If I had to pick a favorite vegetation community, and I hope I don’t, it might have to be sagebrush. I love the way the withered branches twist in on themselves and the fissures in the bark that make them look ancient. I love the delicate silver-green color of the leaves. Most of all though, I love the smell. It’s hard to describe a smell with words. It’s slightly metallic, earthy, citrusy. On warm days it rises and wraps itself around you like a wool blanket. Rough and scratchy, but comforting because this blanket will never wear out. On rainy days, the scent grows sharper as it mixes with petrichor.
Sagebrush is the anchor in the great basin. Its roots grow deep and keep the soil from blowing away. Its branches give shade for wildflowers. Its leaves are food for species that only live in that ecosystem, like sage grouse and pygmy rabbits.
During my next survey I kept running the sprigs through my fingertips so I could smell it as I walked. Besides sage grouse, there are other species that thrive in the sagebrush. First and foremost is the Brewer’s sparrow. Does it have the prettiest song of the sparrows? No. Is it the most striking bird? Also no. It’s a small brown bird with small brown markings. It does, however, sound the most inebriated of all the sparrows.
A fierce competitor for the title of the best sagebrush song, if not best sparrow song overall, is the sagebrush sparrow. It sings a couple clear notes at a time, interspersed with a trill. A mnemonic device that helps me remember their song is: For meeeee, blueberry pie for meeeee, blueberry pie for meeeee. Even more charming than their song is their habit of running along the ground with their tails raised when they are startled. Most birds that nest on or near the ground run along it for a little way before taking flight. Where you see them fly up is not where their nest is, and this helps them hide their nests from predators.
Of course, there were rock wrens in the sage as well. They were quickly turning into the most common birds I was seeing this summer. Every boulder seemed to have at least one screaming from the top of it.
The loudest sound of all was the incessant thumping from the natural gas well pads scattered across the landscape, barren islands in the sagebrush sea. Driving along the road, they seemed sparse. It was only when you looked at an aerial photograph that their extent was glaringly obvious, pockmarking the otherwise unbroken sea of vegetation. Walking over the landscape, they became even more obvious. The sound of the compressors thumping and pumps pumping made it difficult to find places to camp that were quiet enough to get a good night’s sleep. The well pads also flared excess gas and vented short-chain hydrocarbons from storage tanks, filling the air with things I definitely did not want to inhale. At one campsite, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a loud clanging noise from a pipe that ran next to the road. For a moment I thought it was going to explode before my brain caught up with my panicking body and I realized it was the metal contracting as it cooled after a day of being heated by the sun.
I couldn’t even complete some of the points close to the well pads because it was too loud to hear any birds. I was only here temporarily—what did that mean for the birds and other wildlife that was trying to feed, breed, and avoid predation in these places?
The noise didn’t deter all wildlife. While I was having dinner in camp one night, a short-eared owl flew silently overhead, on its way for some evening hunting. Pronghorn watched me warily as I walked through the sagebrush and barked at me before bounding away when I got too close.
The drive to my next survey took longer than expected. The notes I had said to follow the road for 1.5 miles so I took my time and dawdled. I stopped at prairie dog colonies to scan fenceposts for burrowing owls and pulled over to help basking bull snakes cross the road. The road grew rougher, potholes the size of children’s paddling pools marring the asphalt and threatening to break the axles on my ForeRunner. I slowed to a crawl, too busy steering around the potholes to look for burrowing owls. It was only when I checked my GPS and saw that I still had 10 miles to go that I realized the last technician had made a typo in their notes and written 1.5 instead of 11.5 miles. The last part of the drive took 45 minutes and I didn’t set up camp until the dark.
The following morning, I hiked a few hundred meters to my survey on a series of sagebrush-covered buttes. There were rock wrens and lark sparrows, mountain bluebirds shining like lapis lazuli on the stray pinyon pines in the landscape.
In the distance was a small herd of feral horses—a stallion, his three mares, and a yearling foal. As I completed more points of my survey it became obvious that my last two points would be right where the horses were grazing. They sauntered away from the first point but were now blocking my route to the next point.
The stallion was the first to notice me. He swished his tail and snorted at me while I circled and counted birds for six minutes. That was all well and good, but I still had one point left in my survey and the mares were on top of it. Unlike the stallion, they didn’t seem too bothered by me. One of them napped in the morning sun and the other two grazed placidly. The stallion tossed his head and I took a step back while I pondered my next move.
I’d watched enough horse girl movies during a formative stage of my childhood to know that I alone could tame the wild stallion, win the derby, and save Grandma’s ranch from the CEO of Evil Enterprises, Inc., who wanted to turn it into a glue factory that ran on child labor. Perhaps in doing so, I could also tame my inner turmoil through a heavy-handed metaphor.
Meanwhile, the stallion pawed at the ground like a prime Spanish bull sizing up a particularly insolent matador. I was trying to decide whether I should name him Moonshadow or Starfire when he charged. Apparently, he had not watched the same movies. A cloud of dust flew up in his wake and the mares stopped grazing to watch the excitement.
Time for a math problem. If a pissed-off stallion can gallop at 30 miles per hour and is standing 100 yards from an ornithologist, and the ornithologist can run at a maximum of 10 miles per hour, how many bushes does she have to hurdle before she gets trampled?
I wouldn’t reach the relative safety of the bluffs before the horse did.
I did have one critical skill to my advantage: I am the direct descendant of a semi-professional burro racer and have a working knowledge of equine body language. The stallion’s ears were forward, not pinned back, and he was not going at full speed. I was pretty sure he was bluffing. I hoped I was right. I had wasted a lot of running time doing mental arithmetic.
I raised my arms straight out to the side.
“Hey! Knock it off!”
The horse skidded to a halt and tossed his head.
“I’m genuinely just here for birds.”
He snorted again and did a little prance with an arched neck to show me that he was the boss of this section of rangeland. I finally got the message (it was an impressive little prance). I slowly walked backwards to give him and his mares some space. Satisfied, he trotted back to his mares with his tail high in the air. He herded all of them away from me and then stood on a hillock, shooting me dirty looks. It’s easy to blame the stallion and say he was crazy, or aggressive, or wild. The truth was that he had given me plenty of signs to back off and I hadn’t listened to him. Nature will demand respect if you don’t give it.
I had learned my lesson and made my way to my final point of the day with a long detour.
“Nature will demand respect if you don’t give it.” That applies to the noisy gas wells too, albeit with a delay that is so long that we are oblivious.