The battle scars from the fight between conserving North America’s western lands and extracting resources from it are being inflicted on the greater sage grouse — less than 10 percent of the chest-inflating, whistle popping bird’s population remains.

The drought-resistant sagebrush shrub that feeds and shelters the sage grouse birds has been in retreat from massive overgrazing, development for oil and gas, and invasion by non-native grasses susceptible to wildfire.

“Roads and subdivisions, transmission lines, farms, gas fields, and wind turbines—all disrupt what was once an unbroken sea of sage,” National Geographic reports.

Compared to other species, the sage grouse hasn’t been able to adapt to these environmental shifts. The birds are known for running into fences, standing in the middle of busy roads, and for sticking to the same nests to perform their mating dance amongst bulldozers and flaring gas wells.

In 2019, the Trump administration prioritized oil and gas leasing over habit conservation, which would have rolled back protections from the Obama administration’s conservation strategy for the bird, impacting Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California and Oregon.

“Protecting the greater sage grouse species, which has been on the decline since at least the 1990s, has been viewed as a means of preserving the whole array of plants and animals that coexist as part of this habitat type,” The Spectrum reports.

Trump administration’s plans were blocked in court, and environmentalists don’t expect the Biden administration would allow the easing of rules on mining, drilling, and grazing, which could further harm the threatened species.