As of this morning we’ve now recorded some sound from all three leks! Chugwater’s recording went pretty well, although it appears that I made a small data entry mistake when setting up the time code. We use “atomic clocks”- small cheap digital clocks that synchronize themselves with a radio signal from some “official” clock in Colorado- to make sure the audio we record on the lek and the videos we get from the hill overlooks are synchronized. I noticed partway through the morning that the recording time was 8 seconds behind the atomic clock. This is something that’s easy to correct later, but I’ll probably try to get another recording anyway just in case there was some other glitch responsible for the discrepancy.
Preacher’s second day of recording went very well- this was also my first day collecting male positional data, and ID-ing birds without Erin there to help me. Preacher’s small size makes this possible to do while simultaneously monitoring the array recording. There was one mating on the lek- I had to refer to the video tape back at camp to determine Nice Lady Monster (Male #474) had snuck in the copulation before Big Spot Hex Top (Male #472) came over to beat him up.
We recorded at Monument this morning. This was our first run this year on an array of more than 8 channels. The complexity goes up significantly since this means synchronizing more than one of our 8 channel pre-amps. The recording sounded pretty good, but I’ll only know for sure when I have a chance to export the audio files and look at them closely in Syrinx or Raven (our preferred sound visualization programs). We had an eagle flush the lek early, and it took an hour for the first birds to come back.

A couple more recent pictures…