Author Archives: alan_k

Wyoming Bird Bonanza

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Apart from the habitat and climate, there is another thing that separates birding in Wyoming compared with birding in California, and that is the community of birders out there actually looking at birds. The Bay Area has several Audubon Societies and a balkanization of email lists that distribute bird sighting to their members. In contrast, Wyoming has one email list (with ~250 members) for the entire state! Why does this matter? As citizen science projects such as eBird start to fill in our knowledge of bird distribution and abundance, Wyoming could be left as a blank spot on those maps.

Towards that end, two folks at the University of Wyoming, James Maley and Matt Carling, are again putting out a call for the few of us out there to submit our spring bird sightings to eBird. Hence the Wyoming Bird Bonanza.

One correction to the article I’ve copied below- there is no other registration needed aside from eBird. Matt and James will scour the statewide submissions themselves.

——

This edition of Bird Banter, about the upcoming Wyoming Birding Bonanza, was
published April 7, 2013, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Feel free to disperse
it to anyone interested in participating. Thanks to James Maley,
jmaley1@uwyo.edu, for the information. Contact the author at
bgorges4@msn.com.

Wyoming Birding Bonanza strikes again

By Barb Gorges

Are you ready for the second annual Wyoming Birding Bonanza?
Polish your binoculars because you can be a winner.

The competition was dreamed up last year by James Maley and Matt
Carling, both of the University of Wyoming’s Department of Zoology and
Physiology. James is collections manager of the Museum of Vertebrates and
Matt is an assistant professor.

Their goal is to increase the number of bird observations for Wyoming during
spring migration that are recorded in the eBird.org data base, and to get
birders into the habit of submitting information. The data is used by
scientists.

Last year, the contest ran from mid-April to mid-June but this
year it is being pared back to May 1 – 31, migration peak weeks.

Thanks to sponsors like last year’s, Cheyenne – High Plains,
Laramie and Meadowlark Audubon societies, as well as UW’s Biodiversity
Institute, Audubon Wyoming and eBird, there are prizes. [Author's note: If
you would like to be a sponsor, contact James Maley, jmaley1@uwyo.edu.]

Registered contestants who enter at least 15 checklists will
receive a WBB T-shirt. A checklist is a list of bird species and number of
individuals of each, seen in a particular location during a period of time.
James promises this year’s T-shirt will be a work of art. Everyone who turns
in at least 10 checklists will be entered in a grand prize drawing.

Also, for each Wyoming county, the participant reporting the most species
will win a prize. Last year, I was the Laramie County winner and received
the latest edition of the National Geographic field guide. This year our
county is up for grabs since I’m going to be out less often.

For better odds, try birding Big Horn, Converse and Sublette
counties, where no checklists were turned in last year, James said.

“April, May, and June of 2012 are now the top three months of
all time for number of checklists statewide,” he said. There were 1,282
turned in, compared to 424 for the same months in 2010. A total of 266
species was observed in 2012.

I know I paid closer attention to the birds around me because of
the competition. I found a summer tanager in our backyard May 11, considered
rare for Wyoming.

James passed on a list of other rare bird sightings from 2012:

–1 Glossy Ibis at Meeboer Lake (west of Laramie) on April 17

–1 Lesser Black-backed Gull also at Meeboer Lake on April 17

–1 Black-and-white Warbler at Holliday Park on April 21

–1 Juniper Titmouse at Guernsey State Park on April 22

–1 Long-tailed Jaeger at Hutton Lake NWR on May 3

–1 Northern Cardinal in Laramie on May 4

–5 Short-billed Dowitchers at Hutton on May 5

–1 Snowy Owl at Keyhole State Park on May 15

–1 Blackpoll Warbler at Hereford on May15

–1 Cattle Egret in Rock River on May 17

–1 White-eyed Vireo near Lander on May 28.

So, are you ready to earn that WBB T-shirt? You can do it by
simply counting the birds in your backyard for a few minutes at least 15
different times. Here’s what you need to do.

First, sign up at www.eBird.org, if you haven’t already. It’s
free. Click on the “About eBird” link, and then the “eBird Quick Start
Guide,” the first link on that page.

When setting up your observation locations, select a hotspot marker if there
is one at one of your locations already, such as Wyoming Hereford Ranch or
Lions Park. Otherwise, on the map your personal marker may be hidden
underneath the hotspot’s. You can view your data for a hotspot alone or
collated with everyone else’s. If you have questions about eBird, call me.

Next, sign up for the Wyoming Birding Bonanza at
http://www.uwyo.edu/biodiversity/vertebrate-museum/birding-bonanza/. It’s
also free.

Here are the rules.

Counting:

1. Participants will count only full species as defined by the current
American Birding Association checklist.

2. Birds identified to a taxonomic level above species may be
counted if no other member of the taxonomic level is on the checklist. For
example, duck sp. can be counted if no other ducks are seen.

3. Birds counted must be alive and unrestrained. Sick and
injured birds are countable. Nests and eggs do not count.

4. Electronic devices are allowed, but see ABA’s Code of Ethics for
guidelines.

Time: We will extract final eBird data for the Bonanza on 30 June 2013.

