Updated

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!

Update!

Sorry it has been awhile since my last post….lots of early mornings and long days. Well I’ll try to catch up on the last two weeks or so. We have still been getting lots of moisture and little amounts of sun. The last two weeks the sun rises earlier and earlier every morning and so we have to leave earlier. Our leks we are counting are no longer near our house either we have had to drive about 2 hours to most of them now every morning. So many mornings we are leaving by 3:30am. But we have been able to get to pretty much all of our leks now and have finished most of our counts there are only two more leks to hit next we and we have our full counts. We are going to get some fourth counts on some leks done next week too.

We went to find a possible new lek two weeks ago on a ranch that the Division of Wildlife is trying to get a conservation easement on. This particular lek happens to be in a very large basin pretty much owned by two different people. This basin is used by elk as a winter range and there are over 3000 that spend the winters there. We saw about 1000 scattered around the basin when we went in and I’m sure there were plenty more over the little hills in the bottom. We scared up about three or four hundred just when we drove in. It was a pretty cool sight to see. Oh and we did find the lek it had only three males on it but those three males will go a long way to getting the easement passed.

We tried to go in to a lek the Friday of that week that no one had ever been to. It was about 4:00am and so its dark, plus we had never been in this area before. We followed our map to this marked two-track road. The road hasn’t seen much traffic in the last few years, probably none at all. We drive for a few miles and come to a wash and we can’t really see into it, so we get out and check it and its really not that deep so we try to drive across and then we are stuck. We did not judge the width of the wash correctly. So we are hung up on the front on one side of the bank and the back on the other side of the bank. We have at least two tires off the ground and the other two giving us some movement. So we start to dig and dig and dig. Then it starts to snow and rain making mud where we are digging. So after about two hours of digging in the dark and wet we are able to get it out. And by that time the main road was getting pretty sloppy so we just headed out and really did not accomplish much in the way of lek counts that morning.

This last Monday and Tuesday we went electro-fishing with the fish crew out of Meeker. The first day we only caught seven fish that needed to be removed consisting of Northern Pike and Small Mouth Bass. We did also catch two Round-tail Chubbs and one Colorado Pikeminnow. The Pikeminnow is endangered and they are trying to increase its population in this river. I netted the Pikeminnow and also one of the Chubbs. Tuesday was a much better day for fish. We had an extra biologist show up that day though so I was banished to the processing boa, which I had fun on. We got to race up and down the river between the two boats and mostly just float down the river and have a good time. We just measured and weighed the fish that the two boats caught all day. We caught 73 of the fish to be removed and one White fish and one really nice Pikeminnow. The Pikeminnow was close to twenty inches and they were pretty happy to see it in that area since they had never caught one in that reach. And over the two days of electro-fishing we got stuck a few times but it seems that it is much easier to get a boat unstuck than an explorer!

Wednesday We went back to Blue Mountain and finished our final counts there and we even were able to get in to one lek we hadn’t been in to yet. We then drove back into the Sand Wash management area where we had been stuck previously on the last Friday so we could find the lek when it was light. We found it and found a much better route to get to it which was nice! I also got to see feral/wild horses for the first time and got some good pictures! So that was pretty cool. Then we started looking for prairie dogs. And well we found some just right as we entered the search area. What a great day! We did the next search area and saw some pretty cool landscape. As we were coming around just under the peak of this mountain on the way out of our search area we slid off the road. We had been driving pretty slow on this road that was just wet enough to cake sticky mud on our tires and once it’s on its like driving on ice. We decided to drive the rest of the way off the road so we could just run it back up on the road since the ground off the road wasn’t as wet. Well needless to say that did not work…. And the back tires slipped in to a little wash and we were stuck, again. But where we went off was the best place the others areas were really steep and would not have turned out so well. So we call our boss and he started in to pick us up. So we stared to walk out with all our gear. The GPS says its only 2 miles to the road we want to get to cross-country. Well what I forgot was it doesn’t take into account elevation change. So it turns out that 2 miles was really 6 miles. But we made it out and got home. We went back on Friday and got it out once things had dried up and so it’s back to it on Monday. We are doing a bunch of different things this week and I’ll try to update at the end the week!

Still Winter?

Well the last week’s weather wasn’t too terrible. It was just cold and windy which isn’t too bad unless on a 4-wheeler. Then it’s not too much fun. Well it’s not too much fun driving a few miles on one at 30 miles an hour. While driving fence it’s not too bad and we are done with the fence. We still have another two mile section to take down but it’s all still standing up strait now.

