The days during the training week followed roughly the same format. Mornings were for practicing birding and plant identification in a variety of habitats. In the afternoons, we descended on the local library and took over study rooms for presentations on protocol, field safety, and software for data entry and expense reports. These presentations were invariably in windowless rooms to reduce the number of times they were interrupted by someone spotting a bird out of the window and derailing the course. In the evenings we had a little time to ourselves before gathering around our supervisor’s campsite so he could play particularly tricky bird calls for us to learn. People would share their own tips and mnemonic devices they used to differentiate and remember songs until it was too late to stay awake any longer (8:30 p.m.). My personal favorite mnemonic is the lark sparrow, which sounds like a flatulent alien warrior.
I had been reviewing the bird songs ever since I knew I would be back on the bird crew, but the songs always sound slightly different on recordings than in the field. Background noise, distance, and surroundings can drastically alter the way sound travels and is perceived. The best way to learn them was still to go out in the field and practice. The names came flooding back to me as we birded. Brewer’s sparrows in the sagebrush, sounding slightly drunk and rambling. Rollicking warbling vireos in the canopy of the cottonwoods. Recordings never do the songs justice. They never sound as good coming from a computer as they do while you’re standing outside with the chill of morning nipping at your toes and the scent of sagebrush swirling around you.
Part of the job was to collect some basic vegetation data and at each point we would have spirited debates about what 20% of shrub cover looked like and how that compared to 10%. The official reason to collect the vegetation data first is so that the birds have a few minutes to settle down while you’re counting blades of grass, but I suspect the real reason is to leave collecting the bird data as a little reward for wrestling your way through the vegetation data. Arguing about the vegetation data was mind-numbingly boring, and once again proves the moral superiority of birders over botanists.
There was one point that we abandoned quickly after we realized there was an active killdeer nest about 15 meters away from us (it didn’t count towards the ground cover. I asked). Killdeer don’t bother with the nonsense of building a stick nest in a shrub or tree. Instead, they rearrange a few pebbles on bare ground and call it a day. This largely works, as their eggs also look like pebbles and are easy to miss unless you’re looking for them. Even if you are looking for them, they’re so well-camouflaged that they’re hard to spot. Killdeer do not want you to find their nests and pretend they have a broken wing or sit on a fake nest to lure predators away from their actual nest.
I once did weekly ground surveys for an environmental consulting company to find out exactly where killdeer were nesting so that they wouldn’t get crushed by a bulldozer. I spent hours every week walking transects back and forth across the site to find and mark the nests with the killdeer screaming at me to get away and the construction crew impatiently tapping their feet waiting for me to finish my transect. The whole time I was petrified I was going to step on a nest by accident. Not that it mattered– by my next visit, the construction crew had ignored the flagging tape I had carefully put up and dumped several tons of soil on the site.
The killdeer that we spotted during training was firmly planted, and we moved away to let her continue the important business of incubating.
After a couple of days, we moved from our campground at a reservoir to a dispersed camping area in the Dominguez-Escalante Conservation Area, a series of canyons south of Grand Junction. I’d always been intrigued by the sight of the rippling plateaus that grew taller and steeper as they neared the Gunnison River but had never had the chance to explore. The road to get there was doable but had some rocky sections to navigate which kept most other campers away from the site. Once I parked the car, I grabbed my headlamp and set out for a run to stretch my legs. The dirt roads became rougher and steeper, with slabs of rock and stretches of deep sand covering the road as I ran toward the rim of the canyon. The sun set and I stacked cairns at the intersections so I could find the way back along the spiderweb of dirt roads in the dark. I made it to the rim of the canyon for what was probably a magnificent view of the river below. I can’t say I was that impressed by it. To be fair, it was completely dark by the time I reached it.
We arrived at the new camping area at the perfect time to see the desert in bloom. It was early summer, and after a wet spring, the wildflowers were spectacular. Bright red cactuses, white sego lilies, and yellow and orange milk vetches turned the dry landscape into a veritable kaleidoscope. A group of juvenile bighorn sheep ram watched us approaching for our first day out and disappeared over one of the ridges to vanish into the rocks and sand beyond. I had my camera out and got some stunning pictures of a sheep’s anus as it pooped before following its companions out of sight.
The downside of the new campsite was that there were no toilets. In the early mornings there were a lot of sneaky glances before someone vanished with a roll of toilet paper, a Ziploc bag, and a trowel in search of a discreet shrub. In the case of one of my coworkers, it was slightly less discreet as she brought a full-sized shovel with her every time.
For some of the morning birding practice, we piled into the cars and drove to different ecosystems to get familiar with the species there. One of the benefits of driving there in the dark was that I couldn’t see if I needed to be scared of the road I was driving or not. I’ve never been confident at driving on rough roads, and after a few incidents during my last hitch with the Bird Conservancy I had reason enough to be a little anxious behind the wheel. We drove up the Uncompahgre Plateau to find Grace’s warblers in the ponderosas and went to Douglass Pass for towhees and blue-gray gnatcatchers.
Afterwards, we drove to a small library to look at our maps, plot our routes for the summer, and do some general scheming. The library was too small for the full crew of 15 birders and the librarian herded us into a tiny meeting room where we squabbled over who could use the outlets and balanced our laptops on our knees.