Area: Anywhere in Wyoming.

Conduct:

1. Participants must only count birds unquestionably identified.
If in doubt, leave it out.

2. Know and abide by the rules.

3. Share information with other birders–they’ll thank you.

Good birding to all!

xxx

What’s on the menu?

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Monument Draw, between our camp and one of our leks. Sagebrush is definitely the dominant plant out here!

Our focus in our Sage-Grouse research has been fairly limited to the lek– this is still keeping us busy even after many years of study! However, it’s always nice to get a more comprehensive view of the ecology of whatever organism you are studying, and towards that end, we have initiated a collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Forbey from Boise State University. For the Sage-Grouse, their life revolves around the sage plants (genus Artemesia) that form most of their diet, especially in the fall and winter. Jen spent a few days with us a the end of March to see our site, tell us about her research on the interaction between sage and the animals that depend on it, and plan out the first steps in our research together.

What at first seems like a uniform world of “sage” out here turns out to be a variable landscape of food quality for the grouse. First of all there are different species of Artemesia. In our site we have at least two, the basin big sage and Wyoming big sage. These are usually pretty distinguishable, although sometimes smaller Basin plants can look like larger Wyoming plants. The leaves are usually pretty different though, as Jen demonstrated. Jen gave us a handy rule of thumb for this: you can remember the Wyoming sage is like a Wyoming native giving the middle finger to the Californians! We got a laugh out of that.

Sage-Grouse usually cut all but the base of the leaf.

Jen showed us how to distinguish foraging by different herbivores in the area. The grouse tend to pick just the leaves, so if you have a sharp eye you can find the remaining leaf base. Old foraging will show a brown scar in the middle of the leaf, but if you happen to find a place where they have been foraging during the past day or two it will be bright green. Rabbits, on the other hand, tend to cut the entire stem off in a neat angled cut. They harvest the leafy parts before the sage can mount an defense (see below).

Neat diagonal cut = rabbit

Sage stems harvested by rabbits.

The sage are full of all sorts of secondary chemicals such as phenols and terpenes, making them pretty unpalatable to most animals. Jen had us taste a leaf and those little things pack a punch, leaving a persistent bitter taste in our mouths.

The Sage-Grouse obviously have a way around this since they eat almost nothing but sage for months out of the year. One adaptation is a specialized gut with two large caeca (blind pouches coming off the intestine). These are places where bacteria can work their magic and help detoxify and digest the sage. On the lek you’ll often find a dark, gooey tar-like caecal casts left by the grouse, which look very different from their normal (goose-like) poop. I can’t believe I don’t have a photo at hand to show this!

It gets more interesting when you look at variation among plants of a species. While the Sage-Grouse can eat the sage, Jen’s work has shown they prefer to feed off of plants that have less of these secondary chemical compounds. Eating bad quality sage with too high a concentration of these means the grouse have to work harder at digesting for fewer nutrient rewards.

The sage plants themselves are not passive players in this. When something starts to damage the leaves of a sage plant, it will begin to produce more of these defensive chemicals. Even more impressive- as the volatile compounds reach the air, they can spread to nearby plants, causing neighboring bushes to ramp up their production of chemicals as well. What this means is that the longer Sage-Grouse spend foraging in a given patch of sage, the lower quality the food becomes.

Male sage-grouse leaves the lek

Male sage-grouse flying.

This chemical response by the sage may solve a mystery stemming from a 1980’s study of sage-grouse behavior from the Mono Basin in California. Sandy Vehrencamp and colleagues followed radio-tagged males and found that the “good” males (with high energy reserves) were actually traveling farther from the lek, while the males with poor reserves foraged close to the lek. It could be that the plants near the lek tend to build up more of these secondary compounds, so males that can travel farther may actually encounter better areas in which to feed. We hope to follow up on this possibility as we learn more about the way that off-lek foraging behavior interacts with on-lek courtship and performance.

Mid-season Update

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It’s March 31st, and as we trundle towards April, I realize how tardy I have been with general updates this year. Every season is a little different, and this one is throwing us some curves.

Nine Mile Hill shrouded in snow.

We saw our first copulation on our biggest lek, Cottontail Lek ten days ago (March 21st). This date is pretty normal. We’ve found one earlier (March 19th) in a couple of years, and later some other years. Usually once we see the first one, within a few days every lek is showing multiple copulations. Not this year! We got hit with a blast of really cold weather (lows around 10℉) as well as a few inches of snow.  The females seemed rethink their interest in the males, and it was several days later before we saw the next mating on any of the leks. So while the breeding season opened at a fairly average time, I think the season as a whole is going to be on the late side. On balance, I’m not sure if this will be good or bad for our work this year. The longer we have big groups of real females on the lek, the harder it will be to give our robotic females a private audience. On the other hand, the males may stay interested in courtship a little bit longer so we may not have the problem of the males just giving up at the end of the season the way they sometimes do. We’ll have to see what happens!

