Well the last few weeks have been busy! We finally finished Sage Grouse lek counts. That was three weeks ago. We had a few lek counts that week and did one last search for some Sharp-tails. Two weeks ago we started doing obligate sagebrush song bird counts. What happens when we do those is we go out to a point that is surrounded by 16 stations. You walk to each station and stand, listen and look for five minutes. All birds you see or hear within that time that are within a predetermined distance from you are counted. To do all 16 stations it takes about 3 hours and we are still starting about 30 minutes before sunrise. So still pretty early mornings. Lucky for us though, the sun won’t really come up any earlier than 5:30 am anymore. But we are still leaving around 4:30 to get to places. It can be pretty difficult to distinguish the bird calls sometimes, which is how we count most of the birds. Its especially hard if you have two that are pretty similar sounding. I’m not particularly good at it but I do alright. There are really only three birds that are sagebrush obligate, which means they need sage habitat to live and breed in. They are the Sage Sparrow, Sage Thrasher, and the Brewer’s Sparrow. We are listening and looking for those plus 13 more that will use sage to breed and nest in. Sometimes you see some different birds that you’re not expecting to see which is cool. We see lots of Pronghorn Antelope, Elk and a few Moose. We are up pretty high in altitude, at about 8200 ft. It is a high sage plateau that surrounded on all sides by high peaks. It’s a pretty cool area but it sure snows a lot for it being end of May and beginning of June. We had five inches of snow just this last Monday morning. The wind can be pretty bad too, kind of reminds me of Cheyenne, always windy!
The late mornings and afternoons have been the most fun for me. We go out with the grouse crew there in Walden most mornings. They don’t start their work till 8 or 8:30 and go till 4 or 5 in the evening. Which for me makes about a 12 hour day most days, it makes time fly though! They are using radio telemetry to track Sage Grouse hens to determine nesting success. The hens have a small collar around their necks that give off a unique signal that allows them to be tracked and pinpointed. I have gone out every time with a guy named Dan. He is from Ohio and has been working out in Colorado for the last year doing things for the US forest Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service till he landed this job at the CDOW. He saw his first snow last year and was pretty excited about it. But since being in Walden since March he says he is tired of the snow. Anyways he is a really awesome guy he has taught me so much about radio telemetry. We generally find 6 to 8 hens a day. Some hens have remained in the same location for a few weeks and that means they have nested. When doing this work we have to be careful not to get too close because Grouse will abandon the nest and not return once scared off, making that nest a failed nest. Dan for the first couple days didn’t let me track birds he knew were nesting. Which I think was a very good thing since when I started I pretty much just about stepped on every hen I tracked. They are pretty hard to spot in the sage unless you step on them!
Once I started to get the hang of it I started to be able to circle them. Circling them is when we walk around where we think the bird in a circle with it antenna pointed in the center. If the signal stays strong the whole way around the bird is right in that circle. Then we take some bearings and some other data plus a GPS point. If the bird is in the same location the next week, she is nesting. One of the days last week we went out to retrieve a collar off of a mortality. We to ATVs on to this ranch which is pretty big and it sits right under one of the mountain ranges. We were also out looking for two birds that have been missing, which means they haven’t been heard from (meaning their signal) or located in some time. 60 had been missing about two weeks and 24 has been missing for over a month. We were able to find the mortality and kept searching for the other two birds. What happens is sometimes these birds find little valleys to hide down in and then the signal can’t get out and you won’t be able to hear them unless you are in the same valley as they are. We spent all day searching but couldn’t find them. The next day we went up on one of the smaller mountains and heard 60 a few times. So we know she is alive but still no sign of 24. We will keep up our quest for her!
Last Friday was a pretty big day for me I was tracking this bird for Dan and he wasn’t sure if she was nesting or not until we got near where he tracked her last week. He was pretty sure she was nesting when we got there and so I went to hand him the antenna but he said “Nope, you got this. Just take it slow and easy, don’t rush.” I was so nervous! I was worried I would flush this hen off her nest and cause a failed nest. Sage Grouse only have a 40 to 50% nest success rate as it is without me scaring them off. Well this bird happened to be in a bowl which means there are small hills around which cause bounce of the radio signal off of them so they can give you false positives. It took me awhile and I have to circle two times before I was finally able to get a good fix on her. It was soo cool! I’m glad he had that much faith in me! He really is a good teacher too. I was such a great feeling to do it right.
Some other interesting things that happen with Hen Telemetry is that we can only circle a nesting bird the 1st time we come out because if every time we come out we circle the nest we are making a big sent bulls-eye for coyotes. Another thing is that if we see a raven in the general location we have to put the antenna down and wait. If they stick around then we have to just bag it and come back another day. Those birds will follow you to the nest or start searching where your antenna is pointing and then chase the hen off her nest and take the eggs. I saw one flying the other day with a big old goose egg in its beak.
The last thing not job related was I got to see Raquel last weekend! I drove to Salt Lake to spend the weekend with her! It was so very wonderful! Really I can’t wait till August! Well that’s it for now, I’ll try to be better at updating…. Thanks for reading!
