Today, Ryan and I went on a carcass run. We must have been trailing the tallow truck, because we did not get a particularly good haul today. Either that or it was baby cow dry season. We did, however, see quite a few of these delightful little owls--a reward for putting up with the amazing stench of the dairies.

Burrowing Owls!!!!!!!!

We have new interns! I met new intern Ryan yesterday evening, and we promptly got lost trying to find one of the feeding sites Ryan had just seen the week before, and I was SO sure I had seen before. However, there was no moon, and no lights, and no pile of rocks to mark the path. Oh wait. After nearly an hour and a half of searching blindly in the dark with the weak lights of our headlamps, and some vague directions from our respective supervisors, we finally stumbled upon a well-hidden rock cairn, and at last we were at the feeding site. It was pretty foolish. 

Today, Ryan and I went on a dairy run and got a pretty good haul, considering the last time I went we ended up with 2 calves. 

And, we saw burrowing owls!

Like little men. 

A Hard Day's Night

What a very long day. I was up before 4 am, in the blind for hours, went back to the house to help Katie with a solid block of frozen cows, then drove with Katie to our feeding site at Wind Wolves preserve. By the time we got back to the house, it was after 10:30.

Driving back along the dark and winding roads, it seemed there was a barn owl, glowing ghostly white in the Dakota's headlights, on every other fencepost. After a while, Katie and I started joking that it was just the same owl, following us home and messing with our minds.

Spent the day out at South Potrero, nestled in a bush, watching the little chick be adorable. 

Biting Dad's feathers

Biting Dad's tag

Worn out from biting Dad

As nightfall approached, I heard something land on a branch a ways above the nest. Momentarily breaking eye-to-scope on the nest (sorry Estelle!) I scoped up to see the darkened form of a great horned owl. Eerie. 

All Grown Up

I've Got You, Babe

I was back in the blind before sunrise this morning. And what a crazy sunrise it was.

Apocalypse-esque

 At one point, I made the mistake of shining my flashlight into the dark corners of the blind :

The ravens were in rare form this morning :

Raven at the window

"HEY!"

This is such an amazing face :

This series of photos is my favorite :

"Oh, you think you're SO tall ..."

"We'll just see about that."

"I'm king of the world!"

Finally after hours of waiting, just as I was about to pack up to leave the blind and head home empty-handed (so to speak), 483, one of the birds I was supposed to trap, showed up.

So I sat back down, and resumed waiting. Waiting for the just right conditions. Waiting for the ravens to magically disappear, waiting for her condor companions to finish feeding. Then in a flash, there was one:  483 all alo -- no wait, 509 was hovering in the doorway, just beneath the trap door. "Come on, 509" I thought as loudly as I could. "You want to leave. You don't want to be in the trap. There's a perfectly good cow leg just outside." 509 made a move to enter further into the double-door trap, and I willed harder. Then she did an about-face and raced out the doorway. I leapt into action, pulled the trap door rope, and the door fell down. I nearly fist-pumped and did a happy dance before remembering to open the internal door that led to the flight pen. 483 flew on through. The song "I've Got You Babe" started playing in my head. 

Once I had left the flight pen, I drove down to meet Bob the tricolored blackbird biologist down at his trap site, where he let me assist in banding some birds. He also showed me this trick, where if you hold a female blackbird on her back, then slowly let go, she won't fly away. She'll just stay completely still, legs sticking up in the air, until you turn her over again. 

We walked down the hill a bit to scope out the potential great horned owl's nest. It turned out to be just that :

Such an eye for interior decorating.

Mom looking displeased. A big chick can be seen on the far right.

Want to go on a field trip?

So as it turned out, I wasn't going to be quite as alone this week as I thought. Bob, a biologist and bander of tricolored blackbirds (not a biologist who also happens to be a tricolored blackbird), would be staying at the house and trapping blackbirds on the refuge for the next few days. His was welcome company, as I discovered when I returned to the house, elated from my close encounter of the badger kind.

"Want to go on a field trip?" the newly-arrived Bob asked me. "Sure!" I replied, and hopped in his truck--loaded up with cages and cracked corn--to drive down to the blackbirds' nettle nesting grounds. Apparently nettle is a thing they like?

