Tag Archives: fembot

2014 Season Start-up

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Pronghorn Lodge, our home away from our home away from home in Lander.

March 4:  It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a week since we loaded up the Durango and trusty Dodge pick-up (“Snowchief”) and headed out for Wyoming. A thousand miles, one-and-a-half books on tape, and one smoky hotel in rural Nevada, and we’ve exchanged the warm California winter for the icebox that is Lander. Although it had been about nine months since we last said goodbye to our second home in the sage, pulling into town always makes me feel like I’ve never left. From the friendly guy at RadioShack to the burgers and brew at the Lander Bar to the dips in the road as we leave the highway in Hudson, it really does feel like a time-warp has just removed everything that’s happened since we pulled up stakes last year. It is actually kind of eerie.

In spite of the familiarity of the place, field work is not exactly like Groundhog’s Day. Each year has it’s own set of challenges though. The first week was a bit of a “hurry up and wait” affair. We rushed to get the trailer out of storage in Riverton, only to find, when we de-winterized it, that the water heater wasn’t working. A night in the RV park with the heater running fixed that problem, and we got it up the hill the next day in hopes of get camp up and running quickly. Unfortunately, high winds east of us prevented the work trailer delivery from Casper on both Friday and Saturday. This has happened only once or twice before (last in 2011), and we actually asked some of the crew with flexibility to delay their arrival.

Waiting for trailers meant waiting in a hotel room PACKED with our gear.

This had the added benefit of not having people driving during the snowstorm that hit on Saturday. We only got a few inches in Lander, but temperatures dropped to about zero. We more or less stayed in the hotel, staying out of the cold and catching up on computer tasks while we waited for the trailer delivery. With no good place to unload, or gear stayed in the hotel rooms as well. Finally one office trailer arrived on Monday gave us room to unpack the RV and make some living space. The second office trailer (yes, our first 3-trailer camp since 2008) came just in time for several assistants.

Two office trailers, for the first time since 2008! A Wyoming metropolis rises in the sage.

While we may not have been ready, the sage-grouse seem to be, at least a lot more than last year. With minimal snow on the ground and what seems like healthy sage for them to eat, we’ve already seen males and in some cases females on the lek.

By Tuesday we had the whole crew, and were able to welcome them to Chicken Camp 2014 edition! Welcome back Frank, and welcome Jess, Julia, James, Sam, and Sean!

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.

 

In the home stretch

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A male in the snow at Cottontail Lek.

I’m sitting at my desk, once again watching snow swirl outside the window and listening to the quiet churring of the electric heater. We’ve been getting about one snow storm per week- this is at least the fourth that we’ve had since late March. With the possible exception of Jessica Blickley’s 2009 season out here, we’ve never had this much winter weather, especially this late into the season. It’s often getting legitimately warm by this time in April (daytime highs in the 70’s), but not this year!

With less than two weeks left with the crew, the last few days look to be even more critical than usual. We’ve got a lot of the normal wrap-up still to do- calibrating the array and acoustic localization system, taking down the array, and proofing all of the field data would probably be enough to keep us busy. Add to that some new things for this year including the sagebrush sampling I alluded to in this earlier post, two photo analysis projects, plus all of the video analysis the crew has been doing to identify males on the lek tapes- now our schedule looks positively packed.

Gail snaps a photo of me learning to drive the robot.

Unfortunately this list still leaves off two of our main goals for the season– running our experiments with the robotic female Sage-Grouse, and testing out the encounternet telemetry tags. The robots are finally done, or at least very close to completed, and we are hoping the tags might be shipped to us this week. Once the snow melts, we’ll need to hit the ground running almost literally to practice for the experiments, catch a couple of males, and get all of the other things done. A big storm now could scuttle all of these plans, but thankfully this one seems to be fairly mild, and we may only end up with an inch or two that should hopefully melt quickly once the temperature climbs back above freezing.

The season has definitely been a challenge, and not just because of the weather (although the alternation between snow and mud, with few dry days in the cycle, have been frustrating for us). I mentioned in the mid-season update about the lower numbers of males we’ve had on the leks this year. This has been more than just an issue about monitoring enough birds to allow us to conduct statistical analyses.

Monument Lek, our long-term study lek, reached the point where males were abandoning their territories. We normally collect data on the whole lek at once, with video cameras filming all the males, and our field technicians adding notes of field locations so we can figure out which male is where on the video screen. We also place microphones in locations across the lek in order to record all the males simultaneously. Neither of these methods works very well when the males pull up stakes and display from different areas every day!

We have had to be flexible this year and change our strategy on Monument Lek. Rather than a “record everything” approach, we have shifted to a focal male approach, where every morning we’ve tried to target a few of the males displaying around the lek for video and audio recording. We’ve managed, for at least two or three days, to measure strut rates and get sounds from most of the “regulars” that stuck around the lek for the last half of the season. We also have some mating success data for these males. Although it isn’t ideal, we will have at least some continuity with our previous data for this lek.

My last view of a grouse on Monument Lek this year may be one of these guys displaying in the sage far from the main clearing.

It’s hard to know what caused such a dramatic change on this lek, but I do have one (very speculative) hypothesis: lack of water. The main lek area features a prone tractor tire that is used as a water trough for the summer cattle. In most years, there is a puddle surrounding this tire, and sage-grouse of both sexes would visit this. Most females visiting the lek would walk from the northern corner down to the tire for a drink, and many of the top guys’ territories would either be near the tire or along this path of movement.

