Not Happy

Why is that owls always look unhappy sitting on the nest. Maybe it's not the nest, come to think of it, they just always look rather dour.




This one is sitting on a former Swainson's Hawk nest north of Glasgow. One of my other usual spot to find a Swainson's Hawk nest in the spring is also not available this year. It was a rather small Willow tree at a reservoir in the south part of Valley County. I drove past the spot the other day when I was coming home from a grouse count and something was missing. The whole tree was gone. I couldn't remember it being that old of a tree that it might have just fallen down so it was a bit of a puzzle until I got near where the tree used to be to find a well chewed stump.

It was a beaver that did it. The funny part was the tree wasn't that big and it was only one of two trees on the reservoir and the other, now gone as well, was even smaller. I don't know how the beaver managed to survive getting to this reservoir either as it is at least four miles to the nearest tree and there is no year round water flowing from the reservoir - it only traps water from snow and rain events and after that is over the downstream portion of the drainage dries out. The remains of both trees were very well chewed and there was not a speck of bark left on the stumps that remained. I suspect that the beaver did not make it through the winter on that meager diet.

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.

Custom Engraved Moleskine

I really liked this site. I have one Moleskine I use for my Antarctic trips and another I use for daily notes etc. At this site you can have a Moleskine cover laser engraved with an image you provide or one of the images they have. You can even have the spine engraved with a title for image.

Sage-Grouse trapping

Monday morning the radio woke me up at 0300 and I stumbled out of bed, through the house, and out the door with most of the stuff I wanted to bring along. Most importantly, I had my coffee. A quick trip to the office then I headed north of Glasgow to meet Jason Tack, a graduate student of Dr. Dave Naugle at the University of Montana. Jason is working on a Greater Sage-Grouse study that spans the US/Canada border in Valley County, MT and the East Block of Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan. Jason and his crews have been trapping grouse and fitting them with radio collars for the past three years. I had tried to participate in a trapping effort a couple of years ago but the grouse didn't cooperate that morning. Monday morning found me waiting at a road junction just south of Opheim, MT under an impossible number of stars (for those of you unable to see a night sky without much light pollution, it really is amazing the number of bright points layered in the dark sky).

Jason and his crew showed up shortly after I arrived and we headed down the road in the pre-dawn hours towards the lek where they had placed the rocket net the night before.

Kala Minkley, Jason Tack, and Brian Shockley (not pictured is Brad Detmore who was tending some traps in Canada).

We arrived at the lek about an hour later and I parked a ways from the lek where Jason flashed his brake lights for me to stop. They proceeded on towards a blind placed next to the lek where Kala got out of the truck and hid in the blind. Jason and Brian drove a bit farther and parked. Then we waited for the light to leak over the eastern horizon enough to discern if there were enough females in the zone the net would cover. I rolled down my window and let the cold morning are leak in the cab of the truck so I could hear that sound. The squeaky punch of displaying sage-grouse. The horned larks were singing above me in the dark, already laying claim to patches of prairie grass. The two-way radio provided me with brief conversations on the status of birds in relation to the net.

Jason and one of the males we captured.

"are those two males displaying on the net?"

"yes, but they just moved off about a meter."

"How many females are in the zone"

"Looks like about 5"

Jason had previously surmised that we would blast the net at about 0620 so I was waiting to see how this would work as the birds moved around. About 0550 I heard something on the radio that was not real clear but I did hear something about the net. I was wondering if he had told Kala he wanted her to blow the net when there was a loud boom, a flash of light, lots of flying dust and birds. I had my answer.

Removing birds from under the net. Notice the net on the ground and the blind in the background.

I hurried over to the net to find all three of them rapidly placing blankets over the birds trapped under the net. We were only putting collars on females. Collars don't work well on male sage-grouse. They do all right most of the year but when they try to display the following spring the necklace type collar doesn't allow them to display properly. Also, most of the population data of importance comes from following the females and determining how many chicks they raise and where they do that. We started to remove all the trapped males and turning them loose to fly off in the increasing light.

We wound up with 3 females to process. One more had escaped from the edge of the net just as they arrived.

Tools of the trade: banding pliers, bands and radio collar

Kala holding a bird. You can see the grouse peering above the blanket much like Kala is peering from behind her facemask.

One new bracelet.

Quick head length measurement.

Weigh in.

Brian getting ready to turn a female loose.

Kala letting a bird go.

Female heading off.

You may have noticed the new photo of me on the side of this blog. That was from this morning and shows me holding one of the male grouse. Please remember I got up at 0300 that morning!

Bloomin' Orchid - Odm Midnight Miracles "Highland"

A couple of weeks ago when I was in Phoenix I saw the most beautiful orchid at a local store near where we were working. I knew that it would never survive airport security and two airplane rides home but the sight of that plant pushed me over the edge. I have wanted to grow orchids for quite a while and when I arrived in Billings I went to the local big chain hardware store to get an orchid because I just had to have one then (I know, I will be more selective in my choice of suppliers next time. This one came with extras though - all the aphids I could clean off the buds). The plant I picked was not blooming but had lots of buds and we have been not-so-patiently waiting for the flowers. I wasn't even sure what the flowers would look like when I bought it but I did find a photo of this type of orchid on the internet so I had an idea after I got home. Last night it started blooming. I now have two buds that are open with more to come soon I hope.


