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.