(Tricolored Blackbird photograph courtesy of digitalmedia.fws.gov)

Once we reached the site, Bob spread the cracked corn on the road, placing the traps on top. This setup is apparently highly effective--the birds enter the traps to get at the corn, but the cages' design prevents the blackbirds from escaping--and has far less average mortality than the more dominant method of catching birds, mist-netting. Apparently there exists quite the divide between the trappers and the mist-netters, such that at bird-banding conferences, the two groups segregate their seating arrangements. Ah, scientific rivalry.

We went on a walk after, down to a spot overlooking a deep gorge, where across the way Bob had found a prairie falcon nest. On the way we saw a brown racer snake. Neither of us had a scope handy so we planned to bring one out the following day to get a closer look at the chicks. Some distance away from that nest, we spotted another, more unusual one. Built up high on the rock face was a nest with a long red ribbon dangling from it. Bob seemed to think it was a raven's nest, but that a horned owl had taken up residence there. We'll just have to confirm it tomorrow I guess.

Tadpoles found in a water trough.

Treefrog

Back at the house, I took Bob to see the baby barn owls, who had by now developed all their adult plumage and subsequently fledged. However, one of them did not seem to have mastered the art of flying, and upon our entrance into the barn it flew out awkwardly, bumping into the rafters and then dropping to the ground, where it proceeded to threat display to me. Bob chased it back into the barn, and we left the fledglings alone.

Not gonna lie, little owl: while your display didn't exactly scare me off, I was pretty impressed.

Would you like some cheese with that whine?

After saying farewell to James for the week, I hopped on my ATV to ride to the North Rim blind. My hours in the blind were not the most pleasant ever. It was cramped and cold; there weren’t enough hooks on which to hang things, and the floor was viscous mud that seemed intent to drag me feet-first into its depths; the chair sat too low relative to the scope, so I had to remain perched on the edge, back arched, to view the proceedings of the day. Unlike the blind at Hopper, this one was not insulated against the wind or the rain. By the time I left, my toes felt like a block of ice and I couldn’t move my fingers. I had to push on the ATV’s accelerator with my wrist because I couldn’t make my thumb work.

When I miraculously made it back to the house, I had such a cup of hot chocolate.

I left the house once more just after it had started raining to check in with the flight pen birds. I spent the rest of that afternoon slightly less cold in the blind there.

Later:

I started a crappy movie that was left at the house. I was just finishing dinner when Geoff called and told me I should go change the water in the flight pen. Ok. I’ve done this. Granted, I haven’t done this alone, but that shouldn’t be a problem.

This task couldn’t have gone worse unless the birds had actually escaped.

Let’s see: I couldn’t get the tap on the Water Buffalo to turn on, I couldn’t get the bolt on the flight pen door to budge for a good five minutes, I forgot to collect the old carcasses littering the bottom of the enclosure, and then, horror of horrors, I couldn’t get the door to close again. That was the worst, not only because I COULDN’T GET THE DOOR TO CLOSE but there was a powerfully gusty wind blowing and I had visions of showing up in the morning to an empty flight pen, the door open and swinging in the breeze; visions of tendering my resignation—dismissed, rejected, publicly humiliated. It was more than I could bear, and at one point I totally lost my cool (what cool I ever had to begin with). I scraped my finger, popped the bones in my thumb, pulled a muscle in my side trying anything to get that goddamn bolt into its socket. When I finally decided it was good enough, it was a good fifteen minutes later, and I’d worked up a sweat in spite of the cool and blustery night air. I went to bed that night, still unsure what I would (or wouldn’t) find in the morning.

*

That night, riding the four-wheeler through the dark on my way to the flight pen, I caught a ghostly flash of the downy white underbelly and wings of a barn owl. David Bowie, is that you?

How Apropos

Baby barn owls! In a barn!!!

Potted Owl

Hello Western screech owl (Megascops kennicotti)! Geoff found this little guy roosting in a pot that was hanging on the wall of the wood shed.