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.

In a Blind

So, today I spent eleven hours in the flight pen blind, waiting in vain for even one of the three birds I was supposed to trap to show up.

I did, however, take a lot of pictures. Here are some of them:

A golden eagle stopped by to snack on the calf leg.

Ravens did too.

Hoi, a famous mentor bird in the program, chills out on the scale in the flight pen.

Sunning

Two birds sun themselves poolside.

Intern Angela, in the flight pen, with an axe

What you are about to read may be shocking to your sensibilities. Tonight, I had to do something contrary to my nature, habits, vegetarianism, and skill.

Tonight I had to cut off a cow's leg.

"Good God, why?!" you cry out. Well, here's the story. I had orders for the next day to trap three currently stealth birds with the goal of replacing their dropped transmitters. Trapping requires placing a calf in the double-door trap of the Bitter Creek Flight Pen. However, a tasty little morsel must be chained up outside the pen to entice birds inside.

Cut to the leg. Geoff had told me, when I innocently inquired over the phone "Just how does one proceed to divorce a calf from its hindlimb?"that if I was lucky, it would still be frozen enough for me to use an axe. However, if the calf was well-thawed, I'd have to use my knife to cut around the join at the hip, then pop the leg from the hip socket. Delightful. Care to guess if I was lucky or not?

The axe bounced off the calf's springy skin. Oh, so it was going to be the knife then. Neither was particularly sharp, and the knife made for a messy job. I sawed away for what seemed like the longest time, mentally apologizing to the calf for the whole to-do. When at last I pulled the leg out of its socket with a pop that will surely haunt my dreams tonight, it was with a mix of satisfaction and guilt at my pride in something so gruesome, that I held the limb and beheld my handiwork. It is amazing the things one can get used to.

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.

BADGER!

Badgerbadgerbadgerbadgerbadgerbadgerbadgerbadger!

I was driving back down to the house from taking signals up at Hilltop when I saw something scooching along the road as fast as it could scooch. I screeched to a halt, put the car in park, grabbed my camera and went tearing off after it. Badger. Badger! It scooched up the hill and I lost it momentarily in the tall grass. Then I saw it backing into a little hole, but it didn’t fully retreat. I came closer, got right in its face with my camera. I apologize, badger, I was too excited. It kind of hissed at me at first, but made no move to bite me or anything, so I continued snapping away. It just looked at me with those big puppy dog eyes, as if largely unconcerned with my presence. If I scared the crap out of you today, badger, again I am sorry. 

To Bitter Creek!

A week, they told me. You’ll be alone all week. “Thanks for holding down the fort!” Geoff emailed me. Funny to think how such a responsibility would have terrified me just three months ago.

My Monday began with a fortuitously free car wash. I’d like to think it was because I was cute, but really the credit card machine was wonky and the guy just didn’t want to make a whole big deal out of it. Geoff showed up to the Monday meeting wearing a tie, which was odd (and oddly formal, given the usual workplace dress code), until Ria explained it was the result of a knot-tying bet they’d made the previous week. Which resulted further in much discussion of the various tie-knots. Which resulted in Joseph wearing a singing snowman tie during the Monday Meeting. 

I was headed back to Bitter Creek, and no one would be joining me. We