Sage Grouse

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is one of my favorite places and I stopped there as my last waystation at the end of my late winter/early spring trip.  One of the primary reasons for the timing of the trip was to try to catch the Sage Grouse on their lek.  The timing ended up being reasonable and they were displaying the morning I managed to get there.  This lek is unfortunately a bare remnant of what it used to be.  There was a fire several years ago and it takes quite a while for the sage to recover.  When I was there, there were five males and I only saw one female.  One woman I met there said when she was a youngster there were literally hundreds of males on the lek.  The sage is coming back and there aren't many roads around, so hopefully the lek will increase again. 

This was my first experience with any kind of a lek and I stayed until the last bird left utterly fascinated by the show.  The light wasn't the greatest and they were further from the road than made for really great photography (and luckily people were being sensible and staying in their vehicles).  I guess that's by way of being an apology for the quality of this image and my failure to capture the magnificence of this bird.  But it (and the other 1500 or so images)  still bring back the memories.

7D2, 500mm f4 ISL + 2.0TC, beanbag on truck window, f/8, 1/1250, iso 1250, center weighted average metering, aperture priority, +1/3 EV.  Processed in LR5 & CS6.  Cropped to 8.1 Mpixels before resizing.  Taken March 21, 2015 at 7:34 AM.

Thanks for looking,