Male courts the fembot on Monument Lek

We’ve now started the experimental introductions of the fembot on our three focal leks. We were definitely a bit nervous- how would the male sage-grouse react to her? Would they court her? Thankfully the answer is that they like her a lot!

We start by playing back the repeated quacking call of a real female flying onto the lek, to help add to the illusion that our animated model provides. Then the robot moves out onto the lek, and approaches a nearby male (our blinds are usually about 20m from the closest birds). We’ve managed to keep their interest long enough to test subsequent males in the area as well. Testing several males during a trial is definitely important for us- we need to achieve a sample size large enough to find statistical patterns in the midst of the considerable variation among males and trials we are likely to find.

The experiments have not been without their excitement. The most dramatic occurrence has been getting too close to an overly eager male. Most males are perfect gentlegrouse (at least with the females), but every so often we encounter one that doesn’t seem to wait for positive signals from the female. This happened on Chugwater- a male attempted to mount the fembot before Gail could avoid him. She miraculously kept the fembot upright enough to escape, and we continued with the experiment. When approaching another male later, we got too close to this same male again, and he ended the experiment.

We are also still discovering a few mechanical issues with how the robot moves. Fortunately nothing that has compromised an experiment; these problems have only popped on the way back to the blind. On Cottontail, the robot had to come back in reverse when her motors lost forward power!

All in all, it has been a good few days! Definitely a relief that the fembot is popular. Sometimes scientific research has to be a little risky if it is going to tell us something new about the world, but it can be scary to invest so much time in something that may not yield any results. Now that we know she works, we’ll be doing experiments whenever we can until the end of the season, and hopefully learn more about the principles governing how males and females negotiate on the lek.

Fembot 2.0 on her first morning.

After weeks of rearranging components, testing different wheels, and fashioning grouse skins into a covering, Gail has Fembot 2.0 ready for action. We’ve tested it out and it seems to have pretty good traction with the big wheels , and the motions (bending , moving her head around, pecking at the ground) look pretty good. Gail even managed to get the tail to bend down a little when the rest of the body tips forward to avoid the tail pointing up in the air. We tried to test it out on a non-focal lek this morning, but the birds all spooked before we could even get her out of the blind. Hopefully another test soon, so we can make sure the boys like her!

We knew it had to end sometime, our balmy weather reaching into the 70’s and nights sometimes floating above 50. Monday’s forecast called for rain and snow showers, with no accumulation. Sounds harmless, right? The snow turned out to be a little more sincere than we expected, and we woke up to several inches on the steps and walkways around camp. The storm, which was supposed to quiet during the night, was still blowing when we got up. Anna and our brave assistants went out anyway, (sound recording was out of the picture because of the wind and precip, so instead I got some private time with a statistics text), and saw only a handful of males briefly visiting the leks.

The lingering effect of the snow is, of course, the mud. I went down to Monument Lek to record this morning, and it was a wet and wild ride in the UTV. Good thing Gail picked up some extra garbage bags, because all of our gear would have been coated with mud from the trip up and down from camp.

We are definitely past the peak in breeding now. There were only 3 females on the main portion of the lek today, and all three mated. It took one female 3 tries however- the first two times a neighboring male interrupted the copulation attempt. The other two females both chose the same male, and mated only about 30 seconds apart. This male was missing a number of tail feathers, suggesting he may have survived a predator attack of some sort.

Our Melissa count is up to two now- Gail’s graduate student Melissa arrived in Lander on April 1. She is preparing an outreach presentation for the local tribal college, and will be visiting the leks with us for a few days as well.

Most of the sage-grouse leks in our area have been monitored for years by local biologists. The longer the list of known display sites has gotten, the more effort goes into monitoring these leks, and the less time there is to go out and search for new ones.  With our crew able to pick up some of the slack over the past few years, Stan has had a bit more time to find some new leks. We’ve been wanting to do a bit of searching ourselves. We’re several miles into the sage from town, and although we sometimes see grouse along the roads much closer to Hudson, there aren’t many leks known from that side of our camp.

The "unexplored" valley of Coal Mine Draw, complete with a lek

I’d searched around the Preacher lek area earlier this season but didn’t have any luck. Yesterday I took an ATV northwest from camp, north of Monument Draw. I came across one male displaying right along a two-track- I didn’t want to disturb him so I headed for a ridge to have a better look around. As soon as I crested the hill, I saw two females flying up the draw towards me. This was the time of the morning that hens might be leaving a lek, so I thought this might be a promising sign. I went further out onto a promontory with a great view of the whole draw, and saw a few males displaying near a bare patch in the sage. Further scanning revealed a total of 11 males and another female still on the lek. I headed out that afternoon

The morning's overlook, seen from the lek

to get a GPS point, and the lek definitely had a lot of sign (i.e. poop), so I was pretty sure this wasn’t just an ephemeral aggregation of males following some females. Just to be sure, I went out again this morning a little earlier, and got the same count of males on the lower lek. Even more surprising, the solitary male was joined by another male this morning and a third bird that might have been a female. This might end up being another new lek as well!

Most of the males strutting their stuff on a sage-grouse lek are in their second year or older- in other words, they were hatched at 2 calendar years ago. What about the yearling males? Some are precocious enough to gain territories, and can be tough to tell from adults. Most though spend their time on the lek in a sleeked posture, trying to avoid drawing unwanted attention from adult males. This only works for so long, leading to one of the more humorous sights on the lek- a non-territorial male getting chased by an adult into another’s territory, who then chases him into a third territory, and so on. Often the young male will end up taking wing to avoid an angry pursuer, sometimes landing close to where the whole thing began!

Sometimes though, these not-very-competent males give it a go with their displays. These are often somewhat awkward looking, either because males need some amount of practice to perfect this innate behavior, or because they just don’t have the anatomy and physiology yet to perform a full strut. I saw some of this on one of my recent visits to Monument Lek. Two clearly yearling males walked down the lek towards the recording blind, and both gave a few displays. I managed to catch some still photos of the first male, and remembered the video capabilities of my camera when the second male started going. It was very fun to see all of this at close range.