Working with sage-grouse means having an extremely unpleasant work schedule sometimes. Watching them on the lek entails getting in a blind before dawn. Catching them often means working at night, driving around looking for them using spotlights, and catching them with hand nets. Very few sage-grouse research efforts have combined intensive morning observations on the leks with simultaneous spotlighting at night. We would like to become one of these, but thusfar have weighted our efforts much more heavily towards getting behavioral data while relying on the pattern of the undertail coverts (i.e. “ buttprints”) to distinguish males.

Sunday morning was our first try at spotlighting this year. We got up at around 12:15 AM, and headed out towards Chugwater at about 1. We looked for birds until about 4AM. We managed to catch and band a male and a female- definitely putting us above average for productivity compared with our spotlighting attempts in previous seasons. We managed to get back to camp by about 4:30, had 20 minutes to gather our gear for the lek and eat a quick bowl of cereal, then headed back to Cottontail to run an experiment. We all got a good nap in once we got back, then headed down to Sue’s (the biologist at the local Bureau of Land Management office who helps us coordinate our research) for dinner. Sue sets a great table, and we enjoyed hanging out with Stan (Wyo Game and Fish biologist) and Tim (another BLM biologist). All in all a long but fun day!
The photo above is a time lapse I shot during our spotlighting effort.