So. We have entered the "I hate eagles" phase of the strutting season.

Today marked the first run of my standardized lek route in the dunes. All went well, arrived at the first of six strutting grounds on the route before sunrise. 46 cocks and 17 hens, out doing their thing in the sage and rabbitbrush.

As usual, the sun came up when I was somewhere between leks one and two. And all was well at lek two, with 41 males and 26 females out on the damp meadow, the males strutting away.

The omen of bad tidings came as I raced over the sandy hills between leks three and four, and got passed by two sage grouse cocks flying the other way.

This is not good.

And it wasn't.

No grouse at all on the fourth lek. Nor any on the fifth, just over one revegetated sand dune.

Assuming two populations didn't suddenly go extinct, they'd been flushed. Almost certainly by an eagle.

Which means the entire route total will be useless, and I'll have to spend another morning trying to run it again.

And there are never any spare mornings during strutting season.

Plenty of grouse on the sixth and last lek, with 96 cocks and over 50 hens spread out in their basin in the sand hills. But the numbers don't mean much without leks four and five.

To save the morning from a total bust, I raced (Note I said "I"... heeler sisters stayed home to sleep in with the wife.) nine miles further into the dunes, and managed to check another lek before the morning was too far gone.

Twenty-eight cocks still strutting, an hour and a half after sunrise.

'Course, the 13 hens still hanging around probably provided the incentive to stay and strut.

Including these two, who admired each other's style, in between bouts of trying to knock each other unconscious with their wings.

On the way back to the highway, I was surprised at how much my tires sank into the damp earth as I stopped for this shot:

Still a lot of moisture out there in the ground. And, with temperatures over forty degrees (fahrenheit) this morning, there's no opportunity to get in and out over muddy roads that are frozen solid.

As, I suspect, one of the wardens learned this morning, as I listened to him and dispatch trying to reach any one of his neighboring wardens over the radio, going through their call numbers one at a time.

It is what was not said that makes me suspect the calling warden was in need of vehicular assistance.