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.