In our past seasons, the Monument Lek grid of survey stakes was one of the first things we set up once our camp was in order. The grid often went in as early as March 5. This year we put Monument off to the end since it seemed to be taking the longest to stabilize in terms of how many birds were coming and where they were displaying. Yesterday we finally loaded up the truck with several bins of survey stakes and headed down to the lek. We again used the “Blickley Method” of trying to set up an accurate 10 x 10 square, then carefully working our way outward from this square.







Wouldn’t you know it, we ended up putting it more or less in the same place as it was in 2006-8, although we managed to make it smaller by about 2 columns and 2 rows.

The good news is that our main observational data collection begins today! Mary, Dan, and Erin are using small HD camcorders to capture video records of male displays, movements, fights, etc., and at the same time taking data on male positions to allows us to identify males on the video when we watch them back on campus.

Our current plan is to have each of them specialize on one of the leks so they get to know the birds (and their buttprints) as well as possible. Gail and I will be taking over at least once a week. This is exciting but also daunting- in previous seasons we’ve relied on our assistants to do all of the ID-ing. Now we are responsible for some of this primary data collection as well. It’s hard!

I was at Preacher Lek yesterday morning to give it a dry run, and to make sure our new blind placement (our fourth!) would work. The wind was blowing pretty hard, which was making it virtually impossible to identify the birds.



The cold, miserable morning was redeemed though, when two Pronghorn appeared and headed onto the lek. They were definitely more observant of the blind than the sage-grouse were, and seemed to think better of taking a drink at the pond next to the lek. Still, some of my best Pronghorn shots yet!