Santa Cruz Island Round FOUR

The eastward view of the Central Valley from Portezuela.

I made it! I'm home! Santa Cruz Island once again. There is nothing like the feeling of coming back to this place. Every time is an energizing combination of it feeling brand new and exciting but also a solid comfort that I made the right choice to come back. It is so green here now because there has been a few rain events and hopefully there will be more. There are a few wildflowers blossoming already and the Ceanothus is in full bloom, wafting a sweet odor on the breeze.

We showed the new tech, Kachina, around the plots today, driving the Miner up and over Camino de la Casa and up above Coches, up the Ridge Road to Centinela and then down the Valley to Portezuela. The wind was whipping up some beautiful dancing grass below Picacho Diablo and blew the clouds and haze away so it looked like Santa Rosa Island and San Nicholas Island were within spitting distance. I can't tell you how many times I breathed deeply and sighed a supremely satisfied sigh today.

Our trusty 77' Land Cruiser, the Miner, fixed up and ready to go with Picacho Diablo framed in the roll bar.

Crewleader Michael pointing out our Coches Plot to Kachina.

Westward view of Santa Rosa Island and towards Christy Ranch.

This season will be chock full of nest searching, nest predation experiments, vegetation surveys, fox scat surveys, and little bit of radio-tracking and banding. It's gonna be a good one. I'll be here until mid-June, and my good friend Oliver will be the fourth tech coming out in three weeks!

Chiricahua National Monument: Road Trip Part V

Chiricahua National Monument in southeast Arizona. It's pronounced Cheer-uh-cow-uh, not Cheery-cuh-who-uh, named for the Apache people from that area.

We breezed through New Mexico (and by that I mean it was so hot we nearly died) and made it to Chiricahua National Monument very early the next morning. We drove to the top of the monument and enjoyed the sun warming the bizarre and incredible rock formations.

The goal bird of the day was a Red-faced Warbler so we set out on a long hike into the canyons to an area where they are usually seen. We were surrounded by awesome birds the whole time. Yellow-eyed Juncos, Hepatic Tanager, Dusky-capped Flycatcher, Montezuma Quail! In the depths of the canyon we lucked out and saw a Mexican Chickadee, a Painted Redstart, and our goal bird, the Red-faced Warbler. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture because I have a policy with life birds to really see them before I lift up my camera. This little guy was in full view for only a few minutes, then popped back in the trees and bopped around for a bit before he disappeared. Next time!

Black-throated Gray Warbler, Setophaga nigrescens.

Later in the evening we walked to the Faraway Ranch, where my father had written a history of the little cabin, and found an Arizona Woodpecker on the way back! We also found this Desert Grassland Whiptail digging.

Arizona Woodpecker, Picoides arizonae.

Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizard, Aspidoscelis uniparens.

It was a great trip to the Chiricahuas. I can't wait to go back there and spend more time exploring and birding! I would also really like to see a Coatimundi.

Important Note: I am heading out to Santa Cruz Island tomorrow! Though I still have a few more road trip adventures to share, I may detour and my next post will be from the island about the island!

Chisos: Ghosts or Forest People? Road Trip Part IV

Chisos Mountains, which either means ghosts/spirits (Catalan/Spanish) or people of the trees (Apache). Both are very fitting.

We trucked it through Texas with as few stops as possible. Remember, it was June, so it was hot and my little truck doesn't have air conditioning, so we rolled along Interstate 10 with the windows down. The sweltering rush of air from the speed of the truck did little to cool our skin. We needed to get as high as possible (elevation-wise, dude) to get out of the burnanation, so we were headed for Big Bend National Park. We got up above 5,000 feet in the early evening and let the magic of nature wash over us, the clear night sky filled with pinprick stars whispered away the stress from the clanging and whooshing little metal pods that had hurtled around us at breakneck speeds all day.

On June 6th, in the Chisos Basin Campground, I wrote the following in my long-neglected journal:
"It's a warm, blustery night below the stars and I am free once again. I will not recount the trivial yet monumental misery of the past few months [at school] because it is over and done with--right now I am appreciating right now, here. This place is stunning and the heat adds to its essence--when I was here last in January 2011 (wow, 3.5 years just scoots by, doesn't it) it was cool enough to not feel particularly like a desert but now, in the heat of June, it is full-fledged HOT and it feels so real. The Texas desert...Being here, at 5,000+ feet, could not be more perfect for my soul. Sleeping outside with a breeze to keep the bugs away and a clear shy with stars--YES. Tomorrow we will hike up to Boot Springs to find a Colima Warbler--a 9-mile round trip hike into spectacular country, mountain lion country, to search for a tiny bird (my kind of adventure!). For now I am going to turn out my light and enjoy the wind and the [relatively] cool air while it lasts."

