I went out with a greater sage grouse biologist and saw some 70 males performing courtship dances at dawn on a mesa in northwestern Wyoming. I had put out a remote camera on the site the day before, and one of the males walked up to it and saw his reflection in the camera's glass front. He thought his reflection was a rival male, so he started performing just a foot away from the camera. This made for a couple of nice photos, one of which is running in the magazine (see page 108.)
It was incredible to get up into the air over some of these drilling fields and see how much drilling activity has affected the land. For example, the Rowan Plateau in Colorado and Jonah Field in Wyoming were once wide open spaces. They're now a web of drilling paths and corridors that will never be the same. I guess everything changes, but it's a sad time when we trade wild places for cheap energy.
In sagebrush country water has always been a precious ally to ranchers, but it can be an enemy to the drilling companies if there's gas trapped underneath it. I actually visited a ranch in Wyoming where a drilling company was spraying more than a million barrels of water out into the air each day just so they could get to the gas.
