Sage Grouse: Icon of the West

Kathy Such Love ’72's intimate portrait of a fascinating bird.

If you don’t have the wherewithal to travel to the Great Basin region of the United States, wake before dawn, and make your way to a camouflaged blind to watch the spectacularly bizarre courtship dance of the sage grouse in person, the next best thing might be to spend some time with a new book by natural history writer Kathy Such Love ’72 and photographer Noppadol Paothong, Sage Grouse: Icon of the West. The exotic-looking sage grouse, with its brindled feathers, white ruff, and peculiar olive-colored air sacs that inflate and deflate audibly during its elaborate courtship ritual, lives in the intermountain West in a vast, but threatened area known as the Sagebrush Sea.

The gorgeous photography alone will disabuse any notion that this wide, flat country is monochromatic or dull, and the narrative of natural history that Love tells in these pages sparks an affection for these peculiar, imperiled creatures. 

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