Before the sun clears the Ruby Mountains, on a bare rise in the sagebrush east of the range, the birds are already at it. Male greater sage grouse — big, chicken-shaped, mottled the exact gray-green of the brush they stand in — gather on the same open ground their ancestors used, fan their spiked tail feathers into a wheel, and puff their chests until two yellow air sacs swell out of a white ruff and collapse with a deep, liquid pop that carries half a mile across the cold. The hens pick their way through, mostly unimpressed. This is a lek, a dancing ground, and it runs at dawn for weeks every spring. It is the strangest wildlife spectacle in the Great Basin — and it happens in the part of Nevada that everyone agrees is empty.
The sea, not the islands
Nevada gets told as an archipelago: a few hundred mountain ranges standing up like islands of forest and snow, each a pocket of life stranded in a dead sagebrush sea. Half of that is right. The ranges are islands. But the sea is neither water nor dead — it is the sagebrush steppe, the largest continuous ecosystem left in the Lower 48, a silver-gray expanse of shrub that once spread across some three hundred million acres from the eastern Sierra to the Dakotas. From the window of a car on I-80 it reads as three hundred miles of nothing. Walk into it and the nothing resolves into a community as intricate as a reef: big sagebrush and bunchgrass, wild buckwheat and paintbrush, and more than three hundred and fifty kinds of animal that live in it and largely nowhere else. The sage is the keystone — bitter, aromatic, evergreen — and it holds the whole thing together.
The bird that measures it
The sage grouse is how you take the sea's temperature. It is a sagebrush obligate in the fullest sense: it shelters under sagebrush, nests under sagebrush, and through the long Great Basin winter eats almost nothing but sagebrush leaves, which nearly nothing else can stomach. Because it needs large unbroken country to get through its year, biologists treat it as an umbrella — keep enough good sage for the grouse and you keep it for the pronghorn and the mule deer, the pygmy rabbit and the Brewer's sparrow, the whole cast of the steppe. The basins of Cowboy Country are core range: the sage flats around Elko, the long aprons below the Ruby Mountains, the brush above the marsh at Ruby Lake where the grouse drum while the ducks get all the attention. This is the wild heart of the cattle country, the part the cowboy poetry leaves out — not the herds, but the bird that has danced on these grounds since before the herds, the trails, or the state.
What the sea is losing
Here the honest part. The sagebrush sea is now reckoned one of the most imperiled ecosystems in North America — roughly half of it already gone, and something like one and a third million acres more vanishing every year. The grouse track the loss exactly: their numbers are down about eighty percent since 1965, and half of that fall has come just since 2002. Where sixteen million birds may once have strutted, the entire western range now holds somewhere between two and five hundred thousand. In the Great Basin the engine of the loss is a grass. Cheatgrass, an invasive annual, cures to tinder by June, carries fire farther and hotter than sagebrush ever evolved to survive, and then seizes the burn before the slow shrub can return — so every fire loads the next one. More than a fifth of the region's best grouse habitat has burned since 2000. Sagebrush does not grow back on a human schedule; a sea that burns can stay burned for a lifetime.
Still dancing
In 2015 the federal government decided the greater sage grouse did not warrant a place on the Endangered Species list — a decision resting not on the bird's recovery but on an unprecedented truce, states and ranchers and agencies and tribes all agreeing to manage the range so the listing would not be needed. It was a bet that voluntary care could hold a continent's worth of habitat together, and it is still being tested, nowhere more than in Nevada, which holds much of what is left. The oldest knowledge here is the plainest answer to the word empty. Long before the country had a map, the Newe — the Western Shoshone — read this steppe as a homeland thick with meaning, the sage a medicine and a material, the springs themselves alive. They never once mistook it for nothing.
Go see the dance before you decide what the basin is worth. Find a lek at the end of April, park well back in the dark, and wait. The booming starts before the light does — a hollow, rolling sound, like water dropped down a deep well — out over a country that looked, from the highway, as though it held nothing at all. It holds this. Whether it goes on holding it is one of the open questions of the American West.