Tag Archives: field crew

Re-posting Field Crew Advertisement

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For a variety of reasons including wanting to expand the size of our crew, we are looking for an additional one or two assistants for our rapidly approaching field season. Dates potentially a little flexible, but we really need people comfortable driving an ATV (even better if received agency training or certification). Feel free to contact me with any questions.

 

 

Anyway, here’s the revised advertisement:

FIELD ASSISTANTS (1-2) needed approximately March 3 – May 5 (dates potentially flexible) for investigations of the behavior and ecology of Greater Sage-Grouse near Lander, Wyoming and the scenic Wind River Range.  The projects are part of a larger effort in Prof. Gail Patricelli’s lab at UC Davis to understand how sexual selection shapes sage-grouse display behaviors- see the following websites for more information (http://www.eve.ucdavis.edu/gpatricelli/) and (http://www.alankrakauer.org). Assistants will use video and audio recording technology to support an NSF-funded study of courtship dynamics and display plasticity on the lek. Duties include maintaining camera and acoustic monitoring equipment, observation of basic courtship behavior and lek counts, GPS surveying, habitat characterization, assisting in the capture of adult sage-grouse, data entry, and some computer and video analysis. Assistants must be flexible in their needs and comfortable living and working in close quarters in a remote field station, and able to work in adverse field conditions (mainly MUD and COLD).  Work will be daily and primarily early in the morning, with afternoon and night work required as well.  Applicants must have a valid driver’s license, basic computer skills, ATV experience (ideally with formal safety training or certification), and have succeeded in at least one field biology project in the past. Wilderness First Aid or First Responder, and prior experience spotlighting for sage-grouse, preferred but not required. Must be able to show proof of United States employment eligibility. Assistants will receive $600/mo plus room and board, but need to provide their own transportation to Lander and their own personal gear.  Please send a cover letter, resume, and contact info (email and phone) for two (2) references to: Alan Krakauer, Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, 2320 Storer Hall, Davis, CA 95616, or preferably by email to ahkrakauer [at] ucdavis.edu.  The positions will remain open until filled, and review of applications will begin immediately.

2013 Field Crew Advertisements are now posted

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I’ve started posting the job advertisement for our field crew for the 2013 sage-grouse season. We’re looking for 4-5 experienced, motivated, easy-to-live-with assistants to help with our research next season. It should be a fun year- we will hopefully have some encounternet tags to test (next-gen telemetry tags with gps and accelerometers made by our collaborator John Burt), and also likely have multi-robot behavior experiments on the docket.

I’m posting it in the “normal” places (Texas A&M Widlife Job Board, OSNA Job board, Society for Conservation Biology, and Animal Behavior Society- stay tuned for this as they are apparently having problems with their board). There’s a new forum-type board for bird jobs on the Ornithology Exchange- I may try that as well, although it looks fairly redundant with the OSNA job board (at least for our purposes- unfortunately we  can only take US citizens or legal residents and the Ornithology Exchange features a lot of international societies).

Here’s the ad!

FIELD ASSISTANTS (4-5) needed approximately March 3 – May 5 for investigations of the behavior and ecology of Greater Sage-Grouse near Lander, Wyoming and the scenic Wind River Range.  The projects are part of a larger effort in Prof. Gail Patricelli’s lab at UC Davis to understand how sexual selection and environmental acoustics shape sage-grouse display behaviors- see the following websites for more information (http://www.eve.ucdavis.edu/gpatricelli/) and (http://www.alankrakauer.org). Assistants will use video and audio recording technology to support an NSF-funded study of courtship dynamics and display plasticity on the lek. Duties include maintaining camera and acoustic monitoring equipment, observation of basic courtship behavior and lek counts, GPS surveying, habitat characterization, assisting in the capture of adult sage-grouse, data entry, and some computer and video analysis. Assistants must be flexible in their needs and comfortable living and working in close quarters in a remote field station, and able to work in adverse field conditions (mainly MUD and COLD).  Work will be daily and primarily early in the morning, with afternoon and night work required as well.  Applicants must have a valid driver’s license, basic computer skills, and have participated in at least one field biology project in the past. Wilderness First Aid or First Responder, and previous experience/certification with off-road driving and/or ATV’s is preferred but not required. Must be able to show proof of United States employment eligibility. Assistants will receive a total stipend of $1200 plus room and board, but need to provide their own transportation to Lander and their own personal gear.  Please send a cover letter, resume, and contact info for two (2) references to: Alan Krakauer, Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, 2320 Storer Hall, Davis, CA 95616, or preferably by email to ahkrakauer [at] ucdavis.edu.  The positions will remain open until filled, and review of applications will begin immediately.