We are finishing up our Sage grouse lek counts in our little basin here we only have a handful left to do. Then we have some searches to do for new leks. We are heading up to Blue Mountain in the morning at 3:30am to get to the few leks that we can and do a few searches. Our boss did a few flights over that area Thursday and Friday and he said it looks like it’s still the middle of winter up there and there are still 5 to 6 foot of snow up in the leking area. The National Park Service’s paved road is still buried under snow in places and they aren’t opening it till possibly next month. So we are going tomorrow to get what we can then we’ll be done up there. We did drive right up in the middle of a lek this last week and I think I got some really good pictures!

We did some White Tailed Prairie Dog searches this week but it’s still pretty cold and in most places we are searching for them they aren’t up yet. So we’re hoping to get some more done next week since the weather has been and looks pretty bad this week. We did finally see our first coyote since we have been here. We have seen lots of sign but they are very heavily hunted because of all the sheep that are in the area. So they have learned to stay pretty hidden. I did see a few pretty nice elk bulls this last week too. I found out there are about 1500 elk in our area right now getting ready to migrate to the mountains.

We started counting Columbian Sharp Tailed Grouse this last Friday. They are pretty crazy birds. The males kind of look like an airplane on the ground when displaying and they run around all over really fast and then some fly over here and then fly back. All this makes them pretty tough to count. Plus they flush off the lek very easy. We did find a new lek the day before we started our lek counts on them which is pretty cool because it is in an area that they have not previously been. Dustin and I split up to cover more leks and he took the 4-wheeler. I finished all my lek counts and started back to where I dropped him off. I hooked up the trailer and waited for about 20 mins and then was thinking o should go look for him. But he was able to reach me on the radio and the 4-wheeler died on him so I drove the 15 mins to where I was closer to him since it was still pretty muddy back there but we didn’t have to push it too far. And now that is in the shop for who knows how long.

We washed the Explorer on Friday as well. We joked as we were doing it that we were washing away all the mud that was holding it together. Then on the way home it started shimmying really bad so I guess it wasn’t much of a joke! All the mud we had collected put our tires way off balance and we got that fixed today.

Got a call from Brian, our boss, on Sunday night. He said we get a truck in 3 weeks but we need to go to Denver to pick it up on Monday. So Monday morning we did our counts and of course it was snowing… drove to Meeker picked up the boss’s truck drove the four and a half hours to Denver, picked up the truck, and drove back. It was a log drive we ended up having a 14 hour day Monday. But all in all it wasn’t too bad. It will be nice when we have the truck though. It is a 2002 Dodge Ram 2500 with a nice big bed to fix our 4-wheeler so we don’t have to haul it on the trailer any more.

Today was just a bad day it rained most of yesterday afternoon, rained all night and snowed in the morning. So even the main good dirt roads were terrible…. We had to change our plans for today and we weren’t able to get much done since we couldn’t drive our explorer off the main road. Tomorrow may not be much fun either we had a nice little snow/rain/hail/thunder storm roll through here not too long ago with 45 mph winds. And the rest of the week looks about the same. So it’s probably a good thing we had a 14 hr day on Monday. Oh well got to love the weather reminds me of Cheyenne.

Requesting new weather!

So I get a call Tuesday night from Brian and it turns out that the guy that was going to be coming up with the ATV is not coming anymore. Brain is done with the whole thing so we get to drive down to Grand Junction and pick it up. Not that’s a problem Dustin were looking forward to going down, for one we get our ATV and as it turns out there is a Cabela’s in Grand Junction!

So as normal we get left here about 45 minutes before sunrise, we only have about a 15 minute drive to leks in our basin here, do our lek counts and then head on down to Meeker around 9 am. Grab Brain’s truck and head to Grand Junction. Well turns out it was a long day. No problems, got the ATV, stopped at Cabela’s for 15 minutes because we were ready to head home. So we got home about 4:30ish so it was a really long day for us but it was good now we have our ATV.

On Thursday, more rain/snow, oh and now the wind! Did our lek counts in the morning and then met Tyler at the Bitter Brush Wildlife area. Tyler is, I think, the guy in charge of all the DOW’s property in this area. Oh he is also the guy that helped us get the explorer out. Anyway, he was having us drive around the property checking fence and also he needed us to take down about a quarter of mile of fence. We drove for the fence line for quite a bit then got to the fence to take down and we got all the wire down and hauled back then it was time to head home.

