This happens every year out here. It seems like only a short time ago that we were unpacking all our gear and showing the crew the leks for the first time, yet here it is the last week in April and we are less than a week from bidding our assistants farewell. We only have a few days left to make the most of our season- after that, we will have to make the most of the data we did collect, and plan for next year.


The past week has been pivotal in terms of what the 2011 will give us. Some things worked, and some didn’t. One project that didn’t work, unfortunately, was the fembot. She worked very well in 2007, well enough in 2008, but this year most males were pretty aversive to her. While we did get some courtships, they will probably not be enough to make any generalizations about how male courtship behavior relates to other behaviors. Very disappointing, since this tool proved so useful in the past. We are thankful that we will have new, more realistic robots by next season. Possibly the most frustrating aspect of this is that we don’t know what has changed. Has the fembot aged in some way that makes her look dramatically different to the grouse, or do they behave that much differently in boom years compared to at lower population densities or after particularly harsh winters?

The playback experiments in which we broadcast alarm calls have in general been going much better. We have now completed at least one trial at each lek of each of three calls: Killdeer, Pronghorn, and Raven. Obviously final interpretation will have to wait until we quantify differences in behavior, but it looks like males respond little if at all to the Pronghorn, and most to the Raven. We probably won’t have time here to analyze all of the videos here, but the crew have been hard at work identifying all the males on the video so we can speed up the data collection once we get back.


Our experiment at Monument looked a little different yesterday- we had a couple inches of snow from a storm the night before. It was all gone very quickly though.

We also took a relatively calm afternoon to finish building our drop net. If all goes well we will have the last few days to set this up on each of the leks and try to catch some birds! We may not be able to match the measurements of birds we catch with the sounds and behaviors of this year (since this years’ ID’s are based on buttprints, and we may not be around long enough to see the males displaying again), but it will hopefully help us next year by giving us a few more banded birds to start with.