At least an hour before dawn, birders start to arrive at a remote site seven miles southeast of the tiny town of Parlin, in southwestern Colorado. Bundled up against the cold, the visitors unload spotting scopes, binoculars, cameras with bulky zoom lenses, and steaming thermoses of coffee. They are cautioned to shut car doors as slowly and quietly as possible and to avoid making any other noises that could spook the birds. For a few weeks every spring, usually in late March and early April, this quarter-acre patch of sagebrush is open to those who make the trek—about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Denver—to watch one of the strangest and most captivating wildlife displays in North America: the mating dance of the Gunnison sage-grouse.

For a while, the darkness and the silence are total. “Then you start to hear them, even before you can see them,” says Kathy Griffin, who, as grouse conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, has witnessed the spectacle many times. “It sounds a little like popcorn.” Pop, pop, pop: That’s the sound of a male sage-grouse repeatedly inflating large yellow air sacs on his chest like balloons, thrusting his body forward, up, and down. The air sacs are framed by poofy white feathers, and the bird’s spiky, brown-and-white tailfeathers fan out dramatically in the back. If you think a peacock is gaudy, then you’ve never seen a sage-grouse. The overall effect is ostentatious and over-the-top ridiculous, like a fashionista trying a little too hard (“It’s giving Kim Kardashian vibes,” one of my colleagues said upon seeing a photo).

Female grouse gather to watch the show before picking just a few of the most impressive males with which to do the deed. If all goes well—and it often doesn’t, with hungry predators like coyotes and ravens on the prowl—the eggs will hatch about a month after they’re laid.

An average of 17 males at a time strut across each sagebrush lek, or mating ground, though one particularly popular lek has more than a hundred males. (Female Gunnison sage-grouse outnumber males almost two to one.) Once found across the West, the population has shrunk along with thousands of acres of vanished sagebrush habitat. Ninety percent of the bird’s native territory is gone, according to the Audubon Society. Now fewer than 4,000 Gunnison sage-grouse remain in just a few patches of southwestern Colorado, plus a handful of birds in Utah. And the grouse’s future may be grim, say the scientists and activists who are fighting to protect it—especially if the Trump administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service succeeds in its attempt to defang the Endangered Species Act.

Gunnison sage-grouse once may have numbered in the tens of thousands. “There’s an article from 1894 in the Salt Lake City newspaper by a guy who shot 860 sage-grouse in a single afternoon,” says Patrick Magee, a professor of biology at Western Colorado University. “That’s more than the total high count of all males in the population today. So you can imagine how abundant they were.”

The birds can survive only in the sagebrush steppe ecosystem; the prickly plant is their primary source of food. As settlers expanded across the West throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, much of the sagebrush was replaced by other grasses preferable for cattle grazing, as well as paved over for roads, homes, and buildings. Together with overhunting and, more recently, the proliferation of invasive species like cheatgrass, which outcompetes sagebrush, sage-grouse have been pushed to the brink.

That goes for both the Gunnison variety and its more numerous, larger cousin, the greater sage-grouse; the two species are closely related and almost indistinguishable to the untrained eye. The Gunnison sage-grouse was not recognized as a separate species until 2000, making it the first new American bird to be described in a century. It was found to be in trouble almost as soon as it was identified, and in 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as a threatened species. (Colorado wildlife advocates have also long sought, unsuccessfully, to have the greater sage-grouse listed as threatened.) The birds live in eight genetically isolated populations, and that population estimate of 4,000 individuals is “generous,” says Magee.

Read More: How the Greater Sage-Grouse Became Colorado’s Most Contentious Animal

“The numbers fluctuate, but the overall trend is definitely negative,” Griffin says, noting that the sage-grouse is an indicator species, or one whose survival is a bellwether for the health of its ecosystem as a whole. “Instead of the canary in the coal mine, they’re the chicken in the sage.” If sage-grouse vanish, so, too, may the other interconnected species that depend on the sagebrush steppe to survive, such as sagebrush sparrows and pygmy rabbits.

Enter the Trump administration, which announced last month that it plans to reinterpret the Endangered Species Act. (Members of the public have until May 19 to comment on the proposal; more than 173,000 people have done so thus far.) By changing the way “harm” is defined in the act, the Fish and Wildlife Service would make it legal to do everything short of directly killing or collecting a listed animal, allowing for construction and industrial development previously off-limits on critical habitat. The recent move contradicts a 1995 U.S. Supreme Court ruling and is all but certain to lead to a legal battle. Activists have vowed to fight back via lawsuits, saying that weakening the Endangered Species Act in this way could have catastrophic consequences for hundreds of at-risk species.

“It’s absurd to say that you can destroy the habitat a species needs to survive,” says Randi Spivak, public lands policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that protects endangered species, often through legal action. “Just on the face of it, it’s nonsensical, and it will be challenged. We will go to the mat for this beautiful bird.… This could absolutely be a death knell for the Gunnison sage-grouse and for many listed species. It’s enormously worrying for everyone who loves public land and wildlife.”

Even if the move is quickly blocked, it could still do long-lasting damage in a short period of time, Griffin says. “It’s very, very difficult to restore sagebrush habitat,” she says. “It’s kind of like an old-growth forest, and our restoration efforts aren’t at all guaranteed to work. So the damage is essentially permanent. Where are the birds going to go? I’ve done this work for 14 years, and I cry at night sometimes. How is this species going to stay on the landscape?”

Two male Gunnison sage-grouse fight on a lek during mating season. Photo by Dave Showalter / Courtesy Colorado Parks & Wildlife

With the federal government weakening protections for endangered species, could Colorado step up to strengthen sage-grouse conservation on the state level? It’s possible, but perhaps unlikely, in part because of an inconvenient political truth: sagebrush habitat, which is flat and sunny, is often desirable for building solar and wind farms, and the state has aggressive goals to increase its renewable energy production. “Sage-grouse hate tall structures,” which provide perches for predators, Griffin says. “That could be conifers, a fence, a power line, or solar panels. If you put any of those up, it’s no longer usable habitat.” Habitat loss over time is by far the biggest factor that has pushed sage-grouse to the brink, but it doesn’t help that invasive species, climate change, and potentially renewable energy development are all contributing too.

Magee argues that, while some harm to wildlife from the construction of solar and wind farms is inevitable and acceptable as part of the energy transition, it shouldn’t be hard to avoid building these facilities on Gunnison sage-grouse’s most important habitat, in part because they already occupy relatively few acres. “Certainly you shouldn’t put solar on top of a lek, or critical brood habitat,” he says. “That would be horrible. But there are probably areas where the impact could be minimal.”

Could the Gunnison sage-grouse soon go extinct? “I’m hopeful that it won’t. We’re doing everything we can,” Magee says, noting that climate change, which brings more frequent and severe drought and wildfire, poses another existential threat to the species. He compares the sage-grouse to the cautionary tale of the heath hen, a subspecies of greater prairie chicken that lived on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. By 1908, habitat loss and overhunting had caused its numbers to dwindle to about 50 birds; after a refuge was created, the population rebounded to 2,000 individuals, and the hen seemed poised to make a comeback. Then a string of bad luck, including a fire, a harsh winter, and increased predation by goshawks, led to the bird’s extinction by 1932.

Any animal with a similarly dwindling population, as with the 4,000 or fewer Gunnison sage-grouse, could potentially befall a similar fate, Magee says: “When you have so few birds left on the planet, and these are the threats you’re facing, I don’t know when it’s a better time to sound the alarm.”