The past couple weeks have been dominated by learning the art of radio telemetry and tracking sage grouse through the hills. I have been helping a graduate student with her research on their movements and habitat use patterns. The grouse is not a federally listed endangered species here and a lot of effort is going into better understanding and hopefully building their populations so it stays that way.

They are funny birds; I love to see their snaky little heads and necks bobbing just above the level of the sage brush before you startle them. Tracking them with the telemetry equipment is like a treasure hunt or a child’s game of hot and cold. As the beeping signal gets stronger and louder you’re are ‘getting warmer’. When you do finally find the bird and it flushes, it is ultra rewarding. They fly up in a great rush and fuss of feathers, often leaving a small rain of droppings as a parting gift. The telemetry can be very tricky as the signal bounces of hills and funnels through drainages. Often we thought, “Oh, the bird is just over this ridge!” only to find it was hanging out (or loafing in grouse-speak) two valleys over.

Another part of the research is doing vegetation transects where we find birds, estimating plant cover mostly. This is less exciting but it’s still great to be outdoors and in the field. I often find myself wishing I was in a kid’s public television show called Cyberchase. In this show (designed to teach math and problem solving), these kids go into a Cyberland that is essentially a computer. When they are faced challenge to solve, they can just use these little remotes to project say a perfect square on the landscape or equally divide a piece of wood or make all the plants of a certain species glow green. Doesn’t this sound like it would be handy for field work? No dragging around tapes or pvc pipe Daubenmire squares. Alas, my fieldwork is in Utah, not Cyberland.

Other than sage grouse, this past week I got to take a look at some wild horses removed from a piece of private land. Our office wild horse guy gave some startling stats about the costs of managing the wild horses herds in Utah. To keep the horses and the rangelands healthy, thousands of horses have to be removed yearly. Used to be a large proportion were adopted, but with the economy down adoptions are way down as well and the BLM has to pick up the tab for maintaining the left over horses. It’s a puzzle. One interesting solution is a pairing with a prison here where the inmates help with the care and breaking of the horses. I had heard of horse therapy for troubled youth and people with disabilities but prisoners was a new and interesting idea.

That’s bout it round here, should be tracking more grouse next week. Maybe will pin down the one elusive female with a brood whose been hiding out in  a remote wash…