One of the American West’s Most Iconic Birds Is Attempting to Mate Near a Dangerous Airport. Could Robo-Birds Help Save Them?
Conservationists are deploying dancing animatronic birds to lure male greater sage grouse away from the Jackson Hole Airport, where dozens of the creatures have been struck and killed by planes
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Scientists are enlisting robots to help conserve one of the most beloved birds in the American West.
At Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, experts have deployed two dancing robotic birds meant to replicate the elaborate courtship displays of male greater sage grouse. They hope the boogeying decoys will attract amorous bachelors to a new, safer mating dance site—known as a lek—located inside the park.
If all goes as planned, the mechanical birds will lure the males away from their usual lek at the end of the runway at Jackson Hole Airport, the only commercial airport located within the bounds of a national park.
Males have been flocking to the wide, flat airport lek every spring since at least 1945, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide’s Christina MacIntosh. But with air traffic increasing, the site has become hazardous to the birds: Between 1990 and 2013, 32 greater sage grouse were killed by planes near the runway, according to a social media post by the park.
“Shifting bird activity away from the runway is an important outcome for both wildlife conservation and public safety,” Emily Davis, a spokesperson for Grand Teton National Park, writes in an email to SF Gate’s Kylie Mohr.
Officials have been encouraging males to relocate to a 100-acre reclaimed homestead known as the McBride site. It’s situated between the airport and the National Elk Refuge, where many of the birds spend the winter, per the Jackson Hole News & Guide. Experts have spent the past eight years transforming the plot by painstakingly removing a non-native grass called smooth brome and replacing it with grouse-friendly plants.
They hope the birds will not only perform their courtship rituals there in the spring but also build their nests and rear their young there during the summer months. However, “one of the challenges with restoration is that even when you create great habitat, wildlife doesn’t always show up right away,” Davis tells SF Gate.
Last year, officials tried using four handmade papier-mâché decoys to attract males to the site. But the project ended up a flop. Within two weeks of their installation, the replicas had been destroyed by rain, elk or coyotes, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide.
This year, officials are trying a sturdier approach. To develop the robotic birds, Grand Teton National Park teamed up with the Teton Raptor Center and the Jackson Hole High School RoboBroncs robotics team, among other partners. They installed the decoys at the McBride site in late March, in anticipation of the birds’ annual spring mating season, which can run through May.
The high-tech birds sit on stakes and run on solar-powered car batteries. They’re made from custom plastic shells, 3D-printed heads, foam from HelloFresh meal kits, fuzzy T.J. Maxx blankets and real feathers provided by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
“It’s kind of a Frankenbird,” Gary Duquette, who coaches the high school robotics team, tells WyoFile’s Angus M. Thuermer Jr.
The robo-birds are programmed to dance every morning from 5 to 9 a.m. to the tune of recorded bird calls, which are played from speakers camouflaged as rocks, per the Jackson Hole News & Guide. The animatronic decoys perform choreography that’s meant to mimic the eye-catching shows real males put on to impress females.
“[They] kind of do a turn, turn, turn, then do their wing, wing, wing,” Duquette tells WyoFile.
In addition to the pair of robotic birds, experts also installed two stationary males and one stationary hen at the McBride site. They also set up a trail camera to record during the breeding season.
Only time will tell if the robots, stationary decoys and recorded bird calls successfully attract the birds to the McBride site this spring and beyond. Officials say it will probably take a few years to know whether they have permanently relocated.
“It’s still a long-term play,” Bryan Bedrosian, conservation director for the Teton Raptor Center, tells the Jackson Hole News & Guide.
Greater sage grouse, which are roughly the size of chickens and the largest grouse species in the Americas, were once abundant on the sagebrush steppe of the western United States and Canada. However, the species has suffered in recent decades, primarily due to human activity. The population appears to be shrinking because of habitat loss, climate change, noise pollution and other disturbances, especially near their leks.
Quick fact: Decreasing population
Across their broader American West range, the greater sage grouse has declined by 80 percent since 1965, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
In Jackson Hole, the population has largely declined in recent years, from 180 males in 2015 to 40 males in 2019, reported the Jackson Hole News & Guide’s Billy Arnold in 2023. However, the birds appeared to rebound in 2023, when officials counted 90 males.
The 2025 tally was 88 males, per the Jackson Hole News & Guide’s MacIntosh, and this year’s count is slated to begin soon.
The number of grouse visiting the Jackson Hole Airport lek has also decreased over time. Last spring, just three males showed up to strut their stuff near the runway, per WyoFile. But officials aren’t sure whether the birds are dying or simply relocating to the other seven leks in the region.
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