Tag Archives: retrospection

2013 / 2014

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Juvenile Male Sage-Grouse, Cottontail Lek

2014 already has it’s talons in me, but I am pausing a moment to share some recollections of 2013 that was.

Last year I built upon my first full teaching gig in 2012. I taught both Animal Behavior during the summer and Evolution in the fall of 2013. The summer course was challenging because of the accelerated pace and because of some necessary travel, both scheduled and unscheduled, in the middle of the summer term. I was thankful to have an excellent co-instructor (Jamie Bunting), and I think we ended up putting together a nice class. The fall evolution course went well. Having a set of notes to work from made a huge difference in my sanity- I no longer felt quite as much of a ‘trying-to-keep-up-on-a-high-speed treadmill’ feeling. This let me put a lot more of my effort into improving the course. I was much happier with the exams in terms of length and clarity, and the homeworks and discussion were better integrated with the lecture material. To some extent this was behind the scenes stuff, and led to (I think) a comfortable class in which expectations for both me and the students were clearly presented. I look forward to working harder on lecture formats and classroom interaction next time I teach.

Research-wise, we got several projects out the door. These included our collaboration with Sergio Pellis on fighting dynamics in the grouse, an applied paper on the effects of radio collars on male sage-grouse in conjunction with Dan Gibson and colleagues at the University of Nevada Reno, a commentary on the utility of avian vocal studies that rely on calls instead of songs (with my former labmate Lauryn Benedict), and a review of male cooperation that I completed with other lab mates Sam Diaz-Muñoz, Eileen Lacey, and Emily DuVal. We got some of sage-grouse work out the door as well, an acoustics paper led by Rebecca Koch and our laterality analysis- these are in revision though.

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

Our new telemetry tags moved forward in 2013 as well. These tags are intended to give us an unprecedented window into the movement and activity of male grouse off the lek. We were able to do some proof of concept of them in the field at the end of the 2013 season. We followed that up with some testing of the accelerometer function by using some captive chickens in the Avian Sciences facility on campus. Now we’re just waiting for the final tags, and we’ll be ready to break a lot of new ground with our field studies in 2014.

Steamboat Springs, home of the Winter Animal Behavior Conference

2014 is already shaping up to be an exciting year. I got to attend the Winter Animal Behavior Conference a few weeks ago- this is a small, intimate meeting with just a few dozen top behavior folks. The conference strives for a really fun atmosphere. I presented some early analyses looking at differences in the distribution of male mating success on leks of different sizes. It feels great to finally be at the point where we can begin to leverage the multi-lek, multi-year nature of some of our data. I’m hoping that these sorts of analyses can complement our more focused studies and help round out the picture of how “negotiation” on the lek proceeds.

Sage-Grouse usually cut all but the base of the leaf.

Along with making use of our older data, we’re also breaking new ground in the field. In addition to the aforementioned tags, we will conduct our first systematic plant sampling to learn more about variation in quality of the food the sage-grouse depend on during the winter.

 

 

This year should see some important and much needed modernization of our workflows as well. We’re finally upgrading our fleet of video cameras to move away from miniDV tapes and onto recording into digital media files on SD cards. This change will necessitate a host of other lab upgrades, including new computer workstations for viewing the video files (we are currently using a trio of refurbished laptops that are literally falling apart) and a robust server to distribute the video files. We may also finally move at least some of our data into a true database instead of simple spreadsheets. These transitions will require quite a bit of planning, but on balance should be big improvements.

Finding a Home on Campus

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I recently had an email exchange with Kraig Adler, a behaviorist and herpetologist at Cornell. Kraig was one of the faculty members that I got to know best as an undergraduate. In fact, he really put more into undergraduate mentorship outside of the classroom than almost any faculty member I can think of. He was the advisor for the Cornell Herpetological Society, a student-run club that hosted speakers, went ‘herping’ (looking for reptiles and amphibians), and even took overnight field trips to important zoos and collections throughout the eastern part of the country. Kraig sent me a recent article about the CHS, which got me to thinking about some of the important things that go into having a successful time as an undergraduate, one of them being finding a home on campus.

I was pretty fortunate to get involved in research early in my career, starting with some work at the Lab of Ornithology with Charlie Walcott and with Katy and Maurice Tauber in Entomology. These were great experiences, giving me real research projects to get excited about and important one-on-one time with faculty mentors. The CHS provided a different sort of home- not only did we get an incredibly helpful and supportive mentor in Kraig, but also a peer group of motivated students to share in the journey.

When I moved to Berkeley, I quickly saw the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology provided a similar kind of home for undergraduates. Hooked by classes such as Natural History of the Vertebrates, students sought other upper division courses taught by museum curators, and many became regulars at the museum Wednesday seminars. Hanging around got them work study positions or other research opportunities, and as a result, the MVZ became their home-base at UC Berkeley.

A home such as CHS or MVZ gives one a set of familiar faces to seek out on the first day of class. You get study partners, friends, and confidants– these are all important things to make it through the hard times in college. None of these advantages are unique to academic “homes” such as I’ve been talking about; finding any group of folks with shared interest is important for creating a support network for yourself. There’s something a little more to the academic home to which I’m referring, in that these promote interacting with faculty and grad students. This seems important for building confidence and demystifying the academic world a bit. Graduate school is not for everyone, and getting to know people who have/are going through that is really key information for making that decision.

