Tag Archives: sage-grouse

Upcoming MDAS talk

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Here are the details regarding my upcoming Mount Diablo Audubon Society talk. This will be at the October monthly meeting (Thursday, Oct 4) at the normal location- Camellia room at the Gardens at Heather Farms in Walnut Creek. The meeting starts at 7PM, and the seminar should start around 8. This will be a sage-grouse talk, featuring how they make sound, and some of the conservation work headed up by Jessica and Gail.

I also received a follow up email regarding my 16 November talk at CCSF. Apparently I have the option of having my talk recorded, and also having the recording broadcast on community access television. Can’t help but think about Wayne’s World now!

How the syrinx got its name

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Some of my work on sage-grouse has focused on how they make sound. In particular, we described a previously unknown “two-voice” phenomenon during the male courtship display, which led us to examine the vocal tract anatomy of the sage-grouse. We found that the form and musculature of the syrinx, the avian equivalent of the larynx, was much different than we expected based on what had been described for domestic chickens. In spite of this work on the syrinx, I didn’t know how this organ got its name. Well, now I know! A Golden Gate Audubon Society blog post by Burr Heneman details the greek myth and the wood nymph named Syrinx.

NSF grant in, NAOC poster done

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A brief mid-summer update- it has been a busy few weeks after getting back from my Wyoming/Colorado trip at the beginning of July. Aside from the usual manuscript reviews and progress on our own manuscripts, a couple of noteworthy things to check off:

Gail, Anna, and I submitted our latest NSF grant that would fund another 3 years of work on the sage-grouse. We brought on another collaborator: Jennifer Forbey is a professor at Boise State University in Idaho, and is an expert in herbivore/plant dynamics, particularly the importance of nutritional content and plant-produced toxins. With Jennifer on board, we will have a much stronger foraging component to our examination of off-lek behaviors of the grouse (in other words, what they are doing the other 20 hours of the day when they are not courting and fighting on the lek ). I feel like I usually do after writing one of these: exhausted but excited.

I also just finished making a poster for the North American Ornithological Congress meeting next week in Vancouver. I’ll be presenting some new analyses on the lateralization in behavior. Last year I presented on a similar topic at the Animal Behavior meetings, but I didn’t have much time to put together something (I was originally going to present our mechanical sound (i.e. “swish” project), but Becca was able to present this work herself, so I switched to the lateral bias analysis at the moment. This year it was still a rush, but I think we ended up with analyses that better link the existing literature on lateral biases to our own data, and hopefully have results that are pretty close to what will end up in the eventual publications.

The second Summer Session started this week in Davis, so I’m meeting with a few new prospective undergraduate researchers. We’ve made a lot of progress so far this summer- we’ve almost finished measuring mating success from our 2012 Chugwater Lek tapes and have started the Monument Lek mating success tapes. Marty, our summer program intern, has even gotten into the 2012 robot experiment tapes. It’s never good practice to get too excited over preliminary results from partially-collected data, but it does look really encouraging so far (his data look at whether males treated the “coy/disinterested” and “interested” behaviors of the fembot differently). We are also almost done with a sample of display behavior measures from the 2011 season- this will add to our understanding of males who were tested in the “environmental responsiveness” playback experiment in 2011.

Sonation Station

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A male sage-grouse "plucks" rows of specialized feathers to make sound

We care a lot about the sounds that sage-grouse make here in the Patricelli lab. Much of our effort has been in understanding how males make the bizarre collection of noises they use on the lek, what do those sounds mean for females, and how do human noise impacts affect wildlife. Among the sounds we’ve become increasingly interested in are the “swish” notes that introduce the rest of the display. These notes are made by the male rubbing his wings against specialized breast feathers, creating sounds that is reminiscent of walking in noisy corduroy pants. Looking at the spectrogram on the computer, the swishes are fairly broadband, but with surprisingly concentrated and variable frequency structure within the broadband noise. You can hear this noise in some of our videos (for example: here, here, and here).

Sage-grouse certainly are not the only kind of animal to make noises by rubbing two parts of their body together, nor it turns out, even the only one to vary the frequency of these mechanically produced sonations. Natasha Mhatre and colleagues recently reported that tree crickets can adjust the resonance frequency of their chirping stridulations.Their wings have multiple natural vibrational modes, and the crickets have the ability to shift the frequency at which the wings are vibrating. This ability to adjust must make for a much more complicated courtship process, since females may not be able to use the simple rule “lower frequency = bigger, better male”.

Many bird species also make sounds with their feathers. One of our collaborators on our sage-grouse work, Kim Bostwick, a curator at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, also works on manakin species that make sounds by rubbing or hitting their wings together. It is a really interesting system, since the relationships between these birds are known, and it is possible to see how these really specialized behaviors and structures have evolved. She recently published on some of the skeletal specializations that these birds have. She is also putting together a really beautiful website that explains her work on these birds. I hope you will check it out: singingwings.org.

 

 

 

Noise Experiment Paper Finally Out!

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At long last (~18months after first submission), Jessica’s paper detailing the multi-year noise introduction experiment has finally been published. Those with institutional access to Conservation Biology can get it here. The paper compares maximum lek attendance of males and females at leks with and without experimentally introduced noise, and found that relatively modest and localized noise sources were enough to cause declines. Two types of noise were used- relatively constant drilling noise, and less predictable truck noise. Somewhat surprisingly, truck noise, although it was intermittent and had a much lower mean amplitude over long periods, was associated with higher declines than the drilling noise.

Having seen the truly Herculean effort it took Diane and Jessica to actually execute this study in the field, and knowing how important it is to have this paper out there while new sage-grouse management plans are being drafted, I’m super excited to see this finally in print. Congrats Jessica, Diane, and Gail!