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.

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…

Finally! Our hard work getting the leks set up for acoustic monitoring have finally paid off. Erin and I loaded up the Rhino with a big battery, rack case, laptop, and our other gear and headed to Preacher lek. It was our first day with the mics out this year, and we (me) managed to forget a couple of things. Luckily nothing critical, and we were still able to capture our first grouse sounds of the season. Preacher Lek wasn’t exactly hopping- only 2 females first thing in the morning. We were treated to a beautiful view of the sunrise painting the snow-covered Winds.



In the afternoon we loaded up the truck and drove to Chugwater. Our first lek with stakes installed on it was our last with microphones- we got an 8-channel array set up in a few hours there. On the way back we took a slight detour and headed up to the large promontory with the water tank near Chugwater. This place has spectacular views in almost all directions.

It was a pleasant surprise- getting the microphone cables in on Monument seemed a lot easier than cabling Preacher on Thursday. Not only did we install cables for 12 mics instead of 8 on Preacher, but we had to dig extra-deep trenches across the road in 3 places and run the cables through PVC pipes.



This will be our biggest lek this year, and we needed the 12 microphone positions to surround the main display area while getting mics close to most of the birds. In past years we’ve put in up to 33 cables, recording from 24 mics at a time. Kind of nice to go small this year- with our smaller crew it would have been tough to get everything in without killing ourselves.

In other Monument news, Gail and Dan saw the first copulation there, only one day after Chugwater Lek.

The 2011 sage-grouse breeding season now moved from a general descriptor of birds attending leks to a specific statement of an action: we had our first matings today! There were a lot of females on the lek early in the morning, and while they were hanging out with the males, none were giving a solicitation display. When females are ready to mate, they drop and spread their wings, and lower their body.

It seems like at least an hour had gone by, and the females were still just milling around, when I caught sight of a soliciting female across the lek from my blind. Male #404 (code-name Sargent Clusterbutt- we’re naming our males to help remember their buttprint pattern), was the lucky guy, and became the first male to copulate this year, at least that we’ve seen.

For reference, our previous “first of” dates ranged from 18 March 2007 to 21 March 2008 to 30 March 2006. We’re pretty much in the middle here. In some ways this isn’t too surprising given that we’ve had pretty nice (although windy) weather for the past couple of weeks. But to go from single digit birds less than 2 weeks ago to full-on breeding is still pretty amazing to me.

Speaking of tail feather patterns, although this guy looks pretty good from the front…


He won’t be too hard to recognize when he’s turned around!