And 3 became 9- welcome James, Sam, Jess, Frank, Julia and Sean to Chicken Camp! The crew is here, and everyone saw grouse right away thanks to the active leks we have now. Part of the first few days involves the basics of grouse-watching: observing the courtship displays and aggressive interactions, getting used to the spotting scopes and so on. Anna also took the crew out this year to put survey stakes on the lek so we can map where the males are hanging out. I didn’t go this year, but you can see what this process looks like (hammers, long tape measurers, and usually lots and lots of mud).

We’ve already had a couple of big changes from last year. First, for the first time since 2010, we won’t be doing individual ID work Monument Lek. Our initial counts showed about as many birds as at the end of last season (between 8 and 12 males), and again, most were hanging out in the sage and not on the main lek area. Unfortunately not enough that we can reliably target with the robot or coax inside our microphone array. Our plan at the moment is to only monitor 2 leks, Chugwater and Cottontail. Those haven’t shown much if any increase from last year, although we may still have some more guys show up.

Anna testing out new camera.

The second big change is that we’ve started using our new video cameras. We tested  2 models of Sony (the PJ380 and PJ430) and one of Canon that I can’t remember at the moment. All seem superior to our (5-8 year old) Sony miniDV HD cameras, as well as the newer Canons we got at the end of last season. They are also almost comically small. Amazing what a few years of technology and no actual tape deck will do! We’ve ended up choosing the Sony because the user interface seems a little better and the quality seems a bit better too. The Sony PJ430 is a little more expensive, with a lot of bells and whistles we aren’t likely to need like GPS, but the image quality is noticeably better. Good enough that on Cottontail with it’s super-wide spread of birds, we can actually decrease the recording quality to save some storage space and still make out the birds better than we could on our old tape cameras. Progress!