Where to go Birding on Antelope Island

Antelope Island sits in the Great Salt Lake, about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City. A causeway takes you from the mainland to the island and past excellent spots for scoping for plovers and other wading birds. The brine shrimp in the lake attract shorebirds and waterfowl alike and the island is a great place for spotting birds and other wildlife. With 36-miles of trails for hiking, biking, and horse riding, there is plenty of exploring to do.

The island is mostly grassland, with a few stands of cottonwoods that are magnets for migratory birds, and marshes lining the shore. There are pronghorn antelope (fittingly), bighorn sheep, mule deer, and a herd of bison that call the island home as well.

There are 3 campgrounds on the island: Lady Finger, Bridger Bay, and White Rock Bay. Bridger Bay, where I camped, is the only campground with flush toilets, showers, and most importantly, shade structures. It felt a bit extravagant after wild camping on public lands for the past 10 days, but I figured I had earned a bit of a treat. As an added bonus, my campsite came with loggerhead shrikes, willets, and black-throated sparrows.

It’s not hyperbolic to say there are clouds of gnats—every shrub has a dark cloud of midges hanging above it, and a coworker who visited the island the week before I did had left with legs swollen from bites. When I visited in early June, there was a light breeze that kept the gnats away for the most part, although I was glad I brought a head net.

• Start at the visitor center for updates on recent sightings. The staff can also tell you where the bison have been hanging out so that you can either go see them or pick a hike to avoid them, depending on your plans. If you’re lucky, there might also be ravens nesting in the amphitheater. Check out the prairie dog towns nearby for burrowing owls. There are plenty of pullouts along the road to pull over and scan with a pair of binoculars so that you don’t disturb the owls. I found were two pairs and could watch them from the car as they hunted for insects and lizards. One would stand watch outside the burrow while the other hunted. When the hunting owl came back with a tasty treat, the other would do a quick inspection of the catch and their partner and then the hunter would go into the burrow to feed the nestlings. What I did not enjoy were the other photographers. One of them went out on foot, causing the owls to puff themselves up in fright and give alarm calls until he got the picture he wanted and left, and the other decided that his 400mm lens wasn’t big enough to get the shot he wanted and crept closer and closer to one of the owls until it flushed. Don’t be like them. If you can’t get the shot you want, the visitor center sells postcards and prints with photographs from local artists.

• The causeway is great for shorebirds like snowy plovers and Wilson’s phalaropes. Definitely bring a spotting scope to help identify far-away specks. I tried birding from the beach, but as it was covered in the corpses of eared grebes (either from winter die-off or avian flu), it wasn’t ideal.

• Fielding Garr Ranch, on the east side of the island, has a few stands of cottonwoods and acts like a beacon for birds like migratory warblers and black-headed grosbeaks. The old ranch is open to visitors, and you can wander through the barns and houses. As someone who read the Wheel of Time during a formative stage of my adolescence and now has lots of Feelings about blacksmiths, I particularly enjoyed the forge. There was also a porcupine chewing on cambium in the cottonwood trees and a great horned owl family hiding in a barn. Rumor has it there is a barn owl that hangs out in that area as well, but I couldn’t find it.

• The trails around Buffalo Head wind through rocky outcrops full of chukars and rock wrens before wrapping through grasslands with long-billed curlews. There’s a certain wistfulness ascribed to the call of the curlew, mentioned as it is by Shakespeare, Wilde, and Burns, but now that I was on an island surrounded by them the romance started to wear off slightly. Sure, they sound plaintive and heartbreaking when they soar overhead, but when you see them flap about on the ground they lose some of their dignity.

No trip to Antelope Island is complete without a hike to the high point of Frary Peak. The summit posts excellent view of the lake and you can see lark sparrows and western meadowlarks along the route.  

My original plan was to wake up early and go for a run up Frary Peak and be back in time for a quick shower, then drive into the nearest town for laundry, groceries, and the next hitch of surveys. Life, as it so often does, had other plans.

I started up the trail, my legs feeling the good kind of sore that comes from a hard block of training, the cold morning air nipping at my hands. After a couple hundred meters I stopped to take a better look at the ridge ahead of me. Had it always had that many boulders? It looked significantly darker than it had when I left the parking lot. The boulders were moving, and the fact that they were coming over the crest of the hill suggested that they weren’t boulders at all. I’m no geologist, but I was fairly certain that boulders usually move downhill with gravity rather than against it.

I scurried back to my car to put on my glasses and get a better look.

Now that I had my glasses on, I realized that I wasn’t looking at boulders after all, but rather a herd of over 100 bison. They had spent the night on the west side of the island and now that the sun had risen they were crossing the spine of mountains to graze in the salt marshes on the eastern shore. They bellowed as they caught sight of the grass and most of them broke into a gallop, a stampede thundering down the slope where I would have been if I had kept following the trail.

Some of the bison stopped at sand pits for a good dust bath to protect them from the mosquitos at the lake, rolling in the dirt and sending plumes of dust into the air. Others careened straight down the hill. Yearling bulls constantly jostled each other, butting their heads against each other and thrashing the sage brush. The calves, still cinnamon red, outpaced all the other bison in their excitement, their short legs a blur while their mothers tried and failed to keep up. The mature bulls ambled by with their heavy shoulders and long beards. They didn’t need to waste energy fighting the younger bulls or worry about the best grazing spots once they got down to the marsh.

From the safety of the car I could hear the soft grunting noises they made to each other. The sound of their bodies moving through the brush. Their hooves on the ground. I could taste the slightly metallic dust that they kicked up into the air.

They might not have been birds, but they still made for an unforgettable sight as they galloped down the hill and to the green grass at the water’s edge.