Tag Archives: capture

2013 Season Recap

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(note- I began writing this entry in the first week in May but finally had time to finish and post it today).

Our wonderful field crew departed yesterday (thank you again Elena, Kate, Christa, Max, and Hannah! You guys were fantastic!), which leaves Gail, Anna and I to finish up things in the field, pack up the camp, and look back on our 2013 field season.

The 2013 crew- exploring a cave in Sinks Canyon. Photo: GLP

Data Proofing. Photo A. Perry

The end of our time in Wyoming always involves proofing data– teams of two people check each line of data in the computer against the field notes to look for typos and other problems. No matter how conscientious one is, mistakes always creep in (especially when one gets up at 4 in the morning!)  Reading each line aloud and filtering data to make sure there are no o’s masquerading as zeros for example, are important ways to insure data quality.

 

 

Waiting to send out the robots. Photo: GLP

In some respects it was a disappointing season, with some of the least cooperative weather we’ve ever encountered. We had repeated cycles of snow every week or two that delayed or prevented meeting some of our field goals. We didn’t have time at the end of the season to run the full suite of robot experiments that we wanted to, so those will be saved for another year. We also didn’t get our sage chemical sampling in, although this was partly a data quality concern (since the sage are producing their ephemeral “summer” leaves now, our results wouldn’t tell us as much about grouse foraging in the late winter and early spring).

We did tick off a few important objectives though. Gail’s redesign of the robots work great- in our tests on the lek they looked good and we didn’t have to mount any “rescues” due to tipping over.  Our crew were instrumental in developing several new protocols ready for next year- including sage sampling, computer-assisted sorting of tail feather “buttprint” photos and moving to a free-ware image analysis program for making those buttprints.

We also got a lot of interesting data from a “bad” year, so we can take a closer look at how environmental variation affects the grouse. Our birds endured a drought; population numbers were really down not only from the high years of 2006 & 2007, but even from last year, so this could have an interesting impact on male traits and behaviors as well as what females like. As Peter and Rosemary Grant showed with their seminal work on Darwin’s Finches in the Galapagos, sometimes you only notice strong selection when times get tough.

As an exciting finale, we finally got two of our new Encounternet telemetry tags, and with Kurt Smith (Ph.D. candidate from the University of Wyoming who is studying Sage-Grouse just southeast from our site), managed to get them on two males from Cottontail.

Male Sage-Grouse with the >30g Encounternet tag. Photo GLP.

After our capture success, we visited Cottontail every morning until our departure to try and test out these new tags. One of our tagged males (male number 641, later called “Talon Krakauer” by our crew), came back to his old territory. We’ll give Kurt a lot of credit for Talon’s return. In our fairly limited experience, birds caught towards the end of the season tend not to return to the lek that season and wait until the next year to strut their stuff. Kurt has put VHF and GPS tags on well over 100 sage-grouse now, so has a good handle on how to make sure the capture and harnessing is as minimally disruptive as possible.

Gail and I monitoring the Encounternet tag while filming the male's behavior

From a blind 40 meters from Talon’s territory, we were able to communicate remotely with Talon’s tag, switch it from the low power mode that that would allow the battery to last until next season to the “streaming” mode that would send real-time accelerometer data from the grouse to our receiver. At the same time we were able to videotape Talon’s behavior. In this way we can correlate the behavior with the movement data coming from the tag. When the birds started looking nervous like they were going to depart the lek for the day, we were able to switch the tag back into the power-saving mode. The GPS sensor on the tag will now come to life every 2 days to take a waypoint, and if all goes well, we will be able to download these points next year and see where Talon ventured throughout the summer and fall.

We will likely do further tests of the accelerometer sensor with chickens back on campus, but we feel much better having some data from an actual sage-grouse in hand.

 

There Will Be Mud

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Wyoming weather is still keeping us on our toes. After bouncing from lows around 10 to warm nights in the 40’s and 50’s at the end of March, we thought we might be back on track for another warm year like last year. Not so fast! A small winter storm became a big one, and we ended up with more than a foot of snow earlier this week. I’m not sure we’ve kept records, but this was probably the second or third biggest snowfall I’ve seen since I’ve been out here.

