I was awake long before my alarm out of excitement at going out to do a bird survey. I got dressed in the dark and drank a full liter of water with electrolytes before starting my hike to the transect. I was embroiled in a long-standing feud with a Dutch pediatrician since childhood and never drank enough water to spite him, but here was far enough in the backcountry that Dr. Wouters would never find out. My backpack was already packed, and I slung it on my back and set out into the night.
The trail wound through a pinyon-juniper forest, and I looked behind me every once in a while in case I were being stalked by a mountain lion. I hadn’t felt this anxious during training with the rest of the crew. It was a lot easier to get up in the dark when the rest of the crew was there too. The dark wasn’t nearly as dark with the headlamps of other people shining around as they got ready for the day. Being out at this time of day alone was eerie. Sounds that were ordinary during the day made my heartrate leap and every strange shadow was a monster until proven otherwise. If I was already feeling anxious in the relative open forest of the high desert, that did not bode well for the spruce-fir forests I would encounter later in the season. A few years of doing less field work had made my spirit as soft as my belly.
The lights of a distant city gleamed on the horizon and the moon was bright enough that I could almost hike without a headlamp. Almost, but not quite. After a fit of whimsy and an unfortunate cactus incident I quickly turned my headlamp back on. When I reached my first point of the day after an hour and a half of hiking, I took out my clipboard and binoculars and waited for it to get light enough that I could identify birds by sight. A thrill ran through my body, and I couldn’t help grinning. This was what I had waited years for. I had worried that I had seen my time with the Bird Conservancy through rose-colored glasses. That the love I had for it was the love I had for the past, and that doing it again wouldn’t live up to my memories. It felt so good to be out there again. I wanted to leap into the air and shout with joy, but that would startle the birds.
The first point of the survey was at the edge of a sandstone rim. On one side was a steep drop off to the desert floor below, and on the other an open pine forest with cacti and yuccas in the understory. White-throated swifts chattered around me from every angle, soaring around me in their neat tuxedos and snatching insects from the air. To me, they will always be the sound of cliffs and canyons. At the valley bottom, a chukar (an Asiatic partridge introduced in the U.S. for hunting) was calling. When the timer beeped at the end of the point, I tucked my clipboard in its familiar place between my backpack and my back (where it would inevitably get sweat-soaked and illegible until I remembered why I had stopped doing that) and followed the GPS to the next point.
The transect straddled the ridge and some of the points were inaccessible for the cliff bands running across it. On the north side of the ridge, the cliff bands were lower thanks to the shrubs that had clawed roots down into the soil, holding it in place and keeping it from eroding. The north side was chock-full of ponderosa-loving species like western tanagers and plumbeous vireos with green-tailed towhees giving their cat-like meows from a shrubby understory.
Birding in ponderosa forests is tough. There are a handful of species that all sound like variations of the American robin, with a similar up-and-down cadence to their songs.
First is the western tanager. It sings with the up and down phrases of an American robin, but with a harsher tone—like an American robin that’s taken up smoking.
Then there are the plumbeous vireos, that take such long pauses between their phrases that you wonder if they stopped singing altogether.
On the other end of the spectrum is the black-headed grosbeak, which sounds like an American robin that’s dabbled in party drugs and is singing very fast without pausing for breath.
Traversing up and down the cliff bands through the shrubs made for tough going. There was always a way through, sometimes it just took a little longer to find. The shrubs were thick and tangled and scratched at my arms as I pushed my way past them. Elk had made their way through and while their trails were steep, they were reliable at avoiding the highest sections of cliff and the thickest thickets.
I made it to the top of a side ridge and followed along its crest. It was a slightly longer route to my next point but avoided unnecessary descending and climbing. At the foot of a mountain mahogany, white tips shining in the sun, lay a shed elk antler. I sank to my knees and ran a finger along it reverently. It was a treasure, a token of the great wild welcoming me back into its embrace. Normally I wasn’t one to believe in symbols and signs, but clearly there were some signs that believed in me.
The antler had only been shed a few months ago. Its spine was dark with plant oils from where the bull elk had rubbed his antlers in the brush to intimidate other bulls and show off to cows. Only its tips shone white, marred with divots and scratches from where it had fought other bulls and collided with tree branches. I looked around for its twin and found it twenty meters away. The brow tines stretched from my elbow to my fingertips and the antlers reached to my hip if I set them on the ground. The animal that carried them must have been a giant. I picked both antlers up and carried them with me for a while, not to take, but to feel their weight in my hands. To imagine what it must be like to be an elk moving over these ridges looking for cows and rivals alike during the rut and brushing aside snow to reach the grass in winter.
I admired the antlers for another couple of minutes and then nestled them back underneath a mountain mahogany. The joy was in the finding, not the keeping. I started my next survey and listened to the towhees and gnatcatchers flitting around me. The birds were growing quieter as the temperature increased and after recording a last western tanager, I ended the survey.
I looked at the steep slopes around me and tried to figure out the most efficient way to get back to the trailhead. On the map, it looked like I could cut over in a straight line instead of retracing my steps. The lines on the topographical map looked a little too close together, but so far, I’d been able to pick my way through the layer cake of cliff bands and dirt slopes. There was no reason to suspect this route would be any different, so I began to pick my way up the slope, sometimes side hilling until I found a break in the cliffs and sometimes hanging on to branches to pull myself uphill.
As I reached the top of the ridge stared at the cliff band that lay between me and the trail I was supposed to be on, I had to admit I had made a cartographic whoopsie. Instead of the gradual slope I had been expecting, I was faced with a 30-foot-tall wall of jagged rock that I had to get down. Theoretically, it should be possible—I had gotten up here in the first place. Apparently, I did not know better than the topographical map.
After a few minutes of panic at the prospect of having to use my emergency beacon to call for rescue, I decided to follow the crest of the ridge in case there was a lower spot somewhere. Sure enough, after ten minutes I reached a collapsed section where I could scramble down a couple of boulders and was back on the trail.
In the hours since I had hiked along it, a bobcat had passed by, its pawprints on top of mine in the soft sand. There were even a few solitary pawprints of a ringtail, an animal that looks like the result of a torrid love affair between a raccoon and a cat, where it had crossed the sand before vanishing onto rock. By the time I reached the car again, the sun was beating down on my neck and my water bottles were empty. The Dutch pediatrician would be proud.
“The joy was in the finding, not the keeping.”
A great lesson, thank you for sharing!