 

I’ve been pretty busy with teaching over the past month, but hope to have some more research-related updates soon.

NAOC 2012 Recap

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View from UBC

I’m back from Vancouver and the great joint meeting of many ornithological societies. Although there were a few issues, it was, all in all, a great meeting. The venue was beautiful; the University of British Columbia is perched on the end of a peninsula, with stunning views of water, mountains, and downtown Vancouver. The weather was pretty incredible as well: sunny and warm for most of the conference.

 

We had a packed schedule for the four-day meeting. We started at 8:30 with plenary talks from well-known biologists. In the opening plenary, Fiona Schmiegelow gave an overview of research on boreal songbird conservation. Unfortunately I missed the second plenary by Irby Lovette, but the last two were excellent: Roxanna Torres from UNAM led us through 20 years of research on color signaling in Blue-footed Boobies, and Peter Marra from the Smithsonian gave an impassioned plea for the importance of studying winter behavior in migrant birds, and the importance of linking breeding, migration, and wintering ecology.

The talks were all really high quality, not like it was 15 years ago when people were still transitioning into Powerpoint and presentations were still a mix of slides, overheads, and computer. There were 10(!) concurrent sessions, so at times it was a hard choice of which talk to attend. I think the ISBE meetings in Sweden drew away some of the bird song and behavior people. That said, I still saw a number of great talks on sexual selection, bird song, noise impacts, acoustic monitoring, genomics, life history trade-offs, color, and a number of other topics. Sometimes the most unusual talks are the ones that are most memorable- in this case I might give the award to the talk by Mu-Chun Yao (National Tawain University) on how the endangered Fairy Pitta uses monkey poo as a predator deterrent on its nest.

At 5PM, the talks ended and the poster sessions began. The room was fairly spacious for two hundred posters and hundreds of presenters and browsers, although some nights it was on the warm side. I felt pretty good about the response to our poster on lateral biases in sage-grouse behaviors- I was talking to people about it for the entire session on both nights my poster was up. I was hoping someone who specialized in brain asymmetry or behavioral lateralization might stop by to offer criticism or advice on publishing, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. It’s really hard to see every poster even when you aren’t standing their explaining your own, so I’m not terribly surprised.

A real highlight of the meeting was the Bird Band Jam- basically a concert at a local bar featuring several talented musicians from the conference.  I missed the first act, but caught a solo guitarist singing comical songs about birds and birding, then a wonderful sequence of bluegrass/Americana tunes that started with one group and slowly morphed over the course of several songs into another group. The night was capped by a more contemporary rock band that certainly got an A for effort. This was the first time I’ve seen this at a bird meeting (I know Ecological Society of America has something similar), and I think the consensus was to repeat this event in the future.

Closing Banquet in the Anthropology Museum

Meetings are always a good place to start up collaborations, and this one seemed particularly fruitful. I don’t know that I have anything to report right now but hopefully my conversations may have sparked a few projects that I will report on once they get a little closer to being concrete.

 

 

 

Meetings are also a good chance to catch up with old friends. I was pleased to run into four of my former sage-grouse assistants, including Conor Taff (now in our lab), Megan Jones (Florida State), Eli Rose (N.C. State), and the biggest blast from the past Jennifer Sheppard (U. Saskatchewan). I hadn’t seen Jenn since 2006 when she was part of our very first field crew in Wyoming. At that time she hadn’t even completed her undergraduate degree, so it was great to see her doing great work as a full fledged graduate student! I also got to see several former Acorn Woodpecker and Western Bluebird assistants from Hastings. Danika Kleiber is now in graduate school at UBC, and took Sarah Knutie, Lauryn Benedict and I to a waterfowl park south of Vancouver. We enjoyed getting EXTREMELY close looks at some neat birds like Cackling Goose and Sandhill Crane, which clearly warranted a celebratory fresh blueberry smoothie from a blueberry farm on the way back to Vancouver.

And again, congrats to Conor and Jim for their awards!

NAOC 2012: Congrats Conor and Jim!