Cactus Wren, Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus, on our trail sign.

We met many facemelting birds the next day and one very exciting face-tingling herp. First, the warbler--Colima Warbler, Oreothlypis crissalis--is only found in this mountain range in the US. The rest of their population is in Mexico. They are also a part of one of my favorite groups of warblers (I say group rather than genus because, well, I liked it better when they were Vermivora) so I was excited about finally seeing this one and completing my vermivora/oreothlypis species list (SOOO NERDY. "Completing" taxonomic groups [which you can break down into varying sizes depending on how specific you get] is really fun. I've completed all the North American nuthatches, for example [that's an easy one], but I still need Brown Jay to complete my N.A. Jays). Anyway, we had only been hiking for a short while, maybe 2 or 3 miles, and I heard an unfamiliar yet familiar song. It sounded like a Vermivora song, which I guess really is an Oreothlypis song, but whatever. My first instinct was right and we immediately spotted him singing from the very tip of a tiny snag. Adrenaline rush, then relaxing afterglow while we basked in the glory of this tiny puff of feathers for well over 20 minutes before he popped down into the brush and then up the canyon.

Colima Warbler, singing as loud as birdly possible.

Insolence or yoga?

Later in the hike, just plugging mindlessly down the trail, heat setting in, Ben yelled and jumped back. On the steep hillside next to us, about shoulder level, was a Rock Rattlesnake (either Banded or Mottled, hard to tell the subspecies' apart), Crotalus lepidus. EPIC.

We didn't see any mountain lions, but the journey really solidified how much I love Big Bend NP. Our last night camping there, we sat through an incredible and very intense lightning storm that surrounded the bowl of mountains we were in the basin of. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, and it was a crazy way to spend a night--completely unprotected from the elements, electric current coursing through the warm night, cold drops the size of Gobstoppers cracking open on the dusty ground. The cacti drank well that night.

We're Not Even Through Louisiana Yet! Part III

Gator at the fishing pier.

It felt like we were driving along the Louisiana coast for a longer than half a day because we kept pulling over at fishing piers and beaches and finding cool critters and situations. The air was hot and salty, a little thick, but the breeze off the Gulf pushed it all around, smoothing the edge between stifling and sufficiently dispersed particles. Once we made it west of the bayous, the gulf waves crashed brown on the straight sandy stretch of beach that touched Texas many miles away. Porpoise backs glimmered in the distant swells. The water was the exact color of exceedingly watered-down cowboy coffee (not that a real cowboy would ever water it down) with flecks of seaweed rather than fragrant coffee grounds. I was at once in a cloud of screaming Least Terns, hovering above like angels but with anger in their cries. When they calmed down and settled back into the sand, I made sure I wasn't near any nests and moved on. I made the happy discovery that my entire bar of chocolate had melted, which meant I got to drink it right then. All of it. We made it to Texas.

Carolina Anole, Anolis carolinensis.

That's called a dewlap. Yeah. A dewlap. This is a male displaying to me, probably telling me to fear him and GTFO.

Black-necked Stilt, Himantopus mexicanus. Why this bird is not named after a more prominent feature, say a pink-legged stilt, I do not know, but I think it was interestingly named...yes, it has black on it's neck, but most of it's neck is white...silly ornithologists.

Screaming Angel bird AKA Least Tern, Sternula antillarum.

This Laughing Gull, Leucophaeus atricilla, ushered us out of Louisiana and into the ginormous state of Texas. Or he was begging for food, but gulls don't do that, right?

Shamelessly Late Road Trip Post: Part II

As you can perhaps imagine, it's been a busy six and a half months since my last post. My mind was alternately filled with either too much stuff or too much emptiness to bring me to write eloquently about my incredible road trip with my brother. But now is the time, seeing as I am about to return to one of my blog-inspiration islands, Santa Cruz, in just a few short weeks.

We drove through Georgia on the idyllic back roads, which I highly recommend, and counted Mockingbirds on the telephone wires. After a long day of driving, we crossed into Alabama and pulled in to Tuskegee National Forest, the nation's smallest NF. The pine forest was bursting with Prairie and Yellow-throated Warbler songs.

That evening I stalked a toad, which, thanks to my Herpetology class this fall, I later identified as a Fowler's Toad, Bufo fowleri.

