Tag Archives: sage-grouse

International Grouse Symposium: Workshop

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Photo: Lucas Spaete

This will be the first of three updates focusing on my recent trip to Iceland for the 13th International Grouse Symposium. I definitely want to thank my collaborator Jen Forbey (Boise State) for this wonderful opportunity. She provided the inspiration (and a whole lot of administration) to put together a workshop on the day before the conference. The theme was how new technology can help us meet management challenges for grouse. In essence, we were able to show off a lot of tools that many biologists have not gotten to see in action.

Jen Forbey (Left) and Marcella Fremgen (Right) discuss technology with workshop participants

We arrived in Reykjavik a couple of days before the workshop so we could prepare. We had five groups presenting at the workshop, including aerial mapping using a helicopter drone, terrestrial laser scanning, an “e-nose” chemical sensing device, and a field spectrophotometer for measuring plant characteristcs. Gail and I had a dual station- she shipped the robot and I brought the Encounternet system. Some of the stations went through dry runs at the venue, a small zoo/park in downtown Reykjavik, while the rest of us polished our presentations.

Just like real field work, our careful planning lasted until it didn’t. On the day of the workshop we had periods of intense rain and wind. After our initial introductory comments, Gail and I, as well as Donna the drone expert, remained in the tent area. Groups of workshop attendees rotated through the various stations. I think we were a popular one in part because we were inside and next to the coffee!

Donna Delparte takes advantage of a break in the rain to provide a demonstration of the aerial mapping using a copter drone.

We were certainly popular with this uninvited guest.

All in all it was an interesting workshop for everyone- I certainly learned a lot about some of the great new tools coming on-line now.

2015 Field Recap part 3: Outreach

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With the 7 days a week we spent catching/watching/following sage-grouse, it is amazing we had any time for anything else. We did manage a few outreach events. Here’s a quick recounting:

Gail participated in a press junket in Pinedale sponsored by Fish and Wildlife. This resulted in a lot of interviews and articles mentioning the fembot and our work, including this LiveScience piece. Another humorous bit of press: having our robot held up as Wyoming’s symbol of Earth Day in the Parade Magazine Sunday newspaper supplement. Never mind Yellowstone, Grand Teton, wolves, bison, grizzlies, or even a live sage-grouse, somehow a robot grouse made by a California lab best represents Earth Day in Wyoming! We had to laugh at that.

We also helped with a number of local events. Gail brought the robots down for a weekend Ag fair in Lander, and also a sort of project summary for the BLM biologists at the field office in Lander. I took part in a 4th grade Outdoor Education event in Sinks Canyon. This was a station dedicated to introducing bird ID and bird watching skills, sponsored by Red Desert Audubon Society.

Jazmyn McDonald points out a bird during one of the sessions at Sinks Canyon

Del displays specimens of local birds.

Practically on our way out of town back to California, I gave a popular talk sponsored by Red Desert Audubon. Even though it was Friday evening, we still got over 40 people there! It was really nice for us to finally get a chance to talk about what we’ve been doing in the Lander area for the past 10 years.  The Red Desert folks were thrilled as well– they are a smaller chapter and don’t often get to organize events like this. Hopefully not the last time we’ll be able to plan something with the local birding and conservation community.

Although it aired since we returned, we had some hand in The Sagebrush Sea outreach (as well as a little bit with the production). We helped find a venue for a local screening event, and Gail even filmed some Q&A for Wyoming Public Media. This film, which aired this week on PBS Nature, was produced by staff the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, including our collaborator (and first person ever to make a sage-grouse recording array), Marc Danztker. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is now available online from the PBS Nature website.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/sagebrush-sea-full-episode/12341/

Another highlight of the season was getting to meet well-known photographer and conservationist Noppadol Paothong. Nop recently published the book “Save the Last Dance” on the plight and wonderment of North American prairie grouse (sage-grouse, prairie-chickens, etc). This book is a beautiful passion project and won and independent book award. Nop is now working on a new book focused entirely on sage-grouse, and wanted to check out our research. Who knows, maybe you’ll get to see one of the fembots in a book soon!?

I may think of some other highlights worth posting, but otherwise, stay tuned for summer updates. On tap for the next few months will be revisions, writing, analysis, and getting ready for a couple of presentations at the International Grouse Symposium in Iceland!

2015 Field Recap Part 2: Research

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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

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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!

The Sagebrush Sea

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We are back from our field season in Wyoming! I’ll recap our season soon, but first wanted to post an announcement for a great PBS Nature program airing this week. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology produced a beautiful film about the sagebrush ecosystem called The Sagebrush Sea. Much of it was filmed in west-central Wyoming near our field site (although I’m not sure any shots from the Hudson area made it in the final cut). One of the producers is Marc Danztker, a collaborator who got his PhD with long-time sage-grouse biologist and eminent behavioral ecologist Dr. Jack Bradbury. It was Marc who first set up a microphone array on a sage-grouse lek– he did so in order to measure the odd acoustic directionality of some parts of the sage-grouse display.

The crew of "The Sagebrush Sea" visit chicken camp (2014)

The program got a write-up on the Nature Conservancy’s blog Cool Green Science, written by none other than Lander biologist Holly Copeland. Holly has become a great friend to Chicken Camp. She and her husband both came out to help trap sage-grouse, and they’ve hosted our entire crew for a bbq for the past few years. Holly also does important work on land-use issues related to the sage-grouse and is currently on Wyoming’s Sage Grouse Implementation Team tasked with revising sage-grouse protections using the best science available to help keep the birds’ populations as strong as possible and off of the endangered species list.