At the end of the training week, we would have a bird quiz to prove that we were proficient in identifying bird songs by sound. We did a practice quiz while sitting on the curb outside the library after the librarian decided we had spent enough time stinking up the enclosed space and kicked us out. My supervisor, Mark, played song after song on his laptop while we tried to figure them out and we scribbled down the corresponding 4-letter codes on our clipboards. During one nasal recording, a Cooper’s hawk swooped down to see who was encroaching on his territory. In the bird world, we like to call that a Clue. It might have been a parking lot next to a heavily disturbed plot of nonnative species, but he made it clear it was his patch of scraggly weeds.
One of the calls sounded like a bunch of rubber ducks in the midst of an orgy. I was stumped, and judging by the confused looks on my coworkers’ faces, I was not alone. One of my coworkers tentatively raised a hand and asked if we could hear a different recording.
“Of course,” said Mark.
The next recording was of a tuna that someone had, for an inexplicable reason, placed in a bathtub. It did not help with identifying the bird.
I left it blank, and Mark moved on to the next call. This one was a series of disconnected whistles and mechanical noises. It was a gray catbird, a bird that is skilled in imitating other sounds and known for its cat-like mews from thick shrubs. It’s a tricky song to learn because individuals can sound vastly different to each other. Listening to recordings, we didn’t have the habitat clues you would have while birding outside.
One of my coworkers raised their hand again, frowning.
“Can we hear it splashing?”
Once we graded our tests (the mystery bird was a pied-billed grebe, and the sound is now seared into my brain) we went for a team dinner to enjoy a meal that wasn’t made on a camp stove. After gorging myself on pizza and making full use of a flush toilet and running water to wash my hands, I went to a nearby lake with some coworkers for a little more birding before bedtime. It was eBird’s Big Day, when people are encouraged to document as many birds as they can and upload them to eBird for bragging rights. The usual suspects were hanging around the cottonwoods and cattails of the pond; black-headed grosbeaks, red-winged blackbirds, and barn swallows.
A big beaver, round and fat as a little hippo, was circling the pond. One of my coworkers and I doubled back to the parking lot to pick up our camera gear and settled down on the bank to watch and wait. The beaver would swim to the middle of the pond, dive down, and return to a sheltered spot underneath an overhanging willow to munch on a double pawful of aquatic vegetation it had pulled from the bottom of the lake. I was decently pleased with my photographs, until I saw the pictures my coworker had taken and realized that while he was a photographer, I was nothing more than a monkey playing with a mirror.
On the final morning we went for another birding session and finished by hiking to the lookout that I had run to on my first night in the Dominguez-Escalante. I had admit that when you can actually see the view, it’s pretty good. This stretch of the Gunnison River undulated between the rock walls in big meanders, brown with sediment from rocks it was slowly and inexorably eroding as it wound its way across the landscape. This river was patient enough that it didn’t need to be fast.
We sat on the boulders and watched a golden eagle soar past. They like to sleep in, and don’t bother leaving their roosts until the earth has warmed and there are some proper thermals to soar on. This one had found a nice northerly breeze and glided by with seemingly no effort and no interest in the people on the canyon’s edge. I found a flat-topped boulder and sun puddled languorously, listening to the chatter of my coworkers, and scanning the sky above me for white-throated swifts and peregrine falcons. Somewhere in the river bottom far below us, a yellow-breasted chat was grumbling about something or other (presumably another yellow-breasted chat trying to sit in an adjacent shrub).
My supervisor suggested we take a group picture, and we balanced on rocks close enough to each other that everyone was in the frame. It was then that someone said the five words that never fail to strike fear into my heart: “Let’s do a funny one!”
I hate making a goofy pose on cue. I can barely manage a normal facial expression at the best of times (I suffer from resting American Gothic face) and making a different one on short notice is near impossible. “Funny” group pictures inevitably result in me looking like I swallowed a cicada, which usually isn’t the kind of theme the people who suggest funny pictures are looking for. If it were up to me, I would have a 2-week notice period so I could practice a suitably spontaneous expression. I glanced at the edge of the cliff and considered stepping off it. My coworker took the picture while I was still trying to decide.
Back at camp we pulled our camp chairs into a loose circle around our supervisor for the final bird quiz, one for the people going to the eastern plains and a different one for those of us starting in western Colorado and Utah. There is a lot of overlap in species—there is no place you can’t find an American robin, for instance—but the grasslands of the great plains are home to species you won’t see in the red sandstone deserts and vice versa. Since I was part of the desert group, I was fairly confident that I would not have to identify any birds by the sound they made when splish-splashing in a body of water, but you never know.
The quiz took a bit longer than expected and I got a spectacular sunburn across the top of my sandalled feet that would soon age into tan lines that made me look far cooler than I actually am.
After the quiz, we milled around for a while. I was eager to get on the road and head to my first survey, but also a little sad to say goodbye to my coworkers. Aside from the training in the beginning of the field season and a couple days of training in mid-June, we wouldn’t see each other for the rest of the summer. All the early mornings spent wandering through the desert waiting for the sun to rise, the afternoons jammed shoulder to shoulder in tiny libraries, came to an abrupt end and suddenly we were all by ourselves again. Until the middle of June, at least, when we could swap tall tales of our adventures and compare bird sightings at mid-season training.