Tag Archives: field season

2014 Season Start-up

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Pronghorn Lodge, our home away from our home away from home in Lander.

March 4:  It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a week since we loaded up the Durango and trusty Dodge pick-up (“Snowchief”) and headed out for Wyoming. A thousand miles, one-and-a-half books on tape, and one smoky hotel in rural Nevada, and we’ve exchanged the warm California winter for the icebox that is Lander. Although it had been about nine months since we last said goodbye to our second home in the sage, pulling into town always makes me feel like I’ve never left. From the friendly guy at RadioShack to the burgers and brew at the Lander Bar to the dips in the road as we leave the highway in Hudson, it really does feel like a time-warp has just removed everything that’s happened since we pulled up stakes last year. It is actually kind of eerie.

In spite of the familiarity of the place, field work is not exactly like Groundhog’s Day. Each year has it’s own set of challenges though. The first week was a bit of a “hurry up and wait” affair. We rushed to get the trailer out of storage in Riverton, only to find, when we de-winterized it, that the water heater wasn’t working. A night in the RV park with the heater running fixed that problem, and we got it up the hill the next day in hopes of get camp up and running quickly. Unfortunately, high winds east of us prevented the work trailer delivery from Casper on both Friday and Saturday. This has happened only once or twice before (last in 2011), and we actually asked some of the crew with flexibility to delay their arrival.

Waiting for trailers meant waiting in a hotel room PACKED with our gear.

This had the added benefit of not having people driving during the snowstorm that hit on Saturday. We only got a few inches in Lander, but temperatures dropped to about zero. We more or less stayed in the hotel, staying out of the cold and catching up on computer tasks while we waited for the trailer delivery. With no good place to unload, or gear stayed in the hotel rooms as well. Finally one office trailer arrived on Monday gave us room to unpack the RV and make some living space. The second office trailer (yes, our first 3-trailer camp since 2008) came just in time for several assistants.

Two office trailers, for the first time since 2008! A Wyoming metropolis rises in the sage.

While we may not have been ready, the sage-grouse seem to be, at least a lot more than last year. With minimal snow on the ground and what seems like healthy sage for them to eat, we’ve already seen males and in some cases females on the lek.

By Tuesday we had the whole crew, and were able to welcome them to Chicken Camp 2014 edition! Welcome back Frank, and welcome Jess, Julia, James, Sam, and Sean!

Field Season, 2014 Edition

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Gail, Anna and I are leaving for Wyoming next week, and I’ll be posting updates on our progress here in my blog. To get things rolling, I’m going to re-post an entry from the beginning of last-year’s field season.

What is a lek

Stay tuned for more over the next couple of months as we brave the Wyoming winter to learn more about these fantastic birds!

2014 Field Assistant Ad is now live

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I’m emerging briefly from my fall teaching duties to make a quick announcement: I’ve posted the call for field assistants for our 2014 season! If you or someone you know meet the qualifications and want a fun but intense research experience in a beautiful part of the world, go ahead and send in an application. Ad text below…

FIELD ASSISTANTS (6) needed approximately March 2 – May 4 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 the environmental and social factors shaping 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 some or all of the following: maintaining camera and acoustic monitoring equipment, observation of basic courtship behavior and lek counts, GPS surveying, habitat characterization and vegetation sampling, capture of adult sage-grouse, radio-telemetry, 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, WIND 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. Individuals with previous sage-grouse capture experience especially encouraged to apply. Must be able to show proof of United States employment eligibility. Assistants will receive a total stipend of $1600 (~$800/mo) plus food and shared housing, 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.

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.