The weather has been fluctuating wildly as it is prone to do in the Spring in Wyoming. Yesterday was close to 70, and today is topping out around freezing with occasional snow flurries. The wind has also been abnormally high in the early morning. The few hours right around dawn are almost always calm, but have been windy enough today that it didn’t seem worth it to put microphones out.

The temporary respite from the leks has given me time to turn my attention to capturing birds. We are hoping to develop a drop net that we will deploy later in the season. In the mean time we will soon start to do some spotlighting- looking for the birds’ eyeshines at night, sneaking up on them under the sonic concealment of a loud engine or rock music, then catching the birds one-by-one with hand nets. For the first three years of our work out here we did not catch any birds, and relied exclusively on buttprints for ID. We would like to do more capturing, since it lets us measure physical characteristics of the birds, and band them so we can track individual males across years.

Our bird kits are now ready- we’ve got our bands sorted and have the colored band combinations ready to go. There is something inherently satisfying about a well-organized case with everything in its place. As you can see we are low on the large bands with numbers- we place these on one leg and a combination of the smaller colored bands on the other. It is lucky we still have a few of the numbered bands left over from Jessica’s banding efforts in 2009. Our supplier for those bands has been extremely tardy in sending them, but they should (hopefully) be on their way.



A new thing for us this year will be outfitting a few grouse with radiotransmitters (see photo at top). These light-weight (~30g) units broadcast a radio pulse that we should be able to pick up from several kilometers away, and have a battery that will last through next field season. Unlike the radios I used during my turkey work in graduate school, these will be rump-mounted. In other words, more like a fanny pack than a backpack, with the teflon fabric loops going around the legs of the grouse. I had to make the harnesses myself- this turned out to be a time consuming arts and crafts project. To help provide some give to the harness material, but not too much, I sewed some elastic into part of the teflon tube, then bunched up the teflon so there was slack to stretch with the elastic. Then this all has to be fed through small holes in the body of the transmitter, and finally crimped with some short sections of copper pipe.



Thanks to Chad Olsen at Hayden-Wing for passing along this design, which he attributed to Brett Walker.