Tag Archives: sage-grouse

Looking Back on the 2012 Season

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We haven’t left Wyoming yet, and I don’t consider our season officially done until we’ve washed the vehicles and returned them to Fleet Services at UC Davis, but the crew leaving and having to pack up camp definitely puts me in a retrospective mood. Some thoughts on the 2012 season:

Overall we got REALLY lucky with the weather. This has been an amazingly warm, dry year, and we were rarely prevented from accessing the leks or collecting data. It seemed like we might have gotten a little more wind in the mornings, and the rain-out on our final experiment (when Stacie was going to get to join us on the lek) was a bummer, but otherwise we really could not ask for better weather.

As I said in my last post, the crew was fantastic. This project requires field technicians who completely buy in to what we’re doing, and they seemed to do that. It makes it much more fun when they are nice interesting people who are easy to live with, which they were. Once again, we did a good job selecting these folks out of the pool of more than 70 applicants.

Anna getting video of female behaviors on Cottontail

We collected a LOT of data this year. The arrays were installed relatively early, so we got sound recordings from before or around the peak in breeding. We managed at least two experimental treatments on each lek. Anna collected focal data on courtships and female behavior almost every day.

Gail did a great job turning an idea for a robot into a working tool for interacting with free-living animals. Besides just getting a realistic looking skin on the taxidermy mold, she had to solve challenges like figuring out the best wheels or treads, figuring out how to make the tail bend down when the robot leans forward so the robot isn’t mooning the whole lek. In general, the males really responded well this year.

Having to drop Preacher Lek from our stable of focal leks could have been a problem, but I think we handled it pretty well. Preacher’s replacement, Cottontail, was definitely a challenge, but I feel good about our effort there. Liz (and sometimes Mel) had to put some long hours there waiting for the last birds to leave. There were a lot of birds, and probably some movement of males back and forth from the upper center to our focal area closer to the reservoir. This meant new birds showing up all the time!

Our crew scheduling worked pretty well- it was a little uneven in that Cottontail always had more of everything than either Monument or Chugwater, but there are only so many ways to spread 4 people over 3 leks. Hats off to Mel for being a great floater, and learning the birds at all 3 leks. Although it might not have felt like it sometimes when we had to make last minute changes, but we did a much better job of planning ahead as well. Our crew not only had more frequent mornings off (once every eight days), but often actually knew when those were going to be.

The crew may have spent as much time watching video grouse than they did watching live ones. Collecting video data back in the lab will now be a lot easier, as we will know which males were where for the fembot experiment tapes, focal female courtship tapes, and the sound recording. This was definitely not the favorite part of the job for the crew, but they managed to get it all done.

The "unexplored" valley of Coal Mine Draw, complete with a lek

I found a new lek! And not too far from our camp. I think that’s pretty neat. I got to do counts on several leks I’d never been to. It’s nice to hear from the local managers like Sue and Stan how important these counts are.

 

No high-speed video this year. We still haven’t analyzed the set of clips that Gail collected last year. HSV is always really fun, and can be something the crew starts analyzing here, but we had neither the time nor the specific question that required it this year.

We didn’t spend much time capturing birds this year. This is probably our biggest challenge now- figuring out how to schedule a crew so we can work at night, in the morning, and in the afternoon. Something to think on for next year.

I got to meet Joe Hutto.

It was really fun to see our research area in such a warm year. The season was advanced substantially, so we got to see a lot of plants and animals that we normally miss. And in any year, this is a really special place to get to live and work. The more than 5000 photos I’ve taken this spring can attest to that!

"Super-moon" from a couple of days ago

Midnight Ornithology

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Working with sage-grouse means having an extremely unpleasant work schedule sometimes. Watching them on the lek entails getting in a blind before dawn. Catching them often means working at night, driving around looking for them using spotlights, and catching them with hand nets. Very few sage-grouse research efforts have combined intensive morning observations on the leks with simultaneous spotlighting at night. We would like to become one of these, but thusfar have weighted our efforts much more heavily towards getting behavioral data while relying on the pattern of the undertail coverts (i.e. “ buttprints”) to distinguish males.

