Tag Archives: sage-grouse

WSJ Article

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We’re back in California! I’ll have more on the end of the field season in another post. In the mean time, a quick mention that our research was mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article on ecotourism and sage-grouse. I’m not sure if this will be behind a paywall for some folks or not. I thought it was a pretty nice article. A couple of comments:

 

1) Much better than the last article in WSJ that really felt like a hit piece trivializing our research. Gail spent many hours over several months talking with a reporter, and the end product was extremely disappointing. We were hesitant to engage with them again, but I’m glad I did, since this article had a much different tone than the first.

2) The article makes it sound like we were the first to study strut rate in sage-grouse, which is definitely not true (and something I directly pointed out to the Jim). Strut rate is the most consistent correlate of mating success across studies and populations of sage-grouse, from Haven Wiley’s work in the Farson, WY population, to Mark Boyce’s eastern Wyoming studies, to the long term study of sage-grouse in the Mono Basin of California by Jack Bradbury and Robert Gibson. I would argue that our main contribution into this relationship is that we’ve gotten a bit more insight  into the direction of causality. There’s always been the question– are the top males attracting females because they strut at a higher rate, or is the presence and proximity of interested females around the top males causing them to increase their display effort? With the fembot we could test all males on an even playing field by showing them a stimulus at a roughly equal range of distances and with similar female proceptivity, and measure their strut rate in a more controlled environment. Since maximum strut rate to the robot was correlated with mating success with real females, it suggests that females may be responding to the higher display rates. Top males are also adjusting more strongly to female cues (in the early experiment, we just measured the distance between the male and the robot), so the male response is also important. The good males do both.

 

 

2014 field season almost over!

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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

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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

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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!