It’s easy to wax romantic about this job, about seeing every sunrise and listening to the dawn chorus, exploring different landscapes, and being immersed in nature. The reality is that it involves a lot of driving. Especially in the 2023 field season, when my survey locations were picked by a blind chimpanzee throwing darts at a map.
I listened to radio stations that buzzed in and out of static and switched to audiobooks and podcasts when they disappeared completely. I was driving east again, saying goodbye to the Great Salt Lake and driving up and over the Wasatch Range to Bear Lake in the northeast corner of Utah. I had three surveys relatively close together, something of a novelty, and settled in for a couple of days of surveying in the sagebrush-covered hills.
The nearby town of Randolph was small and sleepy. When I asked the baker at the R Bakery if they had Wi-Fi, she looked at me as though I had asked for a spaceship. She assured me that the local burger bar, the aptly named “Trough”, down the road might have it, if they were open. They weren’t. I didn’t mind, as the bakery had a wide selection of sweet treats and generous serving sizes. This was no fancy patisserie with Instagram-perfect macarons. It was a place that served brownies the size of hubcaps and muffins that would make a fitness fanatic blanch. At R Bakery, calories came first and foremost and that was exactly what I was in the mood for. Instead of checking my e-mails I spent a happy afternoon treating myself like a foie gras goose. My pile of unentered data sheets was growing worryingly high, but I shoved the worry away in much the same way that I shoved another piece of carrot cake down my gullet.
Not that I spent much time in the town—there was far too much fun to be had outside. I went for runs on winding BLM roads, with the occasional sprint to dodge cows with calves. I photographed harriers hunting outside my tent, checked flooded fields for funky ducks, and pulled over to help bullsnakes cross the road. The only damper was the ticks that waited outside my car to ambush me every time I got up to pee during the night.
All in all, there were so many things that filled my days that I didn’t really need to leave my campsite except to forage at R Bakery. Eventually I felt guilty enough about my datasheets that I went to the library for an afternoon to enter the data. Much like the local ticks, the local librarian was excited to see some fresh meat in town. She latched on and sucked me dry for information about what I was doing there and where I was going. Unlike the ticks, she was lovely and gave me a great excuse to procrastinate a little longer.
But the undisputed highlight of my time in the Bear Lake area were the greater sage grouse that I sometimes glimpsed during my surveys, with spiky tail feathers and prominent white ruffs that made them look like turkeys dressed up for the opera.
Greater sage grouse are a great example of a bird that lives up to its name. They’re big grouse that live in the sage steppe of western North America. They rely on the sagebrush for food and cover and their success is closely tied to contiguous habitat.
Males gather on communal dancing grounds called leks and do their best to impress the females by strutting their stuff and wobbling their air sacs to make booming sounds (hot!) The females pick the male that impress them the most and mate with them. Some males are incredibly popular while others are left inflating their air sacs by themselves. The sage grouse are understandably self-conscious about this whole affair and the slightest bit of disturbance, such as the presence of people or infrastructure, is enough to put them off breeding altogether.
The fact that I was seeing them so often here was an encouraging sign.