Photo © Gerrit Vyn

What will you be doing this Wednesday 5/20 at 8pm EDT? If you’re in the United States and have a television, you should consider watching a PBS Nature documentary on the Greater Sage-Grouse (male in mating display pictured left) and other wildlife members of the vast community that lives in the sagebrush plains that span eleven western states and hundreds of thousands of miles. Titled “The Sagebrush Sea,” the film is the first of its type shot and produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and it promises to be quite entertaining and educational about this vast and daunting landscape. A friend who was in one of my freshman-year classes at Cornell has been helping out in the editing room as an employee at the Lab this spring, and he tells me that its been a really rewarding experience. Just from watching the trailer below you can see why!

You can check out the PBS Nature schedule webpage to see when the broadcast will air on your local station. The Lab of Ornithology has its own promotional site for the documentary, which you can visit here, and there’s also a Facebook page with fun videos of the great empty’s denizens that you can check out and Like. Krishna Ramanujan has also written up a piece about the film for the Cornell Chronicle, which I’ll excerpt here:

Conservationists, land managers and policymakers are seeking to protect the greater sage-grouse and its habitat – 165 million acres over 11 western states – while also meeting the needs of ranchers, miners, energy developers and others who rely on high desert sagebrush development for their livelihoods.

With courts poised to decide by the end of 2015 whether to protect the greater sage-grouse and restrict development on sagebrush lands, responsible sides are discussing ways to improve the sustainability of ranching, cluster energy development in areas with low-quality land and restore sagebrush habitat in key areas.

Now, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has made a 50-minute documentary on the birds and other denizens of the sagebrush land, as well as the tough compromises ahead.

The wildlife documentary, “The Sagebrush Sea” – the first broadcast film produced by the lab – will air on PBS Nature May 20 at 8 p.m. EDT.

“The film is a year in the life of the sagebrush and seen through the eyes of its most emblematic species, the greater sage-grouse,” said Marc Dantzker, a producer in the lab’s multimedia group.

Photo © Lab of Ornithology

Dantzker, who studied the sage-grouse as part of his doctoral program at University of California, San Diego, produced the documentary.

“Many of the people who live nearby, certainly in the urban centers across the west, don’t know what’s around them in these wide-open spaces,” Dantzker said. “It is such a big country, and you don’t see much [wildlife] unless you get away from people.”

The population of the greater sage-grouse once totaled as many as 16 million but now may be as few as 200,000. They have been studied for their elaborate courtship displays, in which as many as 100 males may congregate to strut and plump plumage and special air sacs in their necks to woo females, said Dantzker. In the end, only a few males get to mate and pass on their genes. The males’ lifespan is only four years, while females live a few years longer.

Read the rest of Ramanujan’s article covering “The Sagebrush Sea.”