The biggest was in 2007, I think a day or two after the Pangolin Pictures/PBS crew wrapped up filming, when we got closer to 3 feet of snow. That hit right in the peak of breeding, and we were shut out of Monument Lek for at least 3 days. For our 2013 storm, the peak in breeding had pretty well wound down, so a day or two absent from the lek didn’t feel like the end of the world for us. It did lead to one of those stunningly beautiful mornings we get out here. I think a snowy dawn is a close second to a Wind River moonset as my favorite events out here.

The storm started on Monday, and on Tuesday, we headed into town early due to frozen pipes. The same weather forecast that underestimated our snow by about 80% also failed to inform us that it was going to be single digits at night. Ah, the joys of trailer living. Tuesday and Wednesday were snow days. It took a lot of shoveling by the crew just to get the vehicles out, not to mention clearing a path for the ATVs to get out (and Huff Sanitation to get in). Thursday we finally got out to two of our three study leks. Kate headed out on snowshoes to get a count of birds on Monument Lek, while Christa, Elena, and Max tackled Chugwater Lek, with Elena and Christa trying to get close up video of female behavior for Anna’s projects.

Chugwater Lek proved to be an exciting place. There were at least nine matings, suggesting that the weather had caused some nest failures, and some of the females were looking to re-mate and try to nest again (or alternatively, the snow kept the females away, causing a build-up of receptive females that we happened to catch on our first day back). Second, the guy doing almost all of the matings turned out to be the guy we captured and banded the morning before the snowstorm. Male number 335 (also called ‘Mufasa’), with green and white bands, left our care in very good shape- all his tail feathers, etc. When Elena didn’t see his distinctive tail feather pattern (‘buttprint’) on the morning after capture, we were hopeful that we had gotten the top guy on the lek. In previous years we’ve done a lot of our capture at the end of the season when males were about to pack it in for the year anyway, and often haven’t seen them come back to the lek until the next year. It’s nice to see a released bird not only return, but obviously still be top dog even after a day or two away from the game.

By Friday the crew was back at all three leks. Unfortunately there’s another storm on the horizon for Monday. It’s only supposed to dump 3 inches or so, but that’s pretty much what they said last time. In the mean time, all that snow is melting, and we’re going to be dealing with some of the worst mud we’ve seen all season. Keep your fingers crossed!

<Note- I’ll throw a few more photos up next time I’m in town- the photo uploader hasn’t been working well this morning>

Re-posting Field Crew Advertisement

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For a variety of reasons including wanting to expand the size of our crew, we are looking for an additional one or two assistants for our rapidly approaching field season. Dates potentially a little flexible, but we really need people comfortable driving an ATV (even better if received agency training or certification). Feel free to contact me with any questions.

 

 

Anyway, here’s the revised advertisement:

FIELD ASSISTANTS (1-2) needed approximately March 3 – May 5 (dates potentially flexible) for investigations of the behavior and ecology of Greater Sage-Grouse near Lander, Wyoming and the scenic Wind River Range.  The projects are part of a larger effort in Prof. Gail Patricelli’s lab at UC Davis to understand how sexual selection shapes sage-grouse display behaviors- see the following websites for more information (http://www.eve.ucdavis.edu/gpatricelli/) and (http://www.alankrakauer.org). Assistants will use video and audio recording technology to support an NSF-funded study of courtship dynamics and display plasticity on the lek. Duties include maintaining camera and acoustic monitoring equipment, observation of basic courtship behavior and lek counts, GPS surveying, habitat characterization, assisting in the capture of adult sage-grouse, data entry, and some computer and video analysis. Assistants must be flexible in their needs and comfortable living and working in close quarters in a remote field station, and able to work in adverse field conditions (mainly MUD and COLD).  Work will be daily and primarily early in the morning, with afternoon and night work required as well.  Applicants must have a valid driver’s license, basic computer skills, ATV experience (ideally with formal safety training or certification), and have succeeded in at least one field biology project in the past. Wilderness First Aid or First Responder, and prior experience spotlighting for sage-grouse, preferred but not required. Must be able to show proof of United States employment eligibility. Assistants will receive $600/mo plus room and board, but need to provide their own transportation to Lander and their own personal gear.  Please send a cover letter, resume, and contact info (email and phone) for two (2) references to: Alan Krakauer, Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, 2320 Storer Hall, Davis, CA 95616, or preferably by email to ahkrakauer [at] ucdavis.edu.  The positions will remain open until filled, and review of applications will begin immediately.

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.