It’s always important to go into a field season with a great plan, but sometimes it’s just as important to be able to adapt that plan to the realities of an unpredictable world. We experienced this quite a bit last year- first when the snow levels and late-arriving birds caused us to add Preacher lek to the two we were expecting to monitor, and second, when our initial tries at measuring “environmental responsiveness” in male sage-grouse failed completely (these are not the most curious birds), and we moved to a sound playback that seems to have worked quite well.

This year the big shake-up so far once again has been a change in leks. We wanted to work on Preacher, Monument, and Chugwater again, but our early season counts at Preacher have tallied only 2 or 3 birds! Not really enough to do much with. We aren’t sure where these birds have gone- whether this is some lingering effect of the noise introduction experiment from a few years ago, due to the prominent traffic noise drifting up from Rt. 789 near Riverton, or some other reason birds might be moving over to nearby Guston or maybe another undiscovered lek in the area. Either way, after considering our options, we’ve replaced Preacher with another lek in the area- Cottontail. Cottontail Lek is one of the closer leks- it is probably closer to camp than Chugwater. Like Monument, it is oriented in a valley opening out towards the Wind River Range. We’ve never done any experiments on either project there because it is just too big- even now counts are over 60 males, and back in the “big years” of 2006-2007, male counts could exceed 200!  We will be working on one end of the lek, one of at least two activity centers there.

Gail and Julia driving the fembot around the yard

After a lot of nailbiting on our part, our volunteer team of engineers shipped out the new robotic female grouse, and it arrived on Saturday. Right now it isn’t much to look at- other than the fiberglass resin shell in the shape of a taxidermy form, it is just a mobile assembly of circuit boards and wires right now. Gail has already done quite a bit to fix it up. She’s re-routed the power for the servos controlling body posture to get rid of some interference, and tucked much of the electronic guts inside the shell. We’ve also given the fembot a few test drives. We initially thought that the treads would be superior to the wheels in terms of maneuverability, but it turns out the added clearance from the wheels may be more important.

Fembot version 2.0- off-road edition

Thursday I hopped in the Durango and headed down the road through Riverton and Thermopolis up to Cody, Wyoming. Some months ago I agreed to give a talk to the Meadowlark Audubon Society there.  I started working on the talk when I got out here. This was one of the first popular talks on the sage-grouse work, and also the first talk I have ever given that goes into any detail on the conservation work from the Noise project. Thankfully I was able to pull slides from talks Jessica and Gail had given, and was able to put together what I think ended up a pretty good talk. The first section was on the fembot research, the second was on how grouse make sound, and then it ended on the noise impacts research. I managed to work in a few different videos, including a distant time-lapse of the lek, high-speed of a male display, and even “violation of the fembot.”

I think the talk itself was pretty well received. We were in the community room of a bank in Cody, and ended up with maybe ~40 people. I got a lot of great questions during and after the talk, and didn’t end up leaving until almost 2 hours after I’d started talking. I’m looking forward to giving this talk again in the future.

Before heading back, I drove up the North Fork of the Shoshone River towards the east entrance of Yellowstone. That stretch of road is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever been on: snowy range past a large frozen reservoir, vertical bundles of postpile, convoluted crags, a river cutting through the snow… All of this was the backdrop for an incredible number of incredibly close bighorn sheep. On my first (and only other) trip up this road, we had seen fairly low on the slopes. On this trip, I saw over 100, many right next to or even on the road. Most were in groups of around 20, with a mix of rams, ewes, and even a few lambs. I could have stayed for hours photographing these guys, but unfortunately I had to get back to Lander.