It is sage-grouse time again! I’m going to start updating my blog again to keep up with the 2011 field season. Let’s go!

We just pulled into Lander tonight after a 2-day drive from California. The past few weeks have been a bit of a scramble to get everything together, so it is hard to believe we are finally here. We were a little worried about driving conditions because of a big storm coming through, but managed to time things pretty well. A little bit of snow over the summit of the Sierras, but much better than the 2-4 feet that was predicted later that night.



After making it through we stopped at a little store in Reno for some field gear.



I’ve never been to Cabela’s, although I’ve ordered plenty from their catalogs. Pretty amazing place. As much as I’d like to have spent a lot more time (and money) there, we had to get back on the road. Crossing Nevada seems to take forever. We drove through a dreary overcast landscape for most of the day, and not long after sunset we settled in Wendover, on the Utah border, for the night.

The next morning we proceeded on towards Salt Lake City, first crossing one of those impressively straight stretches of highway.



The weather held as we climbed through Park City, and up into Wyoming. We leave I-80 at Rock Springs. I just had to get a shot of this tempting restaurant right next to the gas station. Renegade indeed.



We encountered our worst weather as we crested South Pass between Farson and Lander. Snow cutting down visibility, and a road surface with ice and snow on it. I can’t say enough how great the tires are on these cars- although it was a white-knuckle drive for much of this stretch I never felt the Dodge Durango slide around.

After checking into the Pronghorn Lodge, (our normal landing pad at the start and end of the season), Gail and I met Stan from Wyo Game and Fish at the Lander Bar. A Swiss Piggy and great pint of beer- what a great way to celebrate our return to Lander!

The annual pumpkin carving party is perhaps our most anticipated tradition in the Patricelli Lab. The festivities got off to a somewhat inauspicious start, as the weekend’s rains had closed our normal pumpkin supplier: Bobby Dazzler’s Pumpkin Patch and Milo Maze. A quick u-turn on 113 back to Covell Blvd. and we were on our way to Grandpa’s Farm, another patch on the outskirts of Davis. The patch itself was somewhat sparse, with a number of the pumpkins showing some weather damage. But they had some nice ones in bins, and we managed to take home several wheelbarrows full. Although no-one carved a sage grouse this year, Jenn managed a wonderful pair of house sparrows (between the giant frog and shakespeare), and in all we created another great display.

This week we’ve had a guest: Patricia Brennan from U Mass Amherst. I first got to know Patty when we were both in graduate school- she was working on the mating system of tinamous, and I was working working on wild turkeys; we commiserated over the trials of studying large ground-nesting birds with high nest predation rates.

Patty is now forging ahead in a new research direction, understanding genital morphology in males and females (mostly in birds, but expanding into other groups as well), and how these morphologies relate to mating behaviors and strategies, social environments, and conflict between the sexes. Her first model system has been ducks, since the ducks have amazingly elaborated genital morphology, as well as some rather unsavory reproductive strategies.

On Tuesday, Patty and I met up with Andy and Irene Engilis at the Wildlife museum to do some galliform bird dissections. Patty taught me how to remove intact reproductive tracts from birds we might be dissecting, and I taught her what we needed in terms of vocal tracts. We looked at some willow ptarmigan, as well as spruce grouse. The dissections all went pretty well, although a lot of the birds were collected in the fall (not as good for Patty since birds have seasonal reductions in their reproductive tracts), and the syrinx of the male sage grouse was damaged when it was shot.

Wednesday morning, as a beautiful red sun rose above the haze, Patty and I, along with Conor and Melissa (grad students) and Becca and Travis (undergraduates in our lab) went birding at a nearby wetlands called the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area. We had hopes of finding a couple of vagrant species that had been seen recently by local birders. Although we struck out on these, we had nice looks at some other birds, including this Sora (photo above).

It’s been a busy few weeks here, with the students mostly coming back for fall quarter classes. If the summer was a time of relatively quiet productivity, the lab has more of a buzz of excitement and industry now. Melissa, Gail’s new student, has been getting up to speed on the sage-grouse system. She is getting her feet wet with some existing data we have as well as thinking ahead to the kinds of projects she might want to do.
We have a number of returning undergraduate students as well, who are helping to finish off some of our big 2007 data sets, as well as start on some independent analyses of the sage-grouse data. New students are starting on the 2008 data. We’re hoping to extract some relevant data from our last set of robot experiments before embarking on our next study in 2011!
In other news, I’ve just completed a Wilderness First Aid course offered through UC Davis. Our sites in Wyoming would sometimes be considered back-country, sometimes not. Regardless, it’s nice to know more about what to do in a medical emergency in the field. I can’t believe I’ve been through so many field seasons without having this training.
Gail, Richard McElreath and I are submitting a paper this week on the use of bargaining theory in animal behavior.