The Taxidermy Bird That Scientists Turned Into a Robot

[Narrator] So yeah,

here's a taxidermy bird stuck on some wheels.

Fembot is her actual name.

She can look around just like a real bird

and even pretend to forage, all to help researchers

understand the intricacies of this insanity.

(grouse clucking)

Because it turns out in order to truly study

sage grouse mating behavior, you gotta get clever.

Ain't science grand?

(robotic noise)

Biologist Gail Patricelli is the inventor of the Fembot.

It's designed to mimic the behavior of a female sage grouse,

and it even comes equipped with a camera.

This helps researchers get up close and personal

with this extremely sensitive endangered species.

[Gail] We can have her tilt forward a little bit

and peck at the ground.

Obviously if there was some grass there

she would look like she's pecking at the grass.

[Narrator] It's weirdly realistic,

because it has to be in order to trick male sage grouse.

Their mating grounds are called a lek.

Think of it like an open-air bazaar.

The males are the vendors and the females are the customers.

Males want to sell themselves,

but females are picky about what they buy.

With the Fembot, Patricelli can tamper with this dynamic.

We send the robot out and have her

not looking particularly interested in the male.

The male gets started courting her

and investing in this courtship, and then we have

what's called an outside option in economics,

where we have another hen heading out

and the male now decides whether to continue

investing in that first courtship effort

or shifting gears and focusing on

trying to convince that second female to mate.

[Narrator] This is what the robot looks like

without its bird shell.

The shape is a fiberglass mold

of a body from an online taxidermy store.

It's kinda got a crazy

escaped rotisserie chicken

with some sorta something S&M going on in there look

when it's halfway built, but this is all elastic.

This is nylons.

I actually used a pair of Spanx that I ripped apart.

And so I can attach some of the feathers

directly onto this and make it move naturally.

[Narrator] The biggest challenge?

Trying to get a dead bird to move naturally.

The head is attached separately and rotates around.

This whole front part here moves up and down

separately from the rest of the body.

[Narrator] That gives it more flexibility

to realistically recreate sage grouse behavior.

And voilà, a dead female sage grouse is immortalized

as the Fembot.

[Gail] I don't know how they feel

about being immortalized that way,

but yes, they come back to life

and have a whole nother career tempting males for science.

They can move around and peck on the ground

and look uninterested in mating any time soon

or they can remain more upright, looking back and forth,

looking like they're getting closer to being ready to mate.

And so we've been able to see how males respond

to those two different behaviors.

[Narrator] The first generation actually ran on tracks

that Patricelli laid across the lek,

but that came with challenges for the Fembot.

If two males got into a fight

and kicked dirt over the train tracks

then she could end up getting stranded out there.

[Narrator] These offroading machines were the solution.

[Gail] These two robots are Salt 'n' Pepa.

We were planning on making a music video

to Let's Talk About Sex.

We just haven't done it yet.

But one of them had slightly lighter plumage than the other

and we had grand plans

we haven't really followed through on.

[Narrator] But steering around a taxidermy robot

isn't just about decoding sage grouse mating behavior.

The better these researchers can understand the birds,

the better they can protect them.

Over the last decade or so, they've been the focus

of one of the biggest conservation efforts in US history.

[Narrator] The team has also studied

how human-made sounds can disrupt the ritual on the lek.

We've used that information to work with land managers

to try to come up with better rules to manage noise.

[Narrator] So yes, the Fembot is hilarious,

but it's also a powerful tool for research and conservation.

But also, hilarious.

[Gail] It looks like runway walking we've got going here.

Yes, sassy, sassy.