Two male sage-grouse battle in the fresh snow on Chugwater Lek.

Other challenges we’ve had to contend with are the incredible shrinking leks. Our initial impression from the first couple of weeks of the season seems to be correct– male attendance is down considerably from last year in our area. This may be due to the drought the Lander area is experiencing, at least there’s not an obvious other candidate for the decline. Our sage-grouse manager contacts have mentioned that the rough demographic analysis from hunting data suggested low recruitment (not many yearling birds taken compared to the number of adults).

To give you a sense of the change in abundance since we started the project here: Monument Lek, our main focal lek since 2006 when it had over 100 males, has dropped to under 10 birds and males are not staying as reliably on their territories. Anna has still gotten some playback experiments done, but Monument is right on the edge of being useful or not as one of our experimental leks.  We just showed the PBS Nature episode featuring our research (“What Females Want…”) as part of another outreach event down at the Lander Public Library. The footage was shot in 2007 when the male counts were an order of magnitude higher. The difference definitely makes us a little sad, and we are hoping this lek rebounds quickly as it has done in the past. Sue at the BLM told us that in the 80’s it was down to 4 birds, and later climbed back to over 100, so we hope this is another one of those cycles.

Shallow trenches prepared for laying microphone cables at Monument Lek. This lets us put microphones all over the lek, while keeping the cables underground. The speakers are for the playback experiment.

Otherwise we are in pretty good shape with most of our “normal” tasks. We have microphone arrays deployed on all three focal leks now, and have gotten several days of sound recording in.  We’ve also gotten at least one round of counts at our non-focal leks, to help the local sage-grouse managers monitor the grouse population in the district. The only things we are missing are the new robots (Gail is working on taxidermy aspects now, so those should be ready soon), and the encounternet telemetry tags. I say “only”, although those are definitely two very important pieces for our research goals this year and in the next couple of years!

Kiwi Commentary

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It looks like the commentary that I wrote with Lauryn Benedict write is now online (it may require journal access- feel free to email me if you aren’t able to get it through your university’s network and would like a copy). Lauryn and I share a lot of the same pedigree: we were undergrads at Cornell, then jointly advised by Walt Koenig and Eileen Lacey at UC Berkeley for our PhDs . We even did our field research in the same place- the Hastings Natural History Reservation in Carmel Valley. Lauryn studied another one of those common but not terribly well known birds, the California Towhee.

It’s fun to get to write something up with a friend and colleague like this. Our manuscript puts some context around a paper on vocal behavior and duetting in a species of kiwi.

 

Playback Experiment, 2013 Edition

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In my last post, I talked about the usefulness of our robotic grouse for studying complex social interactions on the lek. This week we tried another method for modifying a male’s social experience– audio playback.

Male Sage-Grouse listening to our rock speakers.

We have a long history of playing back sounds to the Sage-Grouse. For the first several years our basic behavior studies were running along side the ‘Noise Project’, an extensive research program into the effects of noise associated with energy development on the grouse. The centerpiece of the Noise Project was playing back the sounds of two common noise sources (drilling sounds and road noise) from the Pinedale Anticline/Upper Green River area.  We used fake rock speakers, possibly the same kinds you might have seen in a SkyMall catalog, to play these sounds at leks, and compare how many birds showed up and their behavior between the noisy leks and control leks that had. I’ll talk more about the results from this project in a future post.

We also used the speakers in 2011, this time as part of the basic behavioral research program. We’ve been interested in the importance of “courtship skills” in the males, and part of that is how attuned males are to changes in their social environment. Does a male change his courtship behavior a lot when a female gets closer, or not very much? Our first experiment with the fembot showed this was related to the success a male has in courting females.

One species used in our 2011 playback study: Pronghorn

Our experiment in 2011 was designed to look at another dimension of responsiveness- how attuned are males to the threat of potential predators? Here we chose alarm calls o f three different species that live with the sage-grouse: ravens, killdeer, and pronghorn antelope. We played these from the rock speakers and measured the strength of the grouses’ reaction, as well as how long it took them to resume their original behavior. Analysis is ongoing, so we don’t yet know how this sort of “ecological” responsiveness relates to their social responsiveness or their success on the lek.

Fast forward to 2013, and we’ve set up the speakers once again, this time to measure how males respond to other males. It would be great to have a robotic male, but as you can imagine, making a mechanical male that is realistic enough to give a convincing display would be a steep technical challenge (never mind making one sturdy enough to withstand an attacking male). Instead, we are playing back the sounds of male struts from the rock speakers to see how males respond to a simulated male at the edge of the lek.  Anna has been putting together recordings with different call rates, so we can see if they are attuned to differences in the signals that males may be sending out. We’ve only just begun, but this will hopefully allow us to collect some interesting data on how males respond to other males while Gail puts together the new fleet of robots.

We also played a control vocalization– Horned Lark.

In other news, we observed the first copulation of the season yesterday! The breeding season has officially begun. Our earliest observation ever was on March 19th (in two different years), so we are on the early end of things.