A REEVALUATION OF HOTSPOT SETTLEMENT IN LEKKING SAGE GROUSE

Recent analyses of avian leks have come to conflicting conclusions con cerning the role of male settlement on female traffic hotspots. This i ssue was re-examined in the sage grouse, Centrocercus urophasianus, us ing data on pre-nesting movements of radiotagged females and the dispe rsion of lekking males collected during a 10-year field study. As expe cted with hotspot settlement, leks were preferentially located in area s through which females travelled between wintering and nesting ranges before mating. In addition, the distribution of males among leks was related proximately to variation in numbers of females visiting each l ek during the mating period and ultimately to numbers that nested with in a 2-km radius, within which nesting hens were preferentially attrac ted. The results show both that hotspot settlement can explain certain coarse scale features of male dispersion, and that female behaviour d uring different stages of the pre-nesting period may influence particu lar components of male dispersion to differing extents. (C) 1996 The A ssociation for the Study of Animal Behaviour