Odm Midnight Miracles "Highland" (I need to get a few more photos of the flowers because these makes the long petals look the same color as the lower part of the flower and the lower part is really much more pinkish red and the upper petals more brownish red than these photos depict - I also need to start learning some orchid terminology!).


I owe Julie Zickfoose a big thanks for answering my questions and providing me with a very good list of resources. Julie has some wonderful orchids that she occasionally posts about. I got a good reminder about how beginning birders must feel with my beginning orchid questions and Julie was great and helped me keep this plant going. Now for more plants!
Here are a couple of my favorite orchids growing wild in Torres Del Paine National Park.

Crossing the Medicine Line

Last week I spend three days in Elkwater, a small resort town on the north side of the Cypress Hills Inter-provincial Park near Medicine Hat, Alberta. I was attending the second forum of the Crossing the Medicine Line Network. The CMLN is a loose organization of individuals, agencies and non-governmental organizations concerned with conservation of the Northern Great Plains.

The name of our group comes from the term applied to the US/Canadian border in this area by the Native Americans of the Northern Great Plains during the late 19th century. It described a boundary where the policies of governments changed for the Native Americans (or First Nations people in Canada). For the Native Americans fleeing the U.S. Army, the land north of the 49th parallel meant refuge. Sitting Bull and his band of Sioux made it across the line after the Battle of the Little Bighorn but Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce were decimated just south of the line. A fascinating article about the history of the Medicine Line can be found here. Although the border politics have changed since then it is still very present and a still a barrier in many ways.

One of the objectives of the CMLN is to promote communication about ecology and conservation between the political entities in the region, primarily between the US and Canadian people but also between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Often our understanding and maps of our shared species of interest end at these borders but the animals themselves are not confined by political boundaries. We are working towards having information be seamless across these borders to match the realities of the ecology and species we work with and thus provide better context for each individual project at the state or provincial level.



This image from our website shows some of the species for which we have common concerns; Swift Fox, Greater Sage Grouse, Loggerhead Shrike, and Burrowing Owl. It also includes a map of the core area of interest, the Milk River basin. Other species of interest include: Baird's Sparrow, Sprague's Pipit, McCown's Longspur, Chestnut-collared Longspur, Long-billed Curlew, and Pronghorn Antelope to name a few.

The image below is a product of one of the projects I have been involved in and was produced by Bryce Maxell and his crew at the Montana Natural Heritage Program. It is a probability of occurrence map for the Baird's Sparrow and it demonstrates one of the issues we are dealing with. Each of the dots on the map is a bird count location from the database (not all counts but we are working on getting there). The black dots represent a count where at least one Baird's Sparrow was found, the gray dots a count where no Baird's Sparrows were found. Notice the big white areas around Montana. There are a lot of bird counts going on there too and one of the goals of our group is to find a way to make these sorts of predictive models for species occurrence relative to the entire breeding range of many of the species we are concerned with on both sides of the borders and across state and provincial boundaries.

I couldn't help but put in the following map too. It shows a predicted occurrence map for 12 grassland bird species in Montana. You can see how important the area in Valley, Phillips, and Blaine Counties is for these species. It isn't much ground when you consider the extent of the Great Plains and the former breeding range for many of these species. If we were able to extend this picture further north it would certainly extend into southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, but not too far, which is why many of the species we are dealing with are considered Endangered just across the border in Canada - Greater Sage-Grouse, Swift Fox, Burrowing Owl and Sprague's Pipit to name a few.

In addition to the grassland bird data we discussed Greater Sage-Grouse populations dynamics along the border including some fascinating genetics work conducted by Krissy Busch. I will tell you more about that later but it involves the results of the analysis conducted on feathers gathered from the leks across the region, a truly trans-boundary project. Energy production, primarily shallow gas but also wind energy, and it's impacts on wildlife populations were also discussed. This is one of the primary threats to populations of wildlife in the area - right after the continued threat of loss of native prairie to conversion to cropland.

It was a great three days and on top of the excellent talks and discussion I was able to visit with good friends I haven't seen for a while. There is a really good group of people involved in this effort.

I was also able to look around the small community of Elkwater a bit. My friend Beth Madden, Wildlife Biologist at Medicine Lake NWR found a pair of Merlins apparently nesting right across the street from the motel we were staying at and I got a few photos of the male. The female was often in the neighborhood screaming at something.








There were very many Black-capped Chickadees. More than I had observed in one spot in a long time. West Nile Virus must not have made it to the Cypress Hills yet.


Wild Turkeys had been introduced in the area and were quite common around town.





I just couldn't resist ending this post with another "mammal with an attitude" photo.

Penguin Migration