Author Archives: alan_k

2014 Fembot Experiments

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Fembot "Salt" approaches the target area as males get excited.

Knock on wood, our behavioral tests with the robotic female grouse are going very well this year. With the robots already built, we were able to start right away. We’ve gotten (I think) 10 experiments in already, with hope for another 6 or so in the next few weeks. This has been fun for me, since this is the first time I’ve gotten to do real robot driving. Thus far I’ve driven in three experiments- two at Chugwater Lek and one at Cottontail Lek. A couple of times Gail and I have done simultaneous experiments on different leks- a first for us and a big advance in our ability to collect enough data to answer our questions.

A good experiment requires both opportunity and response. Opportunity comes in the form of males sticking around long enough in the morning to make it worth sending the female out on the lek. As with our previous experiments, we need to have a lek free of live females so we know who the males are courting and so our robot doesn’t need to compete with real females for attention. Some years these female-free windows are hard to come by, and males leave within minutes of the last female departure. Males need to be responsive as well- not too exhausted to care about courting one last female trundling on to the lek. Thus far we’ve done very well on both accounts.

So what are we actually doing this year? Our goals this year is to look at persistence in courtship. How long will a male engage in courtship, and how does this depend on factors such as seasonality and the female’s interest level. We are repeatedly testing males with trials that contain both interested and disinterested behavior, and getting measures (hopefully) early, mid, and late in the breeding season. We think differences in males behavior within each trial, as well as changes in his effort across the season, will reveal a lot about how he allocates his energy and his success on the lek.

Getting to participate in these experiments by actually controlling the robot has been a little stressful but also incredibly rewarding. It can be nerve wracking to drive the robot out and try to make her movements as life-like as possible. Not only do you have to keep the female upright and not tip over, but you have to maintain life-like movements throughout the trial. Don’t move too fast! Keep her head moving periodically! Don’t drive backwards! Aside from this, getting to interact with a wild animal in this way is just an indescribable experience. One recent experiment at Cottontail illustrates this. One male “Circle Butt” approached a little closer than we wanted for our protocol. I backed off a bit, and he also backed off somewhat and returned to his core territory. I moved back towards the intended target area, and “Circle Butt” came back closer. I backed off again, and again he retreated. It was such a thrill to be able to be an active part of this interaction.

A couple of previous posts on our robot experiments here and here. When I get a chance and more bandwidth I’ll add some video, but here’s a clip from 2012.

Mid-Season Update (2014)

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March has almost literally blown by out here in Windy Wyoming. It’s been a pretty good month so far, in spite of some cycles of mild snowfall and mud that have made our field work difficult at times.

The breeding season started in earnest with a Cottontail Lek copulation on March 19th. This was tied for our earliest one on record. My impression is that the peak in breeding is fairly spread out this year, with female attendance and numbers of copulations not necessarily following the quick increase and decrease that marks some years. Maybe bad weather early in the season tends to synchronize the females more as the earliest hens delay breeding, but the lack of severe early storms or deep snow cover has spread things out this year? Just speculation.

Although it’s early in the season (and these data are only field observations  and still pending new events collected from our video records), reproduction seems particularly skewed this year. The top guy on Cottontail seems especially strong. I’ll have a quick post about him soon. He’s now got our single-day record for copulations, and really dominates the lek in ways we’ve not seen in the past.

Jess digs a cable trench.

Study-wise, we’ve got pretty much everything going now. Microphone arrays have been deployed at our two leks (Cottontail and Chugwater), and we’ve collected two mornings of recordings on each lek. We’re getting used to the new cameras as well. There are good points and bad points (mostly good points I’d say). It’s really nice to be able to view the videos so quickly, and in our initial data collection from the tapes we realized you could even zoom in on certain areas of the screen! That is a pretty nice feature.

We did not put in a microphone array at Monument Lek, nor have we been monitoring it on a daily basis. Bird numbers there are about what they were last year, so we’re not going to invest as much in it since the males seem to have shifted their territories to places we can’t easily observe them. Sad to take a break from this lek- but hopefully it will rebound next year and we will be able to record behaviors and conduct experiment there again in the future.

Speaking of experiments, we actually got a complete set of early season fembot experiments in. More about this in a future post.

 

Frank watches while John tests the range of the receivers.

Our collaborator John Burt just left. John has been building the advanced telemetry tags we are deploying this year. We got a couple on last spring– these new ones have solar to help deal with the power needed to run both a GPS chip and an on-board accelerometer. We’ve got 13 tags in hand, and are looking forward to collecting data on where these males are getting their meals (and how that impacts their ability to put on a good show). We’ve already caught a dozen males, so hopefully it won’t take long to catch a few more and get all of these devices out on birds and collecting data.

Encounternet Tag Solar Power edition.

We also enjoyed having Yale student Sam visit the camp for a few days. Sam is interested in the relationship between female preferences and male aggression, and thinks the sage-grouse might be an interesting system to look at this issue.

 

Dissection

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It’s pretty amazing how much of unfortunate male Roundasaurus Leks was left after the Gyrfalcon killed him. Jen and Marcella were quick to get back to the lek and grab the bird before the falcon or any other animal else had a chance to eat much of it. Below are a few shots of what they found [IF YOU MAY BE UNEASY ABOUT SEEING DISSECTED ANIMALS, BLOOD, OR BODY PARTS, DO NOT SCROLL DOWN.

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Jennifer and Brecken get started on a make-shift table. Gloves recommended for this type of work.

(Most of) the syrinx, the sound producing organ. The yellow is a muscle that only male sage-grouse have out of all game-birds (at least as far as we know).

