Tag Archives: field work

2015 Field Recap Part 1

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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!

First Days: 2015 Field Season

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Welcome to Wyoming! Mwuahahaha

In spite of some snow and one of the coldest periods we can remember, things are getting going! Our crew, or at least most of them are here, and we’ve now been out to see the grouse two days in a row.

It took a couple of days, but four of our five technicians are here now. Arrival day coincided with the most recent winter storm, so one tech didn’t make it until a day later than the others (no big deal in the name of safety). The 5th technician? Well, that is another story. We’ve had people withdraw from the project before, sometimes for personal reasons, sometimes to pursue other career opportunities. It’s always a bummer when someone breaks their commitment to join us in Lander, but at least they’ve usually given us some advanced notice so we can find a replacement. Until now… Tech # 5, who was himself a replacement for someone else who withdrew back in January, let us know just a few days before the start of the season that he wasn’t going to make it!

When Gail and I stopped seeing red, we posted a quick request for a replacement on social media. We got a great response- strong applications from all over the country, and their references were similarly quick to get back to us or willing to spend a few minutes over the phone to discuss the candidates. Miraculously, three days after we sent out the request, we made an offer to our top candidate and that offer was accepted! We will be at full strength next week. I feel like modern-technology is a double-edged sword for us with regard to hiring and retaining our crew- it seems a lot easier now than it did even 6 years ago for people to continue to prospect for new jobs, but at the same time when we need to fill a vacancy ASAP, it sure is nice to be able to spread the word so quickly without having to formally post an advertisement and deal with the dozens of responses like we do in the fall. A big thank you again to all those who helped us get the word out.

First sage-grouse of the season! Right where they are supposed to be on Chugwater Lek.

Back to Chicken Camp. The crew’s first morning here was well down the minus side of the Fahrenheit scale. Chances of sage-grouse doing much interesting was pretty low, and chance of misery on our part was pretty high, so we delayed our first visit to the leks until yesterday. We drove out towards Chugwater and were rewarded with 6 males visible. We parked along the road and checked them out in the scopes for a while, then headed past the lek and visited a neat badlands area. The crenulated landscape was particularly beautiful with the few inches of snow.  All in all a nice morning.

Today we got into some proper grousing. Ryane and Amber set up a blind on Chugwater Lek while I took the rest of the crew up to our overlook hill. It was quite a bit warmer than yesterday, and really one of the most stunning combinations sunrise and moon-set that one could ever see. (Regular readers will remember that I get really excited over the full moon here). We saw 10 male grouse on or near the lek. They all hunkered at some point, implicating a nearby predator of some kind, but it wasn’t until about 6:30 that a Golden Eagle flew high over the lek and scared the birds away. We waited to see if the birds would return, and for the moon to finish setting, but were out of there pretty early by sage-grouse standards. An entirely beautiful and pleasant morning!

We’ve even managed to have a crew birthday already! I think the blue frosting was even bluer in person.

Landing in Lander again: 2015 Field Season

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Red Canyon, near Lander Wyoming

We are at it again folks. We’ve left California’s balmy winter weather and are once again freezing our tail feathers off in Wyoming. For Gail this is now year 10 for sage-grouse work in the area. For Ryane, Gail’s Ph.D student, it is her first time at Chicken Camp.

So what brings us out this year? The answer is some of the same questions that brought us out last year. I’ll have more details on our research questions as the field season progresses, but the short of it is we want to study the links between what a male sage-grouse eats and how he forages off the lek, and how that relates to the kind of show he can put on and the decisions he makes on the lek. This will involve putting Fitbit like devices on the birds to figure out where they go and when they are actually eating, then going out and collecting some of the plants they were eating to figure out how their diet compares to other males. We can then measure their courtship chops on the lek by watching them interact with real females or with one of our “fembot” robotic females.

If you want a refresher about sage-grouse and their fascinating breeding system, check out a previous post describing what a lek is all about.

On with the adventure…

Right now we are still in the set-up stage.  With the help of several other Patricelli lab members (thank you Dustin, Mary, and Alli), we packed our vehicles with research gear and drove out from Davis. As trips go it was pretty uneventful– blue skies and clear roads for the whole trip. As we pulled into Lander, we came across a large herd of elk near the top of Red Canyon.

Chaining up.

Getting four trailers (two travel trailers, an equipment trailer, and a leased office trailer) out to our field site always seems simple in principle. Yet somehow it is always a much longer process than one would think. Our first full day in Lander ended with just the main travel trailer up the hill to Chicken Camp- between unloading some gear from the trailer, hitching up, driving it to an RV park to flush out the antifreeze, unhitching, hitching up again, chaining up for the somewhat snowy road, and then finally getting it in place and leveling, it is quite a process! This is one of the dirty little secrets that nature programs don’t tell you– the logistics of doing field work are a story to themselves.

Gail's new digs...

Gail’s new trailer joined the Trailbag yesterday, and today we got the office trailer delivered from Casper on the first try. Often there are high winds that prevent delivery, sometimes for several days. It seems like when we give ourselves a few extra days in case there is a delay we don’t end up needing the buffer, but when we cut it too close then we get the stretch of bad weather as we did last year.

 

Brrr!

The main thing we have been battling this time around is the bitter cold. Temperatures have been in the teens so far so it’s made all the loading and unloading pretty unpleasant.  On day 2 I was smart enough to put on rain pants after having my soaked jeans freeze solid on day 1. The cold has affected our trailer too. The water pump isn’t working right now. I guess of the amenities we have, losing water faucets is not a big deal as long as we have heat and electricity. We have two or three days to get that sorted out, and also to unpack, before our crew arrives.

For the next update, hopefully we will have some news from the leks!

2014 Field Season Recap

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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!

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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.