Greater Sage-Grouse in motion

My friend Clare at The House asked me a few years ago to post some video of my mornings at a sage-grouse lek. Well, I am finally getting it figured out now that my new camera also takes video. Here is my first attempt at editing and posting videos, but at least I finally got a grouse video to share. Learning how to edit will hopefully improve soon.

A land of light breezes

The wind blows a bit  around here.

These two buildings are found just north and east of Fort Peck.

I find the new Blogger editor extremely annoying, difficult, and frustrating. Adding text and photos is not very intuitive and I wind up with text all over the place with little ability to make it go where I want to in the post. Perhaps it is the Blogger template I am using that limits my editing options - I don't know. I guess now it is worth what I am paying to have my blog here.

Greater Sage-Grouse Dancing in the Moonlight

This was the photo I was hoping to re-create this spring. When I originally took this photo a few years ago, I didn't realize how difficult it would be to attempt to do again.

This year I looked at the moonset charts and figured out the one day that might work. It all worked fine except that I had wound up placing the blind too far to the south and the birds were not in line with the moon. The birds were there and the morning was gorgeous, but I was just out of place. Next year I guess.

The following photos are from a couple of mornings on a couple of different leks about 2 weeks ago. I can't believe that it has been two week already.

The birds were displaying with lots of activity well before sunrise, but the activity would slack off as the sun came up and the hens slowly departed the lek. One morning I was fortunate to have a few hens hang out on the lek well after sunrise, which prompted another round of vigorous displaying.

When the hens left, the fighting and staring at each other commenced.

 

Sage-Grouse Mornings

The last week or so have been filled with sage-grouse mornings. Most of them were rather disappointing - misplaced blinds, spooked birds, or poor light. This morning made up for all of the previous mornings though. Blind was placed just right and the birds cooperated and so did the light. It was probably the best morning I have had on a lek for taking photos (all mornings spent on a lek are hard to beat, no matter how well the photos turn out). Even better was that the lek I was on was one of the most recently discovered leks in Valley County and was discovered by two of my former interns/seasonal employees - Meagan and Amy and has also been a source for a number of birds marked for two research projects I initiated. I camped on near the lek and although it was a tad cold last night - about 20 degrees or so - the view of the sky last night more than made up for it. It is spectacular to look up when there isn't any artificial light to see from horizon to horizon. Just the stars.
More photos to follow.

Early Morning Church Social

Except this is not what you might think. There was a lot of dancing, hollering, fighting and even sex at this gathering.


This is a rural church near Fort Peck where the Sharp-tailed Grouse have set up a lek. I had suspected this lek was there after observing a few birds displaying here early in February a couple of years ago. Dad confirmed that the lek was there this spring so this morning Crean joined me to go see the dancing.



The light wasn't the best, but we had a good time.



Crean even took a few photos with his camera. Below is one of his photos from this morning.

Kite Aerial Photography in Antarctica

A long, long, time ago in a land far, far away I once conducted research on Adelie Penguins. One aspect of my intended research involved getting accurate locations and counts of the penguin colonies. Lacking access to lots of resources, I was stymied trying to figure out how to accomplish this. Until my Dad pointed me to an article in Bird Watchers Digest that described how Kite Aerial Photography (KAP) could be used for environmental work. I was skeptical but desperate so I contacted the author (who's name escapes me right now along with the actual citation of the article) and he put me in touch with a wonderful resource on KAP - a gentleman name Brooks Leffler. Brooks wound up building the KAP rigs I have used over the years and provided me with lots of information. We even did an article on our work for the now defunct KAP magazine Aerial Eye (Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 1997). Below are a series of photos from that time period. Click on the photos to make them larger.


This is a photo of my wonderful co-workers flying the kite from a zodiac in the pack ice. I was on land judging where the kite and camera were in relation to the penguin colony we were trying to photograph and I turned and tilted the camera (with the remote control of the unit) to take this photo back down the kite line.


Another photo of the same scenario except this time the kite line is a bit easier to see.


This is the edge of an Adelie Penguin colony early in the spring when both members of the pair of penguins are present at the nest site.


Later on when the birds are incubating there is only one penguin present at the nest at any one time and the birds become very regularly spaced in the colonies.




But as the season progresses and the chicks begin to hatch that regularity in spacing begins to disappear and the nests start to show up with light colored rings around them as the guano starts to accumulate.




This colony had a few Elephant Seals hanging around the edge later on in the incubation period.



These wallows of belching, farting Elephant Seals even outdid the numerically superior penguins when it came to the biggest stink contest.


At one point we even used the photos to help the support staff at Antarctic Support Associates determine if the new supply ships would have issues with rocks near the pier since it was a much longer ship then had previously been used at Palmer Station.



Here I am on the top of Cormorant Island, probably my favorite island in the area that we visited on a regular basis for our work.



And another self portrait from that same year taken with the KAP rig in my room. It looks like I have that same Antarctic stare I see in many other photos of people working there.

All of this work was before the advent of digital photography. The reason the photos are all black and white was because I had access to a film lab at the station where I could develop black and white film and I needed to know what I had captured on film right away so I could know if I needed to re-photograph a colony. I will pull up some more photos and also talk about the KAP process a bit more in future posts.

Sage Grouse Initiative

The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) just went live with their new sage-grouse conservation website here. Lots of great information and stories of private land conservation in sage-grouse country.



Sage-grouse conservation on private lands in conjunction with efforts on public land are all part of the ongoing efforts in sage-grouse conservation. These cooperative efforts are especially important for effective conservation in those parts of the west like Montana where public and private lands are highly interspersed.