A truly dedicated group of biologists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife,
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Geological
Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service came together to translocate a group of Greater
sage-grouse along the California-Nevada border in hopes of alleviating some genetic and demographic
concerns there.
The lek behind me is the Parker Meadows lek.
There's actually two known leks there.
Right now, there's only a small number of birds, and they're only occupying one lek.
We're bringing birds from the north, from Bodie, which is about twenty five or thirty
miles away, and we're translocating them to Parker Meadows.
Cal Fish and Wildlife started monitoring this lek back in 2002.
Prior to that, there was no numbers of lekking males in the Parker Meadows area.
But in 2002 through about 2010 there were anywhere from maybe seventeen to ten males
on two leks in the Parker Meadows area.
By 2016, the number of lekking males had declined to about four.
The science showed that this sub-population had a seventy percent chance of going extinct
in the next five years.
And so we're really hoping that by trapping birds and bringing them over here and getting
them to breed here that we can kind of improve the genetics, which will in turn just help
the whole population.
We find the birds by spotlighting at night.
We use our binoculars to find the spotlight beam and look for the grouse's eye shine.
It's like a little blue speck that you'll see off in the distance where they're roosting.
And then once we spot it, we have a white noise machine that we turn on.
It just makes it so they can't hear something approaching them.
And we basically walk in on it, and then when we get close we start strobing with our light
so it kind of confuses them and makes them so they won't fly away.
And then we just drop a net over it.
Once we've netted it, we extract it from the net, put radio collars on them.
We'll take a bunch of measurements, wing chord, tarsus, which is their leg, culmen, which
is their beak and we'll put them in boxes, bring them over here.
And then around pre-dawn like five a.m. we'll set them out in the release boxes, which is
a wooden box that they just stay in until dawn.
And then we'll slowly open it up and let them walk out onto the lek here, so that they can
kind of integrate with the lek.
That's our goal.
The other thing that we're going to be doing when we capture them is we're going to artificially
inseminate them.
So we'll be collecting sperm samples from males in Bodie and then inseminate the bird
with it before we release it.
If we can induce nesting in the birds we translocate, it'll help them to stay here because once
they get here they'll make a nest and then they'll just be here on their nest.
And then they'll have chicks that will be like native born to this area and will survive
a lot better than if we just translocate birds.
It's the first time that artificial insemination has been used on sage grouse this year.
We're testing it, first in Wyoming as birds were translocated to North Dakota, then in
Utah, and now here in California.
We're hoping to increase nesting rates, and we're hoping to at least in this case perform
a genetic rescue because these birds, they don't hatch.
They're infertile.
So we're bringing in some outside sperm, trying to increase the fertility of some of these
nests in this area.
We will follow these birds for the rest of the summer and in one or two years we'll know
if this has an effect.
We're really trying something new here.
It's the fun part of science.
In the past, translocations, a lot of the birds they do make it, and they do nest there,
so it's worth, it's worth it, I think.
You know, partnerships in the bi-state area have always been key.
And it's our hope that this multi-year collaborative conservation effort will ensure the persistence
of this population well into the future.