Sunday morning was our first try at spotlighting this year. We got up at around 12:15 AM, and headed out towards Chugwater at about 1. We looked for birds until about 4AM. We managed to catch and band a male and a female- definitely putting us above average for productivity compared with our spotlighting attempts in previous seasons. We managed to get back to camp by about 4:30, had 20 minutes to gather our gear for the lek and eat a quick bowl of cereal, then headed back to Cottontail to run an experiment. We all got a good nap in once we got back, then headed down to Sue’s (the biologist at the local Bureau of Land Management office who helps us coordinate our research) for dinner. Sue sets a great table, and we enjoyed hanging out with Stan (Wyo Game and Fish biologist) and Tim (another BLM biologist). All in all a long but fun day!
The photo above is a time lapse I shot during our spotlighting effort.

Video of an experiment

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We’ve started Round 2 of our experiments, measuring how responsive males are to differences in the behavior of the robot female. We want to see if we can explain some of the variation we see in how hard males are working on the lek, and one of the things we would like to know is the importance of female interest- if a female is disinterested, should a male work harder to try to win her over, or cut his losses and save his energy for the next potential mate? Does it matter what his expectation is for another female visit, and how successful he is?

Below you can see a clip of the disinterested behavior- the robot is simulating pecking at the ground. Real females frequently do this on the lek as well. This clip is from Cottontail, but we finished our second treatment on Monument Lek this morning. Chugwater will require one more experiment, and Cottontail will probably require two or three.

I love this video, not only for showing off the great job Gail has done getting the robot to look realistic, but also for the funny chasing behavior occuring in the foreground. A non-territorial male ambles from left to right, and just as he reaches the right edge of the screen, he must spot an angry territory holder. He walks quickly back to the left, and just as he leaves the screen, a fully inflated male comes sprinting across.

Meeting Joe

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One downside of an extended field season is missing many of the great visiting speakers that come through UC Davis. This week, the animal behavior graduate group welcomes Bernd Heinrich, a brilliant scientist and prolific author. I’ve read a couple of Bernd’s books on ravens, including Raven in Winter and Mind of the Raven, and was sad to have missed hearing more about his life and research.

However, this week I did get to meet another biologist that I have admired for a long time- Joe Hutto. Joe conducted an imprinting study of wild turkeys that I read early in my graduate career. I mentioned the book and movie adaptation in an earlier post. I recently learned that he lives in Lander, and was excited to meet up with him this spring.

As part of their month-long series of films for Earth Day, the Lander Public Library showed “My Life as a Turkey” on Thursday. After the showing, Joe got up and talked a little about the production of the film, and answered questions from the audience. I got to speak with him a little bit before and after the presentation. Joe was just as warm and thoughtful in person as he comes across in the books and movies. What a treat to finally get to meet him! We didn’t get to talk turkey very much, but I’ll be heading over to his place on Monday for a visit.

I also talked to a few people there about our sage-grouse work. The organizers of the film series were interested in having “What Females Want” (the PBS Nature show featuring our research) for next April.

Full Moon Fever

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We get to study the sage-grouse in a really beautiful place here in Wyoming, and at no time is that more evident than during the full moon. There’s just something about seeing a moonrise over a vast expanse of sage, or watching the moon set over the snow-topped Wind River Range that just gives me chills. It’s always disappointing when we get cloudy weather on those days, but for this cycle in early March 2012, we were lucky enough to get stunningly beautiful moonrise and moonset. The moonset in particular was really magical- I was in a blind in the snow on Monument Lek. The birds on Monument had not really come in on any morning we were watching yet, but this morning Becca and I heard bird after bird fly in just as the moon started falling below the horizon. I’ve added a few more photos to the flickr albums- check out the Photos page for the links.