Tag Archives: retrospection

2015 Field Recap Part 2: Research

Posted on by
Reply

As I mentioned in the last post, things seem to be looking up for the sage-grouse. So what about our research?

Lots of sage-grouse watching again this year

A burrowing owl looks in on the sage-grouse lek

We stuck with the same two focal leks that we used last year, Chugwater and Cottontail. Basic monitoring went well, especially with the increasing number of banded birds making it a little easier to get ID’s on the lek, especially in windy weather. We came back with a great set of video and audio data. What is particularly nice is that we can now look at lekking behavior in an increasing population. We now have a lot of recordings from “bad” years in which the population was declining, so seeing how hard males work and what females do in a “good” year, a year with lots of young males on the lek and possibly better overwinter survival, could make a nice contrast when we start to examine the long-term trends in display and mate choice.

The first of our main goals was to continue with our robot experiments. This year, our goal was to try the “outside option” experiment again. We first tried this in 2013, but our additional robots “Salt” and “Pepa” were not constructed until fairly late in the season that year. We started a few trials, but the males were already winding down their display effort and were not responsive enough to warrant trying a new series. Turn to 2015, and we now have our robots ready! Credit to Anna Perry, who devised the first protocol, Ryane, who took the reins this year as experiment planner and main robot director, and of course Gail who put the robots together and has been working with robot birds for a long time.

So what was the experiment? Briefly, there’s a principal from the economic literature that while negotiations and haggling often occur in one-on-one situations, the broader market includes lots of different options and competitors for both buyers and sellers, and the presence of these “outside options” can make a big difference in the decisions that are made in the market. In particular, if a seller is engaging with one buyer who is not terribly eager to buy, the seller might benefit from switching to a new buyer, but only if the new buyer seems more profitable or eager than the original trading partner.

We wanted to test this with the sage-grouse, using two fembots as potential “buyers”, and treating the male sage-grouse as sellers. We were able to get trials on each lek where the outside option was either “interested” or “disinterested”. We also ran control trials throughout the season with only a single robot- these will help us correct for seasonal changes in how hard the males work (they seem to get tired towards the end of the season).

A successful night

Our second main goal was to gather a lot of movement and foraging data, so we can uncover the feedbacks between on-lek display behavior and off-lek foraging behavior of the males. This was moderately successful. The first step was catching males and putting on encounternet transmitters. These are small solar-powered devices that can log both where the male is and also capture data about how it is moving it’s body. We managed to get around 20 tags deployed, although we were hoping for more. The tall grass, while great for the birds in providing cover from predators, may have made it more difficult to see the eyeshine at night during our spotlighting forays. Additionally, the age ratio of the growing population meant there were more young males to be caught, and not all of those males set up territories on the lek.

Downloading encounternet data

All in all, we collected tracking data from 7 males, which when combined with the 4 males from last year, should give us a good picture of where males go off the lek and how they spend their time. For these 7 males, we used the positional GPS data to go out and find their foraging and roosting spots, and measure aspects of the habitat at these locations to learn more about how male sage-grouse use the landscape. We also took small clippings of the sagebrush to see how selective they might be in what they are eating.

One new pilot project this year, we collected some poop from the leks to check for the presence of a certain type of gut parasite called coccidia. If sage-grouse have a lot of it, it could be an important factor in explaining differences in behavior. There’s also the possibility that the toxins in the sage are strong enough to limit this type of parasite. Dr. Rich Buchholz at the University of Mississippi has agreed to look through our samples and give us an idea of what we are working with.

Many thanks to our crew this year Amber, John, Miles, McKinzie, and Kelly for their help this year! Also thanks for the help from the Boise State crew, in particular Chelsea and Marcella who stayed at Chicken Camp for several weeks helping catch birds and organize the vegetation sampling. Also thanks to Sue Oberlie (BLM) and Stan Harter (WyoG&F) for local institutional support and a number of people who stepped in once to help capture sage-grouse. We couldn’t have done it without you all!

The 2015 Crew

In the next post I’ll talk about outreach and other odds and ends of the season.

2015 Field Recap Part 1

Posted on by
Reply

I’m not going to lie– as much as I enjoy Wyoming, it was really nice to roll down from the Sierras and be greeted by the golden hills of drought-stricken California. It was a good but exhausting season with very little opportunity for diversion or reflection. Now that I’m getting settled back in my office, I finally have a chance to summarize what the last 2+ months of Chicken Camp have yielded.

LOTS OF GROUSE, LOTS OF RAIN!

Counting Chickens

The dry conditions in the West had not done the sage-grouse any favors, and over the past seven plus years we had watched the leks in the Hudson area shrink each season. Last year was a mixed bag, with some leks up in numbers and some leks down (and one lek, Preacher Lek, completely empty of birds on all of our counts). In 2015, were we finally turning the corner? Was the population cycle finally finding it’s upstroke?

