I love my job!

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I was able to get to 7 leks. 4 of those leks had no activity on them at all the other 3 had some activity but the numbers were really low. One had 12 males and the other two were under 8. These numbers are similar to many areas throughout the area here. This will greatly affect hunting for the next season.

While driving between leks I came across two small herds of elk about 15 in each and then a few miles down the road I found a herd of about 200 elk milling around on private property. They are still down in the low areas till the snow melts in the hills. There is a lot of snow here still for this time of year I have been told. I have also seen thousands of mule deer. There are herds all over this basin. The major predator of mule deer and elk, it seems, are cars. On most main two lane roads you can’t drive a 1/8 of a mile or 1/4 of a mile without seeing dead deer and elk that have been killed by semis or cars.

I found a dead Golden Eagle that we will be turning in to the US Fish and Wildlife Service for use by Native Americans. We turn over all Bald and Golden Eagles to the USFWS as per federal law.

I’ll be doing lek counts until the end of April or the beginning of May. After I finish my morning lek counts I’ll work on prairie dog locating and raptor nest counts. The first two days in May I’ll be helping with fish electro shock surveys and will start doing Sagebrush obligate song bird counts and continue those through June. In July I’ll be mapping out some private land to be maintained for wildlife and do some radio telemetry to retrieve GPS collars off of deer. There are some other odds and ins that I’ll be assisting with throughout the season I just don’t know what they are yet though.

Today was probably the worst day ever hopefully it will be the worst day that I have of the season and all the rest will be better. I was on my way to my first lek this morning and took a road across a famers field that started out pretty dry and as a got in farther it got muddy and I decided to turn around and buried the explorer about a foot and a half down in the field. It warmed up before my boss was able to get there and so now it is still stuck and we are hoping to get it out tomorrow morning when the ground refreezes. The worst part for me is that we don’t have permission to be on this land but my boss said it would be fine and that it won’t be too big of deal. I still feel really bad about it though. So I did not get much work done today.

I took some pictures of some Sage Grouse males on the lek the other day and hopefully I can get them developed and put some on here. That’s all for now!