Anya Tyson
Buffalo, Wyoming

September has up and gone, but at the moment, summer lingers on. Last week, I worked in the southern Bighorn mountains as the seasons mingled and the aspens turned golden. This region, at around 8,000 ft. is an interesting transition between the rangelands and the montane. The headwaters of the Powder River slither through canyons and firs, and the surrounding country is sage-brushed and expansive. This summer, I did all of my work for the BLM here in Buffalo out on the range, and nearly all of my play in the Bighorns; now I was paid to enjoy myself silly with an important task where both landscapes coalesced. Miriam and I used radio telemetry by day to locate sage-grouse and radio collars of deceased sage-grouse, and stayed in a mountain cabin by night. I loved radio telemetry! I already enjoy map and compass work, but even more exciting—we then got to turn topo lines into actual hills and draws beneath our feet in a biologically significant treasure hunt. We saw 41 grouse in 5 days, far more than we have seen all summer in perhaps more typical (though disturbed) grouse habitat down in the basin. The radio-collared grouse are addressing the question of whether habitat in the area is used by grouse from the different basins separated by the spine of the Bighorns. Distinct populations of grouse in the Bighorn, Powder River basins, and possibly North Platte drainage, may blur at the edges and intermingle here—which may be exceedingly important from a conservation standpoint. This small-scale BLM project is drawing to a close, and I look forward to working with and learning from the produced geospatial data.