 

It was with trepidation that we watched the trends in lek attendance this year. Thankfully, the numbers tell a much rosier tale this time around. All of our medium and large-sized leks showed strong increases. Cottontail Lek, once the monster lek in the area, last year was below 50 males, and this year was close to 80.  Similarly, Chugwater peaked over 30 males, while last year it hovered in the low 20’s. Monument, our original focal lek and site of our first array recordings and robot experiments in the “golden days” of 2006-2008, was up to the mid 20’s, although most of the birds were still out in the sage rather than readily observable in the main clearing. The two smallest leks last year, Coal Mine Draw and Ballinger Draw, were even or down a little, and Preacher remained empty. If I had to take a message from this, I’d guess all leks are not equally efficient at recruiting new males, and that small leks have a harder time recovering their numbers.

The upper display area at Cottontail, with the Wind River Range in the background

Regardless, our focal leks were filling up again, in large part with younger males in their first season of display. In our years of monitoring both Cottontail and Chugwater, we had come to anticipate where the cluster of top males typically hangs out. We were a bit surprised when our early-season numbers on these leks continued to grow, and males started showing up in unexpected places.  This was particularly true at Cottontail, where our main clearing filled out with males for another 100 or more meters. Most of the mating action was still in where we thought it was going to be, although the females would often wander far off camera before coming back and doing their business.

Male sage-grouse hanging out well outside the gridded area at Cottontail.

And the future? Obviously a lot can happen between now and next spring, but we are cautiously optimistic that we will see another bump up in numbers next year. There was more standing grass this year than we’d ever seen, and that should be good for hiding the females’ nests This spring we got a lot of moisture- checking a weather website we’ve gotten almost 7 inches of precip this spring, almost twice the 4 inches that’s average for the region. Through most of April the storms came through at even and well-spaced intervals, keeping things green. We did get some intense rain just before leaving, but the hope is that a green landscape will result in good quality plant forage and lots of insects that provide protein for the growing chicks. Healthy chicks should have a better chance of surviving the winter and showing up on the leks the next year.  And perhaps all the grass this year will also mean good nest cover next breeding season as well.

Rain means green!

The moisture meant it was a pretty good wildflower year as well!

Not as nice for wrapping up the field work though.

End of season mud

But for this year, more males meant more data!  I’ll have an update on our research activities in the next post. More birds* is definitely, erm… good for the birds too, especially on the eve of their potential listing under the Endangered Species Act.

*Anecdotally numbers seem up throughout the region too!

Lab Accolades May 2014

Posted on by
Reply

Some hearty congratulations are due for Patricelli lab members!

First, our honors student Rebecca was awarded the College of Biological Sciences citation as one of the top graduates across all biology majors in the college. She has been working with us for several years, most recently on a thesis project to examine vocal behavior in sage-grouse in response to changes in female behavior. She presented this at last month’s Undergraduate Research Conference, and is completing her thesis soon.

Gail, Rebecca, and Anna celibrate Rebecca's award.

Second, recent Ph.D. (and former Wyoming field assistant) Conor Taff received two major honors yesterday. First, Conor’s dissertation was named the Merton Love Award for best dissertation across the ecology graduate groups here at UC Davis. Given the large number of high-quality graduate students here, this is an enormous distinction! He will be giving the Ecology and Evolution seminar next week. Second, he has been given a prestigious young investigator award by the Cooper Ornithological Society [not the American Ornithologists' Union as I originally wrote]. Conor’s dissertation project was an integrative study of development and sexual signalling in a warbler called the Common Yellowthroat. You can read more about it on his website.

Congrats to both Conor and Rebecca!

2014 Field Season Recap

Posted on by
Reply

Getting muddy out there...

We survived the pack-up and clean-up, and are back in Davis. Once again, Wyoming made this somewhat challenging. There’s been a long-standing joke with our local contacts that runs something like “winter isn’t over until the California ‘Chicken’ crew leaves.” This originated in our first few years, when we always seemed to leave town with a winter storm on our heels. This year, the weather gods seemed to want to revisit this joke. Our pack up week saw 2 decent storms roll through Fremont County. Neither left insurmountable amounts of snow, but we ended up having to pack everything up in a cold muddy morass. Adding to the list of why field work is not always glamorous: scrubbing out dirty trashcans in 32 degree weather with a driving snow, and laying on ones back in a mud-puddle to secure a tarp around a lumber pile. The late season storm did provide some opportunities though, such as seeing the now-blooming paintbrush poke through the snow.

Paintbrush in the snow

We had a break in the weather on our final weekend, and traveled with Stan to Oregon Buttes, a scenic and historic area south of South Pass. Turning south of the highway between Farson and Lander, the first stop was a marker for the Oregon Trail, which comes through that (relatively) low and flat region of the Continental Divide. Onward and we come near the Oregon Buttes themselves, which we got to view through weather oscillating rapidly between snow, clouds, and sun.

Oregon Buttes

Finally we worked our way towards the badlands area of Honeycomb Buttes. The flatlands approaching the buttes held almost comically picturesque herds of wild horses.

Wild horses

The rockhounds among our group (everyone) collected beautiful pieces of petrified wood, fossilized algae, and agates. Finally onto the badlands, which were sprinkled with shards of fossilized turtle shell. It was a fantastic day to explore some different sage-grouse habitat and see a new part of the local scenery.

