This seems like a good opportunity to go through some of the bird songs you might hear in a pinyon-juniper vegetation community, with the mnemonic devices I use to identify them.
To put it mildly, I was fussy and in need of a snack long before it was light enough to start looking for birds. At my last job, I could harass a coworker until they tossed me a granola bar, but one downside of working solo was that there were no backpacks I could pilfer other than my own. Even getting to my campsite the night before had been a headache. The first road I wanted to take to get there was blocked by a locked gate. The second was blocked by a boulder*. The third consisted of a 3-hour detour and by the time I pulled into my camping spot it was already time to go to sleep.
*At first I thought it was a big rock, but after consultation with a geologist and the Wentworth grain size classification scale I can confidently say it was a boulder.
Bewick’s wrens are much like jazz musicians, both in their song style and in that I find them viscerally irritating. Instead of singing the same song as their compatriots, they insist on tweedling around in the same key and calling that acceptable. There is a lot of variation between individuals and it makes them a pain in the ass to identify.
Blue-gray gnatcatchers are one of my favorite birds. They have one of the highest sass-to-body-size ratios in the avian world. Listen for their nasally calls in shrubby areas. To me, they sound like Snaga the orc who wants to know why he can’t eat a hobbit. They have a similar nasally tone and “Come at me, bro” attitude. If you listen closely, you can hear them say, “Why can’t we have some meats?”
Also in the party are black-throated gray-warblers (the featured image of this post), who sing a scratchy Justin-Justin-Justin-BIEBER, as though they’re hoarse from shouting his name at a concert.
Pinyon jays sound like posh Brits having a laugh at something us peasants wouldn’t understand.
I was surveying close to the ghost town of Atchee (Gesundheit!). The transect had been dropped on top of a canyon with half the points neatly on each side. Getting between the points meant navigating cliff bands and backtracking or downclimbing when the one I was on became too narrow or crumbled. As I scurried up the loose slopes and squeezed through shrubbery like a ringtail, I mapped the best route by process of elimination. This route was not it. I quicky realized there was no best way through. The only option was to double check my footholds on the steep parts and muscle through the shrubs on the flatter rim of the canyon.
Once out of the canyon, I thought the going would be easier by virtue of it being flat. Oh, how naïve I was. The rim of the canyon was a mass of tangled serviceberry and mountain mahogany that tore both my arms and my patience to shreds.
Serviceberry is so named because it is one of the earliest flowering shrubs in the western US. Legend has it that it was used to mark the graves of people who had died during the winter. During the icy grasp of winter, they couldn’t be buried because the ground was too frozen. By the time the serviceberry was in bloom, the ground would be soft enough to dig graves. In my own family, we practiced something similar, as my father would dig a hole in the backyard every autumn in preparation for the death of a succession of geriatric pets.
I am glad that the fog of history changed the proactive grave digger from me to Roel.
As a jazz musician I wish I would be tweedling around in the same key. Usually my twiddling is in a different key than the others in my ensemble, often a dissonant key. That makes me actually easy to identify (although others confuse me at times with Frank Zappa).