding season only lasts six weeks. They’ll be done by mid-May.

A life bird. The Gunnison Sage Grouse. Very limited range; a tiny spot in Colorado. Not many people get to see them, maybe a few hundred a year. When we were sure Elvis had left the building, we started up, warmed up, and left. Back to the coach by seven. Gone from Gunnison by nine, at the Russell Stover Candy Factory Store in Montrose by eleven, and set-up in Ridgway State Park eating lunch by noon.