Hello, tweeters.

Netta and I are in Idaho Falls. We spent the two hours after dawn in a blind east of Dubois, ID, at a Greater Sage-Grouse lek. When we arrived there were >50 Greater Sage-Grouse in front of us in a wide-open field, the closest about 30 feet away. They displayed constantly until a Prairie Falcon came over and scared about half of them away. The others stayed and continued, then another contingent all left at once, apparently spooked by something else. The few females that had been wandering around left at that point. About a dozen males stayed, however, and displayed and walked around for another hour after the sun came up. The sun was behind us, and we took close to 1000 photographs both before and after it rose. The closest birds were only about 50 feet at that point, but with 400 and 500 mm lenses they were close enough. One male walked slowly past right in front of us. With binoculars or scopes, it would have been as if they were in your lap.


We arranged this with Jeff Liday (pronounced LIE-dee), a US Forest Service employee in Dubois (pronounced Doo-BOYSE). Next weekend are Dubois Grouse Days, a bird festival that has been put on for a number of years now. Check it out online if you're at all interested in having such an experience. They can put out a blind for you at a lek and take you to it just before six am. A one- or two-person blind costs $35 for one morning. You have to reserve it in advance.


It's a long trip over there, 11+ hour drive from Seattle on I-90 and I-15, but a four-day trip like ours isn't too exhausting, and I guess you could do it in three days. It was 77? this afternoon and sunny all day. We also visited Camas NWR and Grays Lake NWR, both with lots of birds much like the Burns/Malheur experience. It's still too early in spring for a lot of the common migrant land birds, but they're arriving. One of the really neat things was the great number of Boreal Chorus Frogs calling at most wetlands.


There are lots and lots of breeding cranes. The Franklin's Gulls were especially spectacular today at both refuges, flying around hawking small insects from high in the air to just over the ground. Their plaintive calls were in evidence the entire times we were in the refuges. We saw two Moose, one from I-90 in northern Idaho and the other at Grays Lake refuge.


A close-up sage-grouse lek must be a high point in any birder's experience. We were dazzled by it all.


Dennis Paulson