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I’m back from the NAOC 2012 meeting in Vancouver. More on the meeting in the next post. I just want to highlight the accomplishments of 2 good friends of mine. First, my former grouse watcher and current lab-mate Conor Taff won one of the student presentation awards for his talk on the effects of breeding density on sexual selection in Common Yellowthroats. Conor gave a really impressive talk based on a great analysis of the parentage data from the yellowthroat population he has been working on for a number of years.

Second, congrats to Jim Rivers for receiving the American Ornithologists’ Union Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award. This is a relatively new award, set up in honor of Ned Johnson who was on my dissertation committee at Berkeley before passing away. Very happy my friend Jim was honored with this award- Jim has always been a great scientist, and it’s great that he was also recognized for all the work he’s done to get young ornithologists to feel welcome in the AOU. Jim has always been a force of nature at these conferences.

I haven’t found any grand repository for all the awards given across all the societies during this joint meeting, so I’m sure I am missing other noteworthy honors.

Looking Back on the 2012 Season

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We haven’t left Wyoming yet, and I don’t consider our season officially done until we’ve washed the vehicles and returned them to Fleet Services at UC Davis, but the crew leaving and having to pack up camp definitely puts me in a retrospective mood. Some thoughts on the 2012 season:

Overall we got REALLY lucky with the weather. This has been an amazingly warm, dry year, and we were rarely prevented from accessing the leks or collecting data. It seemed like we might have gotten a little more wind in the mornings, and the rain-out on our final experiment (when Stacie was going to get to join us on the lek) was a bummer, but otherwise we really could not ask for better weather.

As I said in my last post, the crew was fantastic. This project requires field technicians who completely buy in to what we’re doing, and they seemed to do that. It makes it much more fun when they are nice interesting people who are easy to live with, which they were. Once again, we did a good job selecting these folks out of the pool of more than 70 applicants.

Anna getting video of female behaviors on Cottontail

We collected a LOT of data this year. The arrays were installed relatively early, so we got sound recordings from before or around the peak in breeding. We managed at least two experimental treatments on each lek. Anna collected focal data on courtships and female behavior almost every day.

Gail did a great job turning an idea for a robot into a working tool for interacting with free-living animals. Besides just getting a realistic looking skin on the taxidermy mold, she had to solve challenges like figuring out the best wheels or treads, figuring out how to make the tail bend down when the robot leans forward so the robot isn’t mooning the whole lek. In general, the males really responded well this year.

Having to drop Preacher Lek from our stable of focal leks could have been a problem, but I think we handled it pretty well. Preacher’s replacement, Cottontail, was definitely a challenge, but I feel good about our effort there. Liz (and sometimes Mel) had to put some long hours there waiting for the last birds to leave. There were a lot of birds, and probably some movement of males back and forth from the upper center to our focal area closer to the reservoir. This meant new birds showing up all the time!

Our crew scheduling worked pretty well- it was a little uneven in that Cottontail always had more of everything than either Monument or Chugwater, but there are only so many ways to spread 4 people over 3 leks. Hats off to Mel for being a great floater, and learning the birds at all 3 leks. Although it might not have felt like it sometimes when we had to make last minute changes, but we did a much better job of planning ahead as well. Our crew not only had more frequent mornings off (once every eight days), but often actually knew when those were going to be.

The crew may have spent as much time watching video grouse than they did watching live ones. Collecting video data back in the lab will now be a lot easier, as we will know which males were where for the fembot experiment tapes, focal female courtship tapes, and the sound recording. This was definitely not the favorite part of the job for the crew, but they managed to get it all done.

The "unexplored" valley of Coal Mine Draw, complete with a lek

I found a new lek! And not too far from our camp. I think that’s pretty neat. I got to do counts on several leks I’d never been to. It’s nice to hear from the local managers like Sue and Stan how important these counts are.

 

No high-speed video this year. We still haven’t analyzed the set of clips that Gail collected last year. HSV is always really fun, and can be something the crew starts analyzing here, but we had neither the time nor the specific question that required it this year.

We didn’t spend much time capturing birds this year. This is probably our biggest challenge now- figuring out how to schedule a crew so we can work at night, in the morning, and in the afternoon. Something to think on for next year.

I got to meet Joe Hutto.

It was really fun to see our research area in such a warm year. The season was advanced substantially, so we got to see a lot of plants and animals that we normally miss. And in any year, this is a really special place to get to live and work. The more than 5000 photos I’ve taken this spring can attest to that!

"Super-moon" from a couple of days ago