A sagebrush sea change from behind barbed wire

For some Americans, sagebrush is so ubiquitous it is forgotten — always in the background of the classic Westerns but somehow never looked at.
Until now.

Millions of acres of sagebrush land, managed mostly by the federal government because nobody else originally wanted it, have become a target for the largest, most ambitious habitat conservation effort in American history. The breadth of public-private, federal-local and other cross-management cooperation is so wide, even prison inmates in the West are sowing sagebrush seeds; and they are all doing this to save the greater sage grouse, a bird smaller than a turkey that has become a measuring stick for an entire disappearing ecosystem. 

Before touching down at the airport in Spokane, Washington, I can see sagebrush mingling with the mostly grass fields separating the runways. I came to eastern Washington to visit the largest prison in the state, where a half-dozen inmates have mixed BLM organic materials with scientific education to generate 20,000 growing sagebrush plants in a small courtyard of their medium and minimum security facility.

There are almost two dozen different types of sagebrush ecosystems in 11 western states, between the coastal ranges of the Pacific and the Rocky Mountains. Like Spokane in eastern Washington, the areas are semi-arid, and both cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

Where there is sagebrush, the sage grouse has historically lived. The bird that the Lewis and Clark Expedition called “the Heath Cock or cock of the Plains” once numbered in the several millions, as opposed to the 200,000 estimated today.

Not all Americans—especially those of us flocking towards large cities—know of the sage grouse and its distinctive mating dance that is mimicked in Native American ceremonial dance by all the tribes within the bird’s historic range.

It lives in the sagebrush sea, as it is sometimes referred to by Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, an area so massive it took generations to realize it was evaporating as urbanization, ranching and energy development moved in.

The bird’s sustenance derives from the sagebrush, it hides its eggs underneath it, and every spring, if possible, it returns to the same sagebrush mating ground, or lek. 
Scientists generally have agreed that as the sage grouse goes, so could go the pygmy rabbit, pronghorn elk, golden eagle, mule deer and countless other animals also reliant on the same habitat.

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