Tag Archives: field assistants

Further Adventures from Laketown

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I’m sitting in our main trailer listening to the rain patter down. It is a rainy Sunday, and we are probably ½ of the way done with packing and clean up. Grouse season is over for us. Andre and Jessica have left for their next adventures, and we’ve literally pulled up stakes and folded our tents.

 

It was a fun and productive last week. We got a few days’ respite from precipitation and were able to squeeze in some last experiments for Ryane’s project. The crew also finished their last vegetation sampling day- against all odds they actually completed samples at all eight of our target leks. Gail and Holly Copeland continued their Sisyphean struggle to get useful noise regulations for sage-grouse habitat in place, and spent a day with some Red Desert Audubon folks teaching 4th graders about birds and what it’s like being a sage-grouse biologist.

Castle Garden Eaglet

On the fun side, we watched the sun set from the 360 panoramic view at Nine Mile Hill, made the annual pilgrimage to the petroglyph area at Castle Gardens in the Gas Hills, and watched The Sagebrush Sea on Stan’s giant TV while eating moose burgers and ice cream. It was an epic week for eating, as we also worked in a salmon chowder from Jessica’s cache of Alaskan salmon, dinner at Cowfish thanks to Ryane’s mother Patti (thanks Patti!), and the end-of-season ‘thank you’ dinner from Gail at Svilar’s in Hudson. And one last pan of my famous buttermilk biscuits too!

Cool folks in a cool room on a hot day

 

Cottontail remained an adventure until the end. Experiments on the left (west) side of the lek remained impossible due to the high water level. Even if we could rig Salt and Peppa to be amphibious, the birds in those areas were all forced from their territories. Many of them simply moved away from the water, and we found them squabbling for new territories above the water line. Others disappeared, and one banded male even showed up on the upper lek.

Sage-grouse contemplating his flooded territory

We got GPS points for the stakes we could get to, and even retrieving the stakes was a bit of an adventure!

Ryane wading out into the mucky water to retrieve our grid stakes and signs

 

The high water did lead to some interesting photo opportunities though!

Wet, muddy April. Cottontail disappears!

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Ryane dressed for mud

As long-time readers will know, weather is often one of the biggest challenges we face when conducting field studies of the sage-grouse. While a warm, sunny April is more pleasant for us to be watching the birds, it can be tough on the grouse and they tend to get tired and not as responsive. Moderate precip is good for the birds (especially survival and growth of the chicks), but our fembots can’t drive well in the mud and sometimes it limits our ability to even get out to the leks.

 

This April has been schizophrenic, bouncing between 70’s and snow practically every week. It can go from green

to white again in just a day or two.

This week we moved well past “moderate” on the precip scale. A few days with significant rain events, followed by 2 days of snow, have left Government Draw a green mucky mess. Nowhere was this more apparent than Cottontail lek. Set aside that the two-track in was practically a stream. Kira and Jessica showed us photos and videos depicting a lek half-under water. The land on the far left of the observation grid had been claimed by rising water levels. Ryane and I went down in the afternoon to set up a playback experiment for the next day under the assumption that the lake level would have receded somewhat by then. Oh no. Like the old Johnny Cash song, “three feet high and rising”. Some stakes at the front edge of the grid were completely under water, and it looked like dry land extended only a few meters from the sage!

 

There's a lek under there somewhere!

We had been warned about the possibility the entire lower lek might flood, and maybe Gail had even seen this in the 2000’s before Cottontail became a focal lek, but this far exceeds any water level we had seen since 2012.

It is fascinating to see Cottontail this way. Cottontail has a secondary lek center up on a hillside. It appears that extreme weather events push birds up there, and in drier weather with enough grouse they colonize the flat area we consider the “main lek”. These cycles of changing population numbers and disappearing territory must keep both lek areas active.

To add to the surprise, there were 30+ males fully fighting and displaying at a little after 6PM! (it was a gloomy afternoon, and there were hens on in the morning).

2016 Experiments

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Now that it is mid-April, most hens have mated and started their nests nests and we are past the peak in female attendance on the leks. This gives us the opportunity to study how the male sage-grouse react to stimuli we provide without competition or interference from real hens.  That means Experiment Time!

 

This year Ryane has designed a study to look at how the males use public information on the lek. We usually think of leks, particularly classical leks like the sage-grouse have, as being very open where everyone can see what everyone else is doing. This isn’t necessarily true of all leks, even sage-grouse leks. We tend to choose more open breeding grounds because it makes our job of tracking and IDing birds much easier, but some peripheral males display from the sage, and some entire leks lack a real central clearing.

Our goal is to understand more about how males take into account various cues that a female is around- whether it’s the sound of a female nearby or the sounds of other males courting a female. To isolate these, Ryane designed a barrier that obscures part of the lek from some males. Then we can provide a stimulus to one side (sound playback from our rock speakers or sending the fembot out of a blind), and watch how males on the other side of the barrier react.

Ryane and Andre setting up the barrier

Note that the birds can (and do) go around, over, and even through gaps in the barrier, so that this isn’t constraining their movements in any way, and the barriers are typically up for only a day or two at a time.

