Another Grouse Morning

Friday morning and I was up and out the door again bright and early (well, not so bright but definitely early!). Another couple of Greater Sage-Grouse leks to count and collect feathers on. We had a pretty good thunderstorm move through to the north on Thursday night but I really wanted to get out so I figured if the roads were bad I would turn around and head back to the office. The roads were actually pretty good and I wound up getting to both leks I had hoped to survey.

One was my favorite lek I have been surveying for last few years. It has been down by about half this year as have a number of other leks but there are others that are right about where they were last year. We are not sure what the cause of this is but West Nile Virus is certainly a potential cause.

The other lek is one of the most difficult ones to survey because of the need to drive a good distance on a pretty poor road (well two track trail would be a more apt description). But it is worth the drive because it is the largest lek in the area with 52 males displaying this week. That number should go up a bit in the next week or so as the young males start to attend the lek.

This is a portion of the large lek. There are about 21 males displaying in this photo.

I also stopped by another lek on my way back to town. There were no birds on the lek or in the area and although it was a bit late in the morning, there should have been some birds lingering in the area since this is pretty close to the peak breeding time (there were more females than males on the first lek I surveyed). I headed out to the lek to collect some feathers and there was plenty of sage-grouse "sign" at the spot.

Although they are hard to find in this large landscape without having the birds present, when you do stumble on a lek it is pretty unmistakable - there is grouse poop all over the place like light green Cheetos littered on the ground, with occasional dark patches where it looks like someone spilled tar. The tar patches are another type of fecal matter that expels the toxins ingested from the sage plants the birds eat exclusively in the winter. The ground is also trampled down in the center of the lek and there are usually a number of feathers scattered around - a byproduct of occasional fights between the displaying males.

After I gathered the feathers I could find I headed back towards the road and then I found this a short distance from the lek and I knew why there were no birds there this morning.

This is a pile of Greater Sage-Grouse feathers. If you click on the photo to make it larger you can make out the head lower left of center in the photo. Look for the yellow combs above the eye.

The most likely culprit, a Golden Eagle, based on evidence at the scene of the crime. Very little of the grouse was left. Only a piece of the pelvis, the head and lower mandible, and feathers remained. There was one large mute (eagle poop) streaked through the middle of the feathers.

Leks can be a dangerous place for these birds. Much like I know to go to these traditional areas to count grouse, predators also learn to return to the leks looking for a meal. Although this may seem like a very high cost to showing up on a lek or even evolving a mating system that exposes individuals to such a high cost, the benefit is related to the nature of these birds and the landscapes they live in. In such large open areas, a female may never find a male to mate with if there was no place where they could reliably be found and even then she would have no way of assessing mate quality. The lek centered breeding system enables these birds to find each other regularly and also the females can assess mate quality by the location of the males on the lek, with presumably better quality males occupying the central areas of the lek. Predation risk can also be mediated by the number of animals looking for predators on the leks although the vigilance is presumably greater in the females since the males usually concentrating on beating each other or gaining a mating opportunity. Sounds about right.

I also found a small Sharp-tailed Grouse lek on my way home. I hope to find another lek closer to home to get some more photos of this prairie grouse species. They are much more active dancers than the sage-grouse and much more pugnacious too.

More lek surveys

I haven't posted much lately because my early morning schedule has left little time for the rest of my duties with work and family. Recent heavy rains have put a damper on my dirt road travels until they dry out so I am finally catching up on other things. One of them being my blog. Anyway, I continued my lek surveys this past week and managed to get a 1/2 ton diesel Ford pickup very well stuck Wednesday morning in creek crossing that didn't appear THAT boggy at 6:30 am but really was THAT boggy. I did hear my first Boreal Chorus Frogs in the creek that morning (nothing boreal about this scene though).



It is amazing where you can get cell phone coverage these days - I hadn't seen a single person in the 3 days I had been doing these surveys, but was able to call the office with no problem and then had to wait the two hours for my boss to make it out to where I was. Saved me a pretty good walk. If the nearest neighbor hadn't been home and the cell phone hadn't worked it would have been a long walk to the nearest help. The good news was that I wasn't that far away from the lek and was able to get the survey done and feathers collected after the birds had left.

Although getting out of bed so early in the morning has been a bit of a chore, I really like being out in the field during that time of day. Watching the eastern skyline start to glow and witnessing the soft morning light creeping across the landscape and bathing the buttes and sage in the soft rosy glow while still waiting in the morning earth shadow of the lower ground is quite calming and makes the rest of the day special no matter what happens (like getting stuck). I am also able to see a number of animals that I would otherwise miss later in the day.



Although watching the sage-grouse display with the morning light behind me is good for watching bird behavior and taking photos, having the birds in between me and the rising sun is visually much more pleasing. From a distance the lek glitters with dancing birds. When you look closer you can see where the flashes of light originate. As a bird shuffles into a turn facing directly towards me or away from me, it rises up and pulls the bend of it's wings to the base of it's neck.



Their stiletto fan tail is blocked by the rising body of the bird, but as the wings brush down their sides, the birds lean forward revealing a corona of glowing silver spikes. The flash of back lit tails can be seen for miles.




Dad and I are going to try to get out to a lek to take some photos on Sunday morning. Hopefully the roads will be dried out by then. I will post photos later that day if we make it out.

Dancing in the Moonlight

Another early morning of lek surveys. We received a little less than an inch of snow last night and everything was white this morning. Better yet, the 3/4 moon was just setting as the sun came up. This lek had 34 males with about 10 females wandering through the lek. The stock ponds were pretty much frozen this morning and what patches were open had an assortment of waterfowl on them. At one small pond near the lek there was also a pair of Killdeer huddled in the snow at the ice edge looking very cold.


The number of males on the leks we are surveying appear to be up slightly from last year. We have been recovering from a heavy winter 3 years ago that appeared to be pretty hard on our Greater Sage-grouse populations and the number of males on the leks has been increasing since then.
The avifauna in the sagebrush grasslands hasn't increased in species diversity much yet this spring. I looked for McCown's Longspurs as they should be showing up any day as well as Mountain Plovers but it was pretty much Western Meadowlarks and Horned Larks this morning. Also one flock of Sandhill Cranes in the distance heading north.

Grousin'

Up early again this morning for another morning of lek surveys. I was able to get out on Friday morning to look for the reported new Greater Sage-grouse lek. The new lek wound up being an known lek and it had 17 male sage-grouse and about 7 hens on it. It was a rare morning with no wind and I was able to hear the birds displaying from about a mile away. I sat and watched them for a while as the sun slowly emerged and then was swallowed by clouds. Then back to the office for a day of meetings.
Sunday morning Benton and I went to check out the lek closest to town on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. This lek is small I was wouldn't have been surprised if I found no birds this year but instead it had one more displaying male then last year's five. Unfortunately, this lek is quite a ways from the road and required a spotting scope to count. I had forgotten how difficult looking through a scope can be when you are first learning and Benton was unable to figure the deal out. He either had both eyes closed and couldn't see anything of course or with both eyes open, was unable to focus on the image in the eyepiece. We'll keep practicing. We both got to see Mule Deer, Pronghorn, Western Meadowlarks, and a nesting Great Horned Owl. The best part was that Benton told me he had a good time and would do it again despite getting up at 5:30 in the morning.
This morning my intern Susan Hult and I are heading out again for another round of lek surveys. I will try to post some photos from the last few days along with a post on our surveys later this evening.