The

The Hi there. I'm Ellen Weatherford.

And I'm Christian Weatherford.

And this is just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast, where we take your favorite animals and rate them out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics. We are not zoological experts, but we do try our hardest to find the best information we can. I got lots of information on mine this week. Oh, good. Yeah. You ready for this info dump? Yeah. I'm glad you're ready for it because it's my turn to go first this week. And this week I'm talking about the greater sage grouse. Okay. Do you know what a grouse is? Bird? It is a bird. That's right. That's all I got, though. Okay. And this species was submitted by Matthew Johnston via email. Thank you, Matthew. And I wanted to cover this animal now because it's getting close to the springtime, which is when things really start popping off for this bird. Okay. Yeah. So when you start getting into like end of February, early March, this is when things really get dramatic for this bird. So I wanted to

kind of prep people for the oncoming season. Yeah. I'm getting my information from the Cornell

Lab of Ornithology, the National Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy, and the U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service. Awesome.

Yeah.

There's lots of information available out there about these guys.

They're well studied, which made my job quite easy this week.

Yeah, love to see it.

So for people like us who are unfamiliar with this bird because it does not live where we do,

here's a quick little primer on what they are.

Males are up to 30 inches long and about seven pounds. And females are considerably smaller. They're only up to 23 inches long and

four pounds, which is roughly one chicken. Oh, okay. We're back to this. It's an incredibly

apt system of measurement for this bird. They're very analogous to chickens, in fact.

Oh, finally. Yes. So just to provide a little bit of a basic description, they are a squat,

ground-dwelling bird with short stumpy beaks. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service website

describes them as having, and this is a quote from the government, a chunky round

body, which that's pleasant.

That's so nice.

I like it when the government calls things chunky.

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