Tag Archives: field season

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.

Sage sampling

Posted on by
Reply

Jen explains the protocol.

Our collaborator Jen Forbey came back for a second visit this year to get us oriented to measuring the habitat and sagebrush characteristics at sites used by our encounternet-tagged males.The process starts by downloading a male sage-grouse’s previous day’s gps locations. We throw the points onto Google Earth and look for areas the males were spending a lot of time (in other words, where several points are in within a few meters or 10′s of meters). During they day, presumably these points represent a patch where the male was foraging, and at night, likely a roost site. We load these points onto a hand-held GPS unit, then navigate to the site.

Daubenmire Frame for estimating ground cover.

Once we are at the high-use area, we look around for sign of grouse (and always find something indicating a bird’s presence the previous day, usually some poop or a cecal cast). Once we know where a bird was actually standing, we look at nearby plants for bite marks indicating the grouse was browsing on the plant. We measure browsing intensity and dimensions of the plant themselves. We also use a couple of methods to measure ground cover- a Daubenmire frame where we measure rough abundance of grass and forbs in a small area, and also take a photo of a larger patch of ground from a camera suspended a set distance above the ground. Finally, we clip a few small branches from the sage-plant so Jen and her team can measure nutrients and toxins in the browsed and unbrowsed plants in the area.

When sage-grouse browse, they often leave parts of leaves. You can see the fresh browse marks (cut leaves with green centers) on the left and right of this photo.

Even more than we anticipated, this sage-sampling has been both illuminating and fun. There’s just something really neat about being able to walk a mile (or at least a kilometer) in the shoes of our birds, and see where they are spending time on the landscape. I feel like we are finally studying a complete bird, and not just the fraction of one that displays and fights on the lek. The process of the sampling itself has been enjoyable (at least in the relatively nice weather we’ve been having); it’s nice to be able to work outside with a team of people and to be able to talk without fear of scaring the birds.

Write-up on Cool Green Science

Posted on by
Reply

Last week our research appeared on the front page of the Nature Conservancy’s blog Cool Green Science. Nature Conservancy researcher Holly Copeland lives in Lander, and came out to watch a fembot experiment with Gail earlier in the month. I would be remiss in mentioning that Holly also invited our entire crew of 10 over to her house, and she and her husband Scott cooked us up an amazing meal of locally harvested game animals. A wonderful Wyoming experience!

Encounternet Tags

Posted on by
Reply

Encounternet Tag Solar Power edition.

We are making some progress with the Encounternet tags. Getting the tags out on the birds has gone quite well actually. Ten or 11 of our 13 tags are deployed on male sage-grouse at the moment, and we kept those last two back to be able to carry out tests back at camp. Frank and Julia have excelled in the role of banding technicians. I’ve been out with them several times now, and many nights we’ll catch ~4 birds- a good haul and much better than our past attempts at spotlighting.

 

The harnesses seem to be holding up as well- none have fallen off yet, and the tagged birds are showing up on the lek and performing their full suite of fighting and display behaviors.

Male "Tiny Dancer" wears a tag on his rump. He continued to mate with females after his tag was put on.

As a reminder, our goal with these tags is to collect positional data on the males, and to know something about their behavior at these positions. In particular, we want to know where the males are foraging so we can visit these sites and determine the nutritional and chemical quality of the sagebrush they are eating.

We are learning that getting these data off of the tags is a non-trivial task. One issue has been the relatively weak signal strength from the tags themselves. Traditional radiotelemetry uses lower frequency pulses that transmit long distances. The higher-frequency data transmissions from our encounternet tags do not travel well when transmitted close to the ground, and unfortunately sage-grouse spend virtually all their lives within a few inches of the ground. We’ve had to put our receivers higher up and a little closer to the birds. The grouse don’t seem to care about the pvc poles that are popping up on the leks. We included perch deterrents on our permanently placed receivers to ensure that raptors don’t start to use them.

We’ve also had to do some optimizing on settings and firmware to actually get usable data, and now are starting to get some nice positional data on at least a couple of our correctly configured tags. I’ve figured out how to get the data into Google Earth to display. Here you can see movements from “Steve”, a Chugwater grouse who was first captured as a young bird in 2010 and has been a reliable lek male for the past few years. The points are roughly every hour, and the tracks show him moving a little less than a kilometer from the lek each day. Each day he seems to use a different area.

GPS points from male "Steve". It is so exciting for us to learn more about what these males are doing off the lek.

Next up, in addition to getting the remaining tags properly configured, is to determine which points to visit for vegetation sampling. These decisions will be based on a combination of GPS accuracy and likely activity, hopefully eventually with the accelerometer behavior data as well.