Category: Prairie
-
Vegetation and Waterfowl Surveys
These past three days, I’ve been accompanying Lauren Smith and Marisa Lipsey, two interns at the BLM, on various surveys. Matt Tribby has been our field advisor, and the man knows how to drive off-road! Marisa, Lauren, and Matt have been studying the vegetation at various sage grouse leks to identify key habitat factors. A…
-
MAPS and a PSA (acronym soup!)
Last Friday, John, Nina, and I did our very first banding run at the Canyon Creek MAPS site. Just as a rehash, a MAPS station is a bird-banding station where you catch wild birds in mist nets and look at their physical traits to help assess survivorship and productivity of avian populations. John and Sabrina…
-
Ray to the Rescue!
Ray, a range ecologist at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has kindly fixed up my trailer—he’s made it so that there is now running water (and heated water), and in general, he helped get it in working order! John, my advisor at the BLM, also did a bunch of work to get the trailer…
-
Nets, nets on the range
Amy Briggs (pomona ’10) and I will be running a Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) station and conducting point counts out in Valley County, Montana over the course of the summer. With any luck, the weather will be on the sunnier (i.e. not rainy) side so that we’ll have more time to spend in…
-
Little trailer on the prairie
Yesterday Charlotte Chang’10, Max and I headed off to Northern Montana. Charlotte will be working on a project examining prairie bird diversity and productivity in the shortgrass prairie of northern Montana. This is the third summer a Pomona student has come out here to work on this project. Charlotte is following in the footsteps of…