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Pinyon Jay and Greater Sage-Grouse Radiotelemetry
Due to growing concerns about how to best manage Nevada's extensive pinyon-juniper woodlands, GBBO is working on a project to develop detailed models of how Pinyon Jays and sage-grouse use landscapes and habitats in order to generate specific guidelines for habitat management.
GBBO's Pinyon Jay telemetry project in eastern Nevada is off to a great start. This is the first radio-telemetry study ever done on Nevada's Pinyon Jays, despite the fact that our state is home to nearly half of the species' global population. So far, we have captured six jays using walk-in traps and mist-nets, and we fitted them with tiny glue-on radio transmitters. Capturing and tagging the birds was only the beginning of the hard work, however – our PJ Cagefield biologists have found that they have to be extra sneaky in order to locate and follow the ever-wary jays without flushing them and altering their activity patterns. But the work is paying off, and we are learning more and more about how Pinyon Jays use the landscape: the map shows an example of a particular jay’s home range based on a four-day tracking period during the breeding season.
At the same time, we have been following 21 radio-tagged Greater Sage-Grouse around several areas of White Pine County. The grouse are captured at night using spotlights and hand-nets, and then fitted with radio-transmitter collars. Usually, we are able to locate our collared grouse on foot using a hand-held receiver and without the excessive stealth required for Pinyon Jays (though it does require a lot of hiking!). Some birds, however, move up into rugged high-altitude shrublands during the post-breeding season and are difficult to reach on foot or by vehicle. In such cases, keeping tabs on the birds requires us to resort to aerial telemetry from a small fixed-wing aircraft.
GBBO is undertaking this telemetry project because of growing concerns about how to best manage Nevada's extensive pinyon-juniper woodlands, which have been steadily expanding into lower-elevation sagebrush country (and sage grouse habitat) for many decades. By developing detailed models of how Pinyon Jays and sage-grouse use landscapes and habitats, we can generate specific guidelines for habitat management. So far, we have learned that Pinyon Jays tend to forage in relatively open woodlands near the sagebrush interface; that their flocks are remarkably cohesive during both the breeding and the post-breeding season, and that their home ranges are unexpectedly consistent at about 10-15 km2 through the breeding and post-breeding seasons. In contrast to their foraging habitats, Pinyon Jays tend to roost and nest in fairly dense interior woodlands. We have also learned that sage-grouse can make substantial movements over the course of the annual cycle, traveling long distances between lekking grounds, brood-rearing habitat, summer grounds, and wintering grounds. Additionally, males and females have very different habitat-use patterns during parts of the year, probably to make the best use of available resources. We anticipate collecting more data of this sort through the winter season, so stay tuned.