This explanation would fall under the hotspot hypothesis for lek evolution. This is one of several hypotheses put forward for why males would cluster together on a lek rather than pursuing other mating strategies such as, for example, remaining with one or more females (like most birds). The idea is that males are able to assess where the density of females is likely to be highest and several males will settle there. If there is a resource drawing the females in, they aren’t defending the resource itself, but instead are taking advantage of an area of increased female traffic.

Mid-season Update

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It’s March 31st, and as we trundle towards April, I realize how tardy I have been with general updates this year. Every season is a little different, and this one is throwing us some curves.

Nine Mile Hill shrouded in snow.

We saw our first copulation on our biggest lek, Cottontail Lek ten days ago (March 21st). This date is pretty normal. We’ve found one earlier (March 19th) in a couple of years, and later some other years. Usually once we see the first one, within a few days every lek is showing multiple copulations. Not this year! We got hit with a blast of really cold weather (lows around 10℉) as well as a few inches of snow.  The females seemed rethink their interest in the males, and it was several days later before we saw the next mating on any of the leks. So while the breeding season opened at a fairly average time, I think the season as a whole is going to be on the late side. On balance, I’m not sure if this will be good or bad for our work this year. The longer we have big groups of real females on the lek, the harder it will be to give our robotic females a private audience. On the other hand, the males may stay interested in courtship a little bit longer so we may not have the problem of the males just giving up at the end of the season the way they sometimes do. We’ll have to see what happens!

Two male sage-grouse battle in the fresh snow on Chugwater Lek.

Other challenges we’ve had to contend with are the incredible shrinking leks. Our initial impression from the first couple of weeks of the season seems to be correct– male attendance is down considerably from last year in our area. This may be due to the drought the Lander area is experiencing, at least there’s not an obvious other candidate for the decline. Our sage-grouse manager contacts have mentioned that the rough demographic analysis from hunting data suggested low recruitment (not many yearling birds taken compared to the number of adults).

To give you a sense of the change in abundance since we started the project here: Monument Lek, our main focal lek since 2006 when it had over 100 males, has dropped to under 10 birds and males are not staying as reliably on their territories. Anna has still gotten some playback experiments done, but Monument is right on the edge of being useful or not as one of our experimental leks.  We just showed the PBS Nature episode featuring our research (“What Females Want…”) as part of another outreach event down at the Lander Public Library. The footage was shot in 2007 when the male counts were an order of magnitude higher. The difference definitely makes us a little sad, and we are hoping this lek rebounds quickly as it has done in the past. Sue at the BLM told us that in the 80’s it was down to 4 birds, and later climbed back to over 100, so we hope this is another one of those cycles.

Shallow trenches prepared for laying microphone cables at Monument Lek. This lets us put microphones all over the lek, while keeping the cables underground. The speakers are for the playback experiment.

Otherwise we are in pretty good shape with most of our “normal” tasks. We have microphone arrays deployed on all three focal leks now, and have gotten several days of sound recording in.  We’ve also gotten at least one round of counts at our non-focal leks, to help the local sage-grouse managers monitor the grouse population in the district. The only things we are missing are the new robots (Gail is working on taxidermy aspects now, so those should be ready soon), and the encounternet telemetry tags. I say “only”, although those are definitely two very important pieces for our research goals this year and in the next couple of years!

Playback Experiment, 2013 Edition

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In my last post, I talked about the usefulness of our robotic grouse for studying complex social interactions on the lek. This week we tried another method for modifying a male’s social experience– audio playback.

Male Sage-Grouse listening to our rock speakers.

We have a long history of playing back sounds to the Sage-Grouse. For the first several years our basic behavior studies were running along side the ‘Noise Project’, an extensive research program into the effects of noise associated with energy development on the grouse. The centerpiece of the Noise Project was playing back the sounds of two common noise sources (drilling sounds and road noise) from the Pinedale Anticline/Upper Green River area.  We used fake rock speakers, possibly the same kinds you might have seen in a SkyMall catalog, to play these sounds at leks, and compare how many birds showed up and their behavior between the noisy leks and control leks that had. I’ll talk more about the results from this project in a future post.

We also used the speakers in 2011, this time as part of the basic behavioral research program. We’ve been interested in the importance of “courtship skills” in the males, and part of that is how attuned males are to changes in their social environment. Does a male change his courtship behavior a lot when a female gets closer, or not very much? Our first experiment with the fembot showed this was related to the success a male has in courting females.

One species used in our 2011 playback study: Pronghorn

Our experiment in 2011 was designed to look at another dimension of responsiveness- how attuned are males to the threat of potential predators? Here we chose alarm calls o f three different species that live with the sage-grouse: ravens, killdeer, and pronghorn antelope. We played these from the rock speakers and measured the strength of the grouses’ reaction, as well as how long it took them to resume their original behavior. Analysis is ongoing, so we don’t yet know how this sort of “ecological” responsiveness relates to their social responsiveness or their success on the lek.

Fast forward to 2013, and we’ve set up the speakers once again, this time to measure how males respond to other males. It would be great to have a robotic male, but as you can imagine, making a mechanical male that is realistic enough to give a convincing display would be a steep technical challenge (never mind making one sturdy enough to withstand an attacking male). Instead, we are playing back the sounds of male struts from the rock speakers to see how males respond to a simulated male at the edge of the lek.  Anna has been putting together recordings with different call rates, so we can see if they are attuned to differences in the signals that males may be sending out. We’ve only just begun, but this will hopefully allow us to collect some interesting data on how males respond to other males while Gail puts together the new fleet of robots.

We also played a control vocalization– Horned Lark.

In other news, we observed the first copulation of the season yesterday! The breeding season has officially begun. Our earliest observation ever was on March 19th (in two different years), so we are on the early end of things.