It’s been more than a week since I posted the last update- this is due to 1) 12+ hour days with not much time for creative reflection, and 2) some inadvertent system updating caused us blow much of our monthly allotment of internet bandwidth. To quickly catch-up:
One of our goals this year is to measure how males vary in their environmental responsiveness, and how this relates to their social responsiveness and ultimately to their success on the lek. We’d planned to do a suite of 3 experiments testing different facets of responsiveness- sensitivity to acoustic cues, to food, and visually to novel objects. We tested the food and novel object protocols at a different lek (North Sand Gulch), and both failed spectacularly. For example, we set out an array of strawberries, tomatoes, and apples on the lek before dawn in hopes we could detect differences in how long it took males to approach the food, and how much they ate. Turns out the males (and females too) completely ignored the food. So plans change, as they often do in field biology, and we’re now hoping to do a more complex set of sound playbacks. We should start these soon, so I’ll have updates on those before too long.
I’ve managed another round of sound recording on all the leks except Preacher, where I will be tomorrow morning.
We are finally past the peak in breeding. The peak was fairly prolonged this year. Most years we have about a week and a half of intense activity, but it lasted 3 weeks or so on Chugwater and Monument. Now, for these two leks it was like a switch was flipped, and we’ve gone from long mornings with many females to empty leks by 8AM. As long as the birds don’t leave too early, this is actually good for our experiments, since the lack of female visitation means we won’t have to compete for the males attention as much.
Yesterday on Chugwater we had encounters with two different raptor species. First, at a little past 7, almost all the birds were scared off by a rough-legged hawk. Rough-leggeds are not much bigger (if at all) than a sage-grouse, and really have little chance to take down a male. This hawk made an attempt at the last guy on the lek, and swerved away at the last minute, I guess thinking better of it. The sage-grouse was not impressed.



We also had a small dark raptor zip through at sage-brush level. My first instinct was that it was a small falcon called a Merlin, but Dan noticed from the photos that it was actually a small forest accipiter called a Sharp-shinned hawk. We are miles from the nearest tree, so this was a big surprise for us!



Many busy days ahead with acoustic playbacks, and starting to set out the train tracks for our robot experiments.