What can we learn from this? It will help us learn more about the importance of social responsiveness in animal courtship and mating. Much of our work over the past years has been to demonstrate that it’s not just how hard males work for the female, but that males also differ in how sensitive they are to changes in the social environment, and this can also relate to differences in their success with females. It will also tell us more about the importance of the sensory environment- the topic of our next grant proposal!

Mid-April Update

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I’ve now been at Chicken Camp for a few weeks. Ryane and Gail got the camp set up and the crew oriented, so I was stepping into a well-oiled machine when my 9-seater turbo-prop touched down in Riverton. There was a light snowfall just after I arrived, and that lead to some great photo opportunities on Chugwater. I shared my first morning on the lek with a birder/blogger/education graduate student named Christian who was visiting camp for the day. It was fun to share the grouse and our project with him, and to learn about his ambitious project to use a “big year” (seeing as many species as possible) as a way to connect with birders and learn about how they use technology and form communities. His website is worth a look: thebirdingproject.com

 

Female sage-grouse solicits a displaying male

Female sage-grouse wanders to the edge of the lek

Territorial male sage-grouse evicts a non-territorial male from the lek

After Christian left, we caught a HUGE winter storm, that over two days dumped at least a couple of feet of snow. I can only remember one storm that left this much– back in 2007, we had another 2+ feet that fell just after peak breeding and left a 3 day hole in our daily observations at Monument lek.

 

Sunrise from camp

Needless to say we were kept off the leks for a few days for a few days with this year’s storm as well. Chugwater lek is fairly accessible, so we were back there after 3 days. Cottontail took another couple of days, and required a tough effort to forge a path there.

 

Photo courtesy Brett Sandercock

We had another visitor, Brett Sandercock from Kansas State University, who came out to Chicken Camp for the weekend. I knew Brett from my Berkeley days when he was a post-doc and I was a wee grad student. We’ve since crossed paths as grouse-ologists– Brett has been working on Prairie Chickens in the Midwest for a number of years. It was fun getting to show him sage-grouse for the first time!

 

 

We also managed a quick afternoon trip to the Nature Conservancy area in Red Canyon.

Lower reaches of Red Canyon

 

The snow seemed to extend the peak in breeding this year, and we had a lot of females showing up in the first week or so after the big storm. From the few banded females we have, we know they were there before the snow and came back again after, suggesting they might have abandoned their first nesting attempt.

 

Two banded males courting a banded female

A very few females we can tell individually even with out bands. Ryane had sent me a digiscope of a white-feathered female that was seen a couple of times early in the season. It came back last week, and one day I was on the lek and able to get some shots.

 

Leucistic sage-grouse hen with white plumage

Losing a nest is generally a bad thing, but our Game and Fish contact said that we shouldn’t be concern. Any females that got caught by the storm were breeding early, and have plenty of time to try a second nest. Add to that the huge benefit that the big pulse of moisture will provide to the ecosystem. It looks to be a green spring out here, which should mean lots of new growth and insects for the chicks.

 

With fewer and fewer females showing up every day, we finally have a chance to start our experiments for the year. I’ll leave the topic of those for another post.

2016 Field Ad – Now Filled

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[NOTE- All positions have been filled 2/2016]

We’ve now started advertising for our 2016 sage-grouse field season. This year will be a little different from normal. Most relevant to potential applicants, this year the positions will be volunteer only (room and board, but no stipend this year). We are definitely sympathetic to the opinion that all technicians should be paid, and, if possible, paid what their work is actually worth. However, when it comes down to it, the choice to get as much research done as possible on our federal grant, continue supporting the dissertation research of at least one graduate student, and yes, providing training and mentorship to technicians, outweighed the alternative (i.e. the alternative being NOT collecting any new data, running new experiments, continuing to conduct much needed population surveys, etc…).

There is a non-zero cost for technicians to join us this year, although we believe that will generally not be too high, since we do cover room and board, and there’s just not much to spend money on during the normal field season. Thinking about what costs will pop up- any pieces of winter gear not already owned, travel to the site, vehicle insurance, cell phone bills, rent at home, etc. In terms of benefits, the position should include coverage under UC Davis workman’s comp. Additionally, technicians typically receive two certifications- a BLM cert for ATV operation and an animal use certification through Davis. The less tangible advantages: working in a really beautiful place with really fascinating birds, getting trained in new techniques, and (hopefully) earning really strong reference letters. We have (or are currently) working on manuscripts that have had technicians as co-authors (although we can’t promise this), and many of our techs have gone on to great careers in ornithology, graduate school. Two former techs even joined the Patricelli lab as graduate students!

We definitely understand that for some people this isn’t enough to tip the scales, but we do believe that Chicken Camp is still a great place to spend a couple of months!

Anyway, here’s the advertisement [note please direct applications to Ryane this year]:

VOLUNTEER FIELD ASSISTANTS (3-4) needed approximately March 7 through 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 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, 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. Previous experience/certification with off-road driving and/or ATV’s is preferred but not required (uncertified individuals will have the opportunity to get ATV certification in-field). 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 food and shared housing, but need to provide their own transportation to Lander and their own personal gear.  Please send a single PDF containing a cover letter, resume, and contact info for two (2) references to: Ryane Logsdon, Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, 2320 Storer Hall, Davis, CA 95616, or preferably by email to rlogsdon [at] ucdavis.edu.  The positions will remain open until filled, and review of applications will begin immediately.