The next morning we did some searching for new leks in a few areas and were unable to locate any. Then back to the Bitter Brush Wildlife area to finish our fence removal. It is pretty surprising how many deer, elk, and antelope die because they become entangled in fence. We haven’t covered much more than a forth of the fence, well maybe less than that, and we have seen at least 20 animals that have die because of fences. Fences and cars are the major predators out here. We finished pulling the posts and got them hauled back and drove some more fence before our gas on our little Kubota UTV got low. Then we drove out to Blue Mountain to see if we can get into some of our leks there. It took us about an hour and a half to get to the near end of the lek site and we could only reach two site because the road and everything else for that matter is still covered in about 2 feet of snow. The other end of the site is about and hour from the near end and the National Park Service Road there is closed until the end of April. Dustin and I are thinking if this weather keeps up we won’t be getting into those leks at all this season. We had snow today and are getting more tonight and tomorrow. If we don’t get a week with out precip and temps above 60 degrees I really don’t think we will get in. We would just really like to get data on those leks. Oh well that’s wildlife for you the weather rarely cooperates. That’s all for now!

Free of the Mud! But not the Snow.....

So I haven’t posted the last few days because I have been really sick with a bad sinus infection… Not fun couldn’t breath well and couldn’t sleep at all. So I missed all of conference due to that and a blizzard on Sunday. I picked up some over the counter stuff which has helped me so much to breath and sleep. I just wish it would go away all together now.

So we got the explorer out on Saturday morning. It only took us an hour to get it out we just dug around it a bit and pushed it out. The original plan which took part of the time was to drive Tyler’s truck in a bit and winch it out. He could only get halfway in before he started to sink in so we were too far to winch it out so that is when we decided to just push it out and it worked!! Brian is such an awesome boss, he never got mad about any of it! He did tell me on the way out to it that if we couldn't get it out we would just light it on fire and say some one stole it!

Dustin started to work with me yesterday; he will be working with me the rest of the summer. We went and did some lek counts and then went in to town to get our communications gear in our explorer fixed. Then it was off to Meeker, which is about 50 miles away, so he could meet Brian. Well Brian’s kids were sick so he wasn’t there so then drove back home.

Today did some more lek counts saw about 27 males on one lek and seven on another lek. Then I buried the explorer in a snow drift on the way to try to get to the last lek that we thought we might be able to make it to. That took about 30 mins to dig out but we got out again. Oh well happens this time of year. Then we drove to Meeker to try and see Brian again and the plan was to then go get a ATV in Grand Junction. Yeah, well we did see Brian but did not get to go to Grand Junction so that means we get to drive to Meeker tomorrow to pick it up once it arrives in the morning. I love driving to Meeker everyday! Haha, that’s life no ones fault just the way things work out!

We do get to start searching for White-tail Prairie Dogs after we finish Sage Grouse in the mornings. Well maybe anyway it is suppose to snow a bunch at least thru Friday. So they won’t be very active. Hopefully the weather dries up soon, there are about 30 leks we can’t get to until it does. It can rain or snow for that matter in May, whatever it wants! We just need a few weeks of dry and sunny!
Still missing Raquel and waiting for August! Well that’s all for now! Hope all is well with everyone!

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!

2nd day at CDOW

Well today was the first day of me doing the actual work I’ll be doing for the next month or so. So I got up about a few hours before sunrise and jumped in my late 90’s Ford Explorer and drove out to GPS locations of leks where the Greater Sage Grouse maybe found. A lek is a gathering of males for the purposes of competitive mating display. Leks assemble before and during the breeding season, on a daily basis. The same groups of males meet at a traditional place and take up the same individual positions on an arena, each occupying and defending a small territory or court. Intermittently or continuously, they spar individually with their neighbors or put on extravagant visual or aural displays (mating "dances" or gymnastics, plumage displays, vocal challenges, etc.).

I’m looking to count males that are trying to attract females. These surveys can only be done from about a half hour before sunrise till about an hour after sunrise. I drove to 4 leks today and the first 3 had no Grouse on them. Two were inactive the last few years so it is expected that there would be no activity there. The other has had activity in the past and it may have none now because numbers are declining in all the surrounding areas and there is no explanation as to why. The last lek had 40 males on it with a bunch of females around. It’s a pretty cool thing to see if you have never seen a lek before.

Starting next week I’ll be working on Prairie dog surveys and Raptor surveys after I finish with Sage Grouse in the morning. I have a lot of other projects going on in the next few months but I’ll list those later.