We’ve been collecting “background data” all season- measuring mating success, and getting sound recordings of displays and video tapes of natural courtship interactions and bouts of aggression. Every year we hope to pair these data with targeted experiments that will let us measure specific reactions of the males. We wait to do these until after the peak in breeding so as not to interfere with reproduction in this sensitive species, and because males may have their attention divided if lots of receptive females are nearby.

One of our goals is to measure environmental responsiveness of males- how quickly they notice important things in their environment, how dramatically they respond, and how soon they return to their normal behavior. After having trouble getting appropriate responses to objects, our last, best hope this year of measuring responsiveness was to play back the sounds of animals. We started with the alarm call of Killdeer- Gail got some killdeer recordings from the Borrer Lab at Ohio State University and edited them into a single playback file. We used the outdoor rock speakers from Jessica, placing three at each lek, and running the cable to the recording blind.

Fortunately these experiments appeared to work pretty well, although we will need to sift through the video tapes to quantitatively measure male reactions to the sounds. The males reacted, but not too much (i.e. they didn’t flush off the lek), and at least from the trials at Preacher it seemed like males were pretty consistent across trials. We are moving ahead with playbacks of two other local species: Raven and Pronghorn.

In the photo above, Gail is measuring the sound level of our playback so we can report how loud our playback was.



We are also prepping for the fembot experiments. We want to measure how males approach the robotic female, and how they adjust their courtship effort. This will give us a measure of social responsiveness. The questions are: is social responsiveness correlated with environmental responsiveness, and when we look at the relationship with mating success, do the males who mate the most share some level of responsiveness.

Setting up for the fembot experiment is quite a process. Once we’ve settled on the path she will take, we have to connect lengths of train tracks, then level them with bits of dirt or last year’s cowpies, polish off the tarnish to ensure good connection between the base of the fembot and the tracks, and pile up dirt along the sides to disguise the edges.







Once the tracks are set up we test the movement of the fembot to make sure she has a smooth ride!





Unfortunately our first couple of tests at Preacher have not gone terribly well. Hopefully we will have more success at Chugwater and Monument- these leks are much bigger, and therefore more critical in terms of measuring enough males for statistical analysis of the data.