The gizzard was absolutely packed with sagebrush leaves. Surprisingly no traces of other plants, even though the (relatively) mild wet winter has greened things up a bit already.

Without teeth, a lot of the mechanical breakdown of foods occurs in the gizzard. Sage-grouse don't seem to use stones to help crush their food like a lot of birds do, although the walls of the gizzard contain tough ridges that help to grind things up.

There were still a lot of intact leaves. Jen was able to show us how some leaves are partially snipped from the plant, while others are cut down ot the stem. We will be looking for both types of foraging traces on plants when we examine diet quality later this season.

A male's testis (left) and brain (right). I'll leave this here without comment.

An exciting couple of days

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Gail giving driving lessons to the Boise folks.

An early visit from our collaborator Jen Forbey and a few other members of her lab should have been exciting enough for early March at our camp. Jen has been looking at the interactions between grouse and sage- basically how sage nutrition and chemical defenses affect grouse physiology and foraging behavior. Her visit was for some mutual training possibilities. Her graduate student Marcella has a lot of trapping experience, and was able to show us a new spotlighting technique that we’ve now adopted. It’s an “on foot” method, where birds are first seen from a truck driving on an established road, then a pair of people walk out to the bird, one with the spotlight and a portable speaker blaring music, and the other close on their heels with a net. We trained Marcella on our video and buttprint protocols, and also got her going with a recording unit to get some recordings from her Idaho population. The Boise team also completed sage-sampling at three leks to look at forage quality surrounding these display grounds. Jen and her crew were fun even when we were squeezing 13 people in to the trailer for dinner!

Gyrfalcon & grouse

I mentioned some excitement. First was the once-a-decade (or more) visit of a large arctic falcon called a Gyrfalcon to Cottontail. Sean and James got some digiscope photos of a falcon that we initially assumed was Prairie Falcon, but further review of the images suggested it might be the larger Gyrfalcon. Not only did they see it, but they saw it make several passes over the lek before finally killing and eating a male sage-grouse! Sadly it was a male who was already a favorite- named Roundasaurus Leks due to his buttprint looking like the head of a T-Rex. We almost never see predation events on the lek, and to see one so early in the season, and by such an unexpected predator, was pretty mindblowing.

The gyrfalcon came back the next day and James and Sam were able to get some more diagnostic images from a zoomed in video. Unfortunately it hasn’t been back since then, and I haven’t gotten to see it yet. Maybe I shouldn’t say unfortunately, since this bird seems pretty capable of reducing our sample size in a rapid manner!

Jen and her technician Brecken dissected the unlucky male grouse to see what it had been eating (all sage, in spite of the presence of some forbs and insects during the warmer days). I’ll probably have more about that in a subsequent post.

Pygmy Rabbit tracks (top), and Cottontail (bottom). Photo Gail Patricelli

Second: another wildlife sighting. Jen and Gail were at Monument Lek and noticed the burrow and tracks of Pygmy Rabbit! This is another sage-specialist that Jen studies, so she knew what to look for. In some places this is a threatened species. I’m not aware of it’s status in our neck of the woods, but neither Stan nor Sue our agency contacts were aware this species resided in the Hudson area so we will count this as a cool discovery.

Last was something exciting but not quite as fun. I tried to take the crew and Jen’s crew down to the Monument Rocks for a quick but fun excursion. There was still some snow on the road, but not enough to be a problem. Or so we thought. Maybe a half-mile past the lek, the snow covered up what turned out a treacherous mudhole. Trying to power through it only succeeded in me getting astoundingly high-centered. Day 1 we tried using the ATV to help pull it out, but the truck didn’t budge at all in spite of an hour or two of digging. Next morning, we tried another pick-up, but still no budging. It wasn’t until we’d deployed two jacks and dug almost completely under it, and then used the truck, that we finally got it out of there. Definitely not how we wanted to spend two days.

It took quite some feats of engineering to get the truck out.

2014- Week 1

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And 3 became 9- welcome James, Sam, Jess, Frank, Julia and Sean to Chicken Camp! The crew is here, and everyone saw grouse right away thanks to the active leks we have now. Part of the first few days involves the basics of grouse-watching: observing the courtship displays and aggressive interactions, getting used to the spotting scopes and so on. Anna also took the crew out this year to put survey stakes on the lek so we can map where the males are hanging out. I didn’t go this year, but you can see what this process looks like (hammers, long tape measurers, and usually lots and lots of mud).

We’ve already had a couple of big changes from last year. First, for the first time since 2010, we won’t be doing individual ID work Monument Lek. Our initial counts showed about as many birds as at the end of last season (between 8 and 12 males), and again, most were hanging out in the sage and not on the main lek area. Unfortunately not enough that we can reliably target with the robot or coax inside our microphone array. Our plan at the moment is to only monitor 2 leks, Chugwater and Cottontail. Those haven’t shown much if any increase from last year, although we may still have some more guys show up.

Anna testing out new camera.

The second big change is that we’ve started using our new video cameras. We tested  2 models of Sony (the PJ380 and PJ430) and one of Canon that I can’t remember at the moment. All seem superior to our (5-8 year old) Sony miniDV HD cameras, as well as the newer Canons we got at the end of last season. They are also almost comically small. Amazing what a few years of technology and no actual tape deck will do! We’ve ended up choosing the Sony because the user interface seems a little better and the quality seems a bit better too. The Sony PJ430 is a little more expensive, with a lot of bells and whistles we aren’t likely to need like GPS, but the image quality is noticeably better. Good enough that on Cottontail with it’s super-wide spread of birds, we can actually decrease the recording quality to save some storage space and still make out the birds better than we could on our old tape cameras. Progress!