The next day we stopped by Splinter Hill Bog in southern Alabama and strolled through the carnivorous pitcher plants and towering pines. Keep your eye out for a post soon about why bogs are so fascinating.

 
We visited my dear friend James in New Orleans and were immersed in an up-close and personal view into the underground singer/songwriter scene in the Dirty Dirty, which was pretty incredible. We camped in Louisiana and met a campground armadillo, with whom we sat for a long while watching him or her while they snuffled around in the sand pit where our non-existent tent was supposed to go.

Stay tuned for Part III, which I promise will come much sooner than six months from now!

4,010 Miles, 30 Life birds: Part I

A tornado of final exams and presentations and papers (and sabbatical replacement search committee meetings and phone interviews) descended upon me in early May and by graduation I was well beyond ready to play. School got out on May 17th and I had two more weeks in Asheville before my brother would fly out and we would drive my trusty pickup back across the country. I spent those two weeks birding, playing baseball, and drinking local brews in the lengthening evenings with friends.

Early morning birding on the WWC campus.

Redbird, Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis.

My friend Sam and I hiked Mt. Mitchell, the tallest peak in the U.S. east of the Mississippi--12 miles round trip through lush hardwood forest and up into spruce-pine forest. We got great looks at some delicious warblers, including Canada, Magnolia, Black-burnian, and Black-throated Blue. The hike is bizarre because you spend the first 5.75 miles on a secluded mountain trail but share the last 200 meters of the trek with tourists who drove to the top and they are huffing and puffing on the asphalt road to the concrete structure that sits atop the highest point (really, they had to build something man-made above the highest point east of the Mississippi?). It made me laugh. We stayed up there a short time and then quickly retreated to the solitude of the deserted trail.

Blue Ridge Mountains

On May 28th, my brother arrived and we spent 3 days in the Asheville area to explore and so I could perform in two concerts with the Wild Asheville Community Chorus lead by Suzannah Park and Nathan Morrison (one of the main reasons I decided to finish at Warren Wilson was actually not even related to school, but to this incredible, soul-nurturing choir!). We birded the Blue Ridge Parkway and saw lifer #1 for the trip: a Cerulean Warbler. We heard it singing for ten or fifteen minutes before we actually saw the bird--dang those guys are hard to track down high in those leaf-filled trees! It chased a Blackburnian Warbler away (always a treat to see, those flame-throated birds) and took off again. I would love to get better looks at the Cerulean Warbler but I'll settle for that for now.

Not a Cerulean Warbler but another vibrantly colored shade of blue--Indigo Bunting, Passerina cyanea, near Mt. Mitchell.

On June 2, Ben and I started the long drive south to New Orleans, where we would then head West along the coast of Louisiana. I won't bore you with all the details of the trip in one post but will follow up this post with vignettes and photos to catch you up on what we saw and experienced!

It's Getting Lush/Spring Migration

One of my favorites, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Regulus calendula.

Yellow-throated Vireo, Vireo flavifrons.

The migrants are pouring up into the mountains. The trees are finally leafing out, the green is creeping up the slopes slowly every day. The whole system is so alive and in motion. To go outside in the morning is a feast of all the senses--a mixed chorus of birds, a bombardment of color (mostly some shade of light green), the spicy fresh smell of new leaves, a lightness in the air before the humidity sets in, and plenty of yummy fresh "weeds" to munch on as you walk (violets are edible! Garlic mustard, chickweed, and dandelion--a constant foragers feast!).

I will be honest with you, I have been struggling with motivation lately in all aspects of my life, but once I step outside and give myself just a few minutes with the chaotic stimulation of spring, I feel amazed that I could ever have wanted to stay in bed. I really should just pitch a tent and wake each day with the dawn chorus.

Blue-headed Vireo, Vireo solitarius, chowing down a grub.

Same Blue-headed. I had a four vireo day--Blue-headed, Red-eyed, Yellow-throated, and White-eyed.

Today I hiked all around Jones Mountain, where I have three study plots (I have a total of twelve on campus). I'm starting to gather data for my senior research--bird surveys in the college forest, basically setting up a monitoring baseline for further surveys in the coming years (whether or not the college follows through is out of my hands)--so I expect to skip a lot of class and just be lost in the forest for the next month, with the birds. I'll be taking lots of pictures, so keep your eyes peeled for new blog posts.

A Flowering Dogwood, Cornus florida.

Dogwood flowers.

Quaint resting spot at the orchard.