The 2011 sage-grouse breeding season now moved from a general descriptor of birds attending leks to a specific statement of an action: we had our first matings today! There were a lot of females on the lek early in the morning, and while they were hanging out with the males, none were giving a solicitation display. When females are ready to mate, they drop and spread their wings, and lower their body.

It seems like at least an hour had gone by, and the females were still just milling around, when I caught sight of a soliciting female across the lek from my blind. Male #404 (code-name Sargent Clusterbutt- we’re naming our males to help remember their buttprint pattern), was the lucky guy, and became the first male to copulate this year, at least that we’ve seen.

For reference, our previous “first of” dates ranged from 18 March 2007 to 21 March 2008 to 30 March 2006. We’re pretty much in the middle here. In some ways this isn’t too surprising given that we’ve had pretty nice (although windy) weather for the past couple of weeks. But to go from single digit birds less than 2 weeks ago to full-on breeding is still pretty amazing to me.

Speaking of tail feather patterns, although this guy looks pretty good from the front…


He won’t be too hard to recognize when he’s turned around!

It took all afternoon, but we now have one lek ready for recording. Preacher Lek is relatively compact, so made it easy to surround the main display area with mics. The only tricky aspect was that we had moved the observation blind from the lek itself to a nearby hill. This meant we needed a lot more cable. We decided to try something new- rather than using single lengths, we plugged one cable into another to help span the distance.

Unfortunately it isn’t as simple as unspooling the cables. Sage-grouse, like some other birds, show an aversion to snake-like objects. We have to bury the cables under the lek surface. This involves a lot of work with picks and shovels.







Erin took a break from the cables to start clearing some of last year’s cowpies off the lek.



It all went relatively smoothly except for ooonnnneee little cable that someone layed out backwards. It was a long day, especially after fixing that one mistake, but nice to get that checked off the list!

We have a few local hikes we like to do in the Lander area- one of our favorites is to an easement we call Red Rocks (not to be confused with Red Rock Canyon). This is an area with wind-blown rock formations and sweeping views of tall bluffs and the east face of the winds. It was a beautiful Wednesday afternoon before heading to dinner at the Lander Bar.

In our past seasons, the Monument Lek grid of survey stakes was one of the first things we set up once our camp was in order. The grid often went in as early as March 5. This year we put Monument off to the end since it seemed to be taking the longest to stabilize in terms of how many birds were coming and where they were displaying. Yesterday we finally loaded up the truck with several bins of survey stakes and headed down to the lek. We again used the “Blickley Method” of trying to set up an accurate 10 x 10 square, then carefully working our way outward from this square.







Wouldn’t you know it, we ended up putting it more or less in the same place as it was in 2006-8, although we managed to make it smaller by about 2 columns and 2 rows.

The good news is that our main observational data collection begins today! Mary, Dan, and Erin are using small HD camcorders to capture video records of male displays, movements, fights, etc., and at the same time taking data on male positions to allows us to identify males on the video when we watch them back on campus.

Our current plan is to have each of them specialize on one of the leks so they get to know the birds (and their buttprints) as well as possible. Gail and I will be taking over at least once a week. This is exciting but also daunting- in previous seasons we’ve relied on our assistants to do all of the ID-ing. Now we are responsible for some of this primary data collection as well. It’s hard!

I was at Preacher Lek yesterday morning to give it a dry run, and to make sure our new blind placement (our fourth!) would work. The wind was blowing pretty hard, which was making it virtually impossible to identify the birds.



The cold, miserable morning was redeemed though, when two Pronghorn appeared and headed onto the lek. They were definitely more observant of the blind than the sage-grouse were, and seemed to think better of taking a drink at the pond next to the lek. Still, some of my best Pronghorn shots yet!

It’s Monday morning, first day of Spring, and a fat hazy moon is sinking fast towards the Winds. It’s been a busy few days. I had a hunch that as soon as we shook off Winter’s heavy blanket of snow and ice, that the birds would very quickly get in gear. We’re now having multiple females showing up at most of the leks, and male numbers are stable or increasing. The days we lost are now catching up with us- we’re now having to balance the field set-up tasks with computer work, all the while developing new gear like making a drop net. I suspect we will have our first copulation within just a few days, which will put us on par with our previous seasons.

Preacher Lek now has stakes, although we moved the blind to avoid looking into the sun and now we’re at right-angles to the stakes (an easy problem to fix). We may end up clearing away some of the cowpies there (and possibly at Monument too). We may find a better method than this though!



Monument still needs it’s survey stakes, and all the leks need their microphone cables in. Lots of work left to do this week!

Buttprints are almost done for Chugwater, and Mary is collecting the first real set of male position data today as well as first “official” overlook videos. Hopefully we can get Preacher and Monument up to speed within the next couple of days.

Our first rodent friend of the season, a woodrat nicknamed Cletus, was living in the heating vents for a couple of days. We actually managed to catch it in our have-a-heart trap, and it got relocated towards Chugwater. In spite of our best efforts, it probably won’t be our last furry friend this year…



The picture at top was taken yesterday, on what was apparently one of the closest approaches of the full moon to the earth in a long time. I believe it!