the quiet wild: the barrens, the birds, and the stillness that shapes them both
Video highlights of sharp-tailed grouse dancing on their lek in northwestern Wisconsin. Sound on to hear their drumming and calls.
It started with a thin seam of coral stitched low along the horizon, where the pines stood like old fence posts leaning into the wind, dark and weathered against the incoming light. By the time I was settled into the blind, that ember had flared into something magnificent—rose and amber and the faintest wash of violet melting over the barrens. This wasn’t the backdrop to a day. It was the day—unfolding with the quiet authority of something that had always known it would return.
The land here in northwestern Wisconsin—these oak and pine barrens—isn’t what most people think of when they picture beauty. It asks something of you first. There are no jagged peaks or alpine drama. No cinematic waterfalls or towering forests. Instead, it is a beauty born of openness: the sway of little bluestem, the silvery rattle of dried hazel, the knotted arms of bur oaks twisting toward the sun. This is a place shaped not by excess, but by restraint.
What most people don’t realize about this stretch of northwestern Wisconsin is that it was once the bottom of a lake.
Roughly 22,000 years ago, a glacier heavy as a mountain sat on this land. As it advanced and retreated, it carved through stone and spilled meltwater across the earth, leaving behind a broad basin known as Glacial Lake Grantsburg. When that lake drained, it left something remarkable in its wake: deep sandy soils, stretching in some places for hundreds of feet beneath the surface. The land left behind was poor for farming and hard for settlement, but perfect for a different kind of life.
The bur oaks have learned to live with it. The jack pines lean into it. The grasses, the lupine, the wildflowers—all of it depends on that cycle of renewal. And so does the bird I came here to see.
The first sharp-tailed grouse arrived. Then another. And then yet another. They came on soft wings, low to the ground, their barred feathers mottled perfectly against the pale grass. You could blink and miss them—until they begin to dance.
Their feet strike the earth with a staccato rhythm, tails cocked like fans, wings held wide. They puff their air sacs, emit a low and strange hooting call that seems pulled from the roots of the prairie. They spin, spar, and posture with an urgency that is both ritual and survival.
I had come to photograph. But the sight of it—the wild precision, the persistence—struck me hard. The tears came slowly, unbidden. Not sadness. Not even joy. Just a release of wonder too big to hold.
Most people will never see this dance. And the truth is, most people don’t even know these birds are here. But the sharp-tailed grouse are more than performers on a spring morning stage. They are ecological barometers. Indicator species. If they vanish, it is not only their absence we will mourn—but the loss of a very specific, very rare type of wildness.
These birds need this habitat: open barrens shaped by fire, held in balance between forest and prairie. Too much canopy, and they disappear. Too much fragmentation, and the leks—their traditional dancing grounds—fall silent.
These birds aren’t just dancers. They are indicators. Where sharp-tailed grouse thrive, it means the land is healthy—that the balance is intact, that the fires have come as they should, that the plant communities are rich with variety and space. They help spread seeds. They feed foxes, raptors, coyotes. They knit themselves into the web of the barrens in quiet ways. And they are slipping from us.
Less than one percent of Wisconsin’s original pine and oak barrens remain. The rest has been swallowed by timber and plow. Without these fire-kissed grasslands, the sharp-tail’s lineage—a lineage that predates statehood, that coexisted with bison and Indigenous fire regimes—will slip away.
We’ve already seen the warning. The greater sage-grouse, once abundant across the western landscape, now clings to survival. Habitat loss, energy development, and fire suppression have pushed that species to the edge. And while the sharp-tailed grouse isn’t there yet, we are close enough to feel that edge beneath our feet.
This is what is at stake.
And it isn’t only the birds. The barrens themselves are vital pieces in the great ecological mosaic of North America. They connect prairies to forests, shelter countless plant and insect species, and hold a cultural memory of fire and openness that shaped both wildlife and people. These landscapes may not offer postcard grandeur, but they offer something older and more necessary: space for balance. Space for return.
On my walk back to the car, the sun was fully up, casting long gold across the waving grass. In the sandy soil, I noticed two sets of tracks. One was deer—slender, tentative, drifting. The other, unmistakably, was wolf. No blood. No sign of struggle. Just two lives passing through the same space, as they have for centuries, in the silence of the early morning.
It reminded me, as it always does, that the wild isn’t some far-off place. It isn’t “out there.” It is here, if you know how to look. And even though these wild spaces are the walls of my office—things, that as a working wildlife photographer, I see daily, carrying them home on memory cards and mud-caked boots—I am no less awed. If anything, the repetition deepens it. The more I see, the more miraculous it feels. And the more urgent it becomes to protect what remains.
Because we only save what we love.
To love this place—these overlooked, open, wind-brushed barrens—is to understand that wildness doesn’t always shout. Sometimes, it whispers. It dances before dawn. It asks you to kneel in the grass and listen. And sometimes, it asks you to quietly dance along with it at dawn.