There are numerous petitions out there now, legally filed to have the sage grouse listed as a threatened or endangered species. When the time comes, that decision will be made by bureaucrats and administrators. But they will base their decision upon the professional expertise of about only a dozen highly qualified wildlifers.

So, when four of that dozen call you up and mention they are traveling through your country, en route to a conference, and ask if you would have time to show them some of your grouse country, and the problems arising from gas fields and coalbed methane development, well, you make the time.

That it allows you to stop in and visit a neglected benchmark along the way, that isn't in anybody's database anymore...

Well, that's a good thing.

And when, after a long afternoon and evening of driving dusty roads looking at leks and wells, you find yourself up in the aspen country at sunset...

Well, that's a good thing.

And you find yourself invited to stay for dinner, cooked by lamplight in this makeshift camp thrown up in ten minutes, not 200 meters from seven sage grouse...

Well, that's a good thing.

When you find your dinner is not the usual traveling camp fare, but instead a gourmet-prepared repast of smoked salmon (wild-caught this week), fried red peppers and some sort of potato-based pasta with a name I had never heard and cannot pronounce...

Well, that's a good thing, too.

And when you don't get home until almost eleven that night, after a nearly hour-long drive in the dark on back roads, having spent the day discussing and arguing grouse, graciously declining their offer to stay the night, and accepting all their compliments on your well-behaved heelers, that's okay.

All in all, a good Monday.