Tag Archives: field assistants

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.

 

Mid-season Update

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It’s March 31st, and as we trundle towards April, I realize how tardy I have been with general updates this year. Every season is a little different, and this one is throwing us some curves.

Nine Mile Hill shrouded in snow.

We saw our first copulation on our biggest lek, Cottontail Lek ten days ago (March 21st). This date is pretty normal. We’ve found one earlier (March 19th) in a couple of years, and later some other years. Usually once we see the first one, within a few days every lek is showing multiple copulations. Not this year! We got hit with a blast of really cold weather (lows around 10℉) as well as a few inches of snow.  The females seemed rethink their interest in the males, and it was several days later before we saw the next mating on any of the leks. So while the breeding season opened at a fairly average time, I think the season as a whole is going to be on the late side. On balance, I’m not sure if this will be good or bad for our work this year. The longer we have big groups of real females on the lek, the harder it will be to give our robotic females a private audience. On the other hand, the males may stay interested in courtship a little bit longer so we may not have the problem of the males just giving up at the end of the season the way they sometimes do. We’ll have to see what happens!

Two male sage-grouse battle in the fresh snow on Chugwater Lek.

Other challenges we’ve had to contend with are the incredible shrinking leks. Our initial impression from the first couple of weeks of the season seems to be correct– male attendance is down considerably from last year in our area. This may be due to the drought the Lander area is experiencing, at least there’s not an obvious other candidate for the decline. Our sage-grouse manager contacts have mentioned that the rough demographic analysis from hunting data suggested low recruitment (not many yearling birds taken compared to the number of adults).

To give you a sense of the change in abundance since we started the project here: Monument Lek, our main focal lek since 2006 when it had over 100 males, has dropped to under 10 birds and males are not staying as reliably on their territories. Anna has still gotten some playback experiments done, but Monument is right on the edge of being useful or not as one of our experimental leks.  We just showed the PBS Nature episode featuring our research (“What Females Want…”) as part of another outreach event down at the Lander Public Library. The footage was shot in 2007 when the male counts were an order of magnitude higher. The difference definitely makes us a little sad, and we are hoping this lek rebounds quickly as it has done in the past. Sue at the BLM told us that in the 80’s it was down to 4 birds, and later climbed back to over 100, so we hope this is another one of those cycles.

Shallow trenches prepared for laying microphone cables at Monument Lek. This lets us put microphones all over the lek, while keeping the cables underground. The speakers are for the playback experiment.

Otherwise we are in pretty good shape with most of our “normal” tasks. We have microphone arrays deployed on all three focal leks now, and have gotten several days of sound recording in.  We’ve also gotten at least one round of counts at our non-focal leks, to help the local sage-grouse managers monitor the grouse population in the district. The only things we are missing are the new robots (Gail is working on taxidermy aspects now, so those should be ready soon), and the encounternet telemetry tags. I say “only”, although those are definitely two very important pieces for our research goals this year and in the next couple of years!

Arrival in Wyoming

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Although we are based out of the University of California Davis, our field studies of Sage-Grouse take us to west-central Wyoming. This is one of the best places to find this species, with lots of good habitat for the grouse and other sagebrush specialists.

View from our camp, 2011

It’s also a stunningly beautiful place to get to work. Our camp looks out on the eastern face of the Wind River Range, a spine of the Continental Divide near Lander, Wyoming. Although we are less than an hour from town, we feel like we are in the middle of nowhere. We can see distant lights from Riverton, and a bit of city glow from Lander, but otherwise we have this patch of heaven almost to ourselves.

Driving through Nevada

The first challenge we face is simply getting all of our gear out to the site. This takes careful packing followed by a long drive through the lonely spaces of Nevada and Utah.

Work trailer arrives.

Once we’ve landed in Lander, the next step is to get the camp set up. Besides our RV, we have to rent a work trailer, as well as propane service. Thankfully we have electricity; there’s a line that runs the well pump for the cattle water tanks in the summer that we can use in the spring (the cows don’t come up until May when we are done with our research- we’ve been fortunate to coordinate with the local grazing leaseholders on this).

 

Propane tank arrives- nice to have heat, hot water, and cooking capability without having to run into town to fill canisters all the time.

Home sweet home.

Looking for tracks or poop on the lek.

Our first field technicians arrived on March 3rd, and the following day we were out at dawn looking for grouse on the leks. It’s still very early in the season- at least 2 weeks before the earliest sage-grouse mating we’ve ever recorded during our years out here. This means some leks will still be empty while others will have a few males starting to set up territories. Our first visit is to the most accessible lek called Chugwater Lek (in our area each display ground has a unique name). We didn’t see any birds, and a search of the lek surface showed no fresh sign. Our first birds didn’t show up here until March 7.

Scanning Cottontail Lek to count grouse.

Cottontail Lek is our largest lek, and on our first visits there we did find males starting to set up territories. This was the first chance for the crew to see the courtship display, and they were suitably impressed (just wait until they get to experience it from a blind down on the lek instead of a distant look-out point!)  We were also treated to a large herd of pronghorn moving past in the early morning light. This was also a new animal for some on the crew. They are taking to the western wildlife quickly, although some are still getting used to the idea of a landscape without any trees!

Pronghorn Antelope near Cottontail Lek

Over the next couple of weeks we will be gearing up for our data collection, which will involve setting up a grid of stakes on the lek to help with territory mapping, installing microphone cables on the leks, starting to get photographs of the males to distinguish them, and hopefully capturing and banding some as well.