Honeycomb Buttes

The drive back was uneventful. We made it to Elko, NV as our halfway point, and bypassed the Cabela’s superstore in Reno in the interest of beating Sacramento rush-hour traffic.

Looking back on the 2014 field season, how did it go? It was a particularly exhausting season, with so many new things to figure out, and a large crew to manage. In some ways it felt like our first season when everything was new, although with the pressure and expectations that come with a lot of goals and the knowledge that we are mid-grant with limited time to accomplish our objectives.

Fembot "Salt" approaches the target area as males get excited.

That said, I think we kicked butt this year. We crossed off several major items in our 2014 field effort. First off- the robot experiments were a real success. Anna did a wonderful job in planning these out, and the birds and weather generally cooperated. We had two target areas on each lek, and were able to run at least 3 different trials at each one. On some days both Gail and I piloted robots at the different leks- a first for us (and the first time I’d gotten to drive during a real experiment). Anna was able to train James to be a second experiment director for these dual-experiment days. Hopefully our data will allow us to look both for seasonal trends in courtship effort as well as differences individual male persistence. We will only know the results once we analyze the video and audio data collected along with the experiment, but our impression was that everything worked pretty well this year.

Secondly, we accomplished a whole suite of interrelated objectives as part of the encounternet tag work. Step one of this was to actually capture birds and get tags on them. Frank and Julia got up to speed on this really quickly, and we ended up catching close to 30 birds. Not sure what our average was, but I’d guess close to two birds per night which is not bad with for the relatively small crew we had available to go catch birds on a given evening. Getting the harnesses on the birds had stymied us in the past, but this season we got the hang of it (the rump mounts are a little tricky to fit, and will fall off pretty much immediately if they aren’t attached properly).

With tags on birds, we were ready to tackle the encounternet system itself. With some trial and error and updated versions of the firmware supplied by John Burt, we managed to work on power management of the tag and positioning of the receiving basestations. We ended up with four males for which we could get hourly GPS fixes along with accelerometer activity samples coincident with those fixes. Much thanks to Sean and Sam for building some of the antenna mounts we used.

Finally, with the GPS data flowing in, we could start to crack the foraging ecology questions. Julia was instrumental setting getting an easy protocol for moving  the GPS data from our Google Earth plots onto our GPS. The tags seemed very reliable in pointing us to areas heavily used by the birds, and with Jen Forbey’s help, we became adept at taking samples of the sage and making quick assessments of the habitat at the activity site. We also did lek-based assessments to measure foraging quality at areas surrounding 6 of our leks.

These were the main goals, but we also tackled some auxiliary projects this year. In conjunction with the sage-sampling work, we looked took a series of photographs of various sage-grouse sign (browse marks and poop) to look at how it aged over a period of days. This will help assure us we can identify very recent grouse activity from older sign. Second, we tackled the buttprint aging project again- Sam got started on this early in the season and so this year we’ve managed to save multiple photos for a number of individuals. Combining last year’s data, hopefully we can answer whether it’s possible to reliably age second-year birds based on a distant picture of their tail, and whether this is easier to do early or late in the season.

We accomplished all of these research goals while developing a completely new workflow for our video data. This year we made the transition away from tape cameras and recorded all of our video in full digital format on SD cards.

All in all, a very productive year! Many thanks again to our crew for all their hard work this season!

2014 field season almost over!

Posted on by
Reply

Wow, every year it astounds me how quickly two months can blow by. Field data collection is almost completed for the 2014 field season, and our field crew has one more day (except for Sam who just left to make it to his next field job). One more night of trapping for Julia and Frank, and one more morning of watching grouse butts and writing down locations for Jess, James, and Sean. On Monday Chicken Camp will be Population: 3 once again.

 This crew has been fantastic about keeping up with their data this year. They avoided the daunting pile of proofing that catches us at the end of most seasons, and results in pairs of technicians scattering to various perches throughout camp and reading long strings of “Male 645 6:10 AM Stake C5, 4, 2” to each other for hours at a stretch. As a result we’ve managed to start in on some of the “post season” field tasks in the afternoons. The most noteworthy of these is that we’ve already pulled the microphone cables at both Chugwater and Cottontail leks. Picking up the cables is definitely easier than installing them at the beginning of the season, but it still takes time to clean the mud off of more than a kilometer of cable, coil it so that it doesn’t become a rats nest for the next year, and fill the dirt back in the trenches. Thursday we had glorious weather for this endeavor at Chugwater. Warm, sunny, and fairly calm. Today was threatening to crack 80 degrees with a stiff wind- definitely not the worst weather we’ve had but that wind can really take it out of you.

We also kicked butt in getting counts of the non-focal leks in the area. It’s pretty typical for us to need to complete a final round of counts once the crew leaves. With 6 technicians this year, we could pretty easily spare someone to check out the 10 or so other leks we’ve been monitoring for the local grouse managers.

Depending on the results of trapping and whether we get film of the male with encounternet tag 77, we may be done with all of our field monitoring of the grouse until next year!

I’ll have a more complete recap of the season in the near future.