While I’ve met a lot of great undergraduates at Davis, including some who have worked in our lab, I haven’t seen something akin to the CHS or MVZ here. Maybe it’s out there, but I haven’t encountered it yet.

2013 Explorations

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One of the perks of working in Wyoming is the natural beauty all around us. This year we did a pretty good job showing the crew around- we got them to Dubois early in the season, and had fantastic weather for our Castle Gardens trip. Unfortunately we ran out of time and nice days to get up to the historical high mountain towns of South Pass City and Atlantic City, and I’m not sure any of the crew even made it up to the waterfall in Sinks Canyon.

In our last couple of weeks we did find some new adventures this year!

 

Photo: GLP

1-    Caving in Sinks Canyon. The lower reaches of Sinks Canyon and the Popo Agie (pronounced pa poggia) are among our first stops with the crew every year. The Popo Agie crashes through it’s boulder-strewn bed and into a wide cave at the Sinks, dives underground for about a quarter of a mile, then reappears at the Rise, a calm pool filled with large trout. What happens between the Sinks and Rise has always been a matter of mystery and speculation for us, until this year! Stan was able to arrange a guided tour of a cave in an overflow channel. After dropping through a small icy grate and climbing on our hands and knees for 50 feet or so, the cave opened up into a series of long narrow chambers of scalloped rock. At a couple of places we could see water. Very cool adventure!

2-    Riverton Pow-Wow. From the local place names to the faces we see in line at Safeway and Walmart, Native American cultures (mainly Shoshone and Arapahoe) are all around us in Lander. This year the Spring Pow-Wow coincided with our last night with the crew, so we headed to the community college in Riverton to check it out. I’ll admit to not fully understanding everything I was seeing, but I thought it was fantastic. The costumes were incredible when taken individually, and even more mesmerizing as part of an “inter-tribal”– a swirling sea of dancers shuffling around the gymnasium floor to the pounding chant of one of the drum circles. The tots in costumes were a universal favorite. Unfortunately it was rounding 9PM and the sage-grouse dances appeared to be hours off still; we’ll have to leave that for another time.

 

Firehole Canyon

3-    Flaming Gorge. As the Green River heads south of I-80, it fills a picturesque valley full of canyons, badlands, banded rock walls, and other spectacular scenery. Despite having zoomed passed this area on the interstate, this was the first trip for all three of us. On our way back to Davis, Gail, Anna and I headed down the east side of Flaming Gorge, stopping at Firehole Canyon with it’s dramatic buttes. Among the other stops were the Red Canyon overlook, which reminded me strongly of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado (except filled with water), and the Sheep Creek Geology loop which started along a riparian area in a narrow shady canyon.

Red Canyon Overlook

Camarasaurus skull

4-    Dinosaur National Monument. Dinosaur N.M. lies 20 miles east of Vernal, Utah, and just south of Flaming Gorge. This is a sprawling park and we were sorry only to see one corner. The highlight of the western entrance is the Quarry exhibit. This is a stunning fossil bed containing hundreds of dinosaur bones. It was a river bed 140 million years ago, and after fossilization the stratum was tipped such that the river bed is now almost perpendicular to the ground. While about 80% of the fossils had been removed, an impressive amount were left in situ. We also had lunch by the river at Split Mountain, and went just up the road to see some neat petroglyphs.

Split Mountain

Lizard Petroglyph

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.

 

Yellowstone Trip Report

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Grand Prismatic Hotsprings, Yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park really is an amazing place- and we were fortunate that it lay on the route from Lander to John Byers’ pronghorn study in western Montana. We were doubly fortunate in that our colleague, Stan Harter, could take a couple of days to show us around. Stan wrote about our trip in the Spring 2012  issue of the Wyoming chapter of The Wildlife Society (pages 8-10). One excerpt from our second evening in the park:

 

 

Sunset on the Lamar Valley was spent on an overlook toward the west end of the main valley. However, we weren’t looking west into the sunset, as the grandest scene in the land unfolded before us, with bison crossing the river, an osprey tending its nest in a high cottonwood, several elk prancing high-necked as if on high alert, more bison and pronghorn mingling about near a cluster of aspen near the river, and on a high ridge another grizzly that seemed larger than the bison which was actually closer to us.
After the sun’s last rays vanished over the western horizon into a cloudless night, we hastened back to the point where we had seen the Mollie’s wolves earlier. A memorable scene

Bison bulls bully full wolves.

unfolded from a seemingly lackluster situation. Twelve of the canids were stretched out in the grass just below the cached carcass in the trees, sleeping off their version of a Thanksgiving food coma. Boring, right!! Not so! After a few minutes of this, we nearly missed the best event ever! A big bull bison was feeding his way uphill into the sprawl of canine slumber, and as he approached, the wolves scrambled out of his way. It was as if the bison was telling them who was really boss. Then about 10 minutes later, another bull did the same thing – and yet another bull followed suit a bit later still. Each time the wolves would bed down again, only to be booted out by the bison!!

 

I’ve put a few photos up in a Flickr album, and will at some point hopefully merge in some from our last trip in 2010. You may think a hundred something photos hardly qualifies as “a few”, but given that I may have shot 50gb of pictures over our 3 day/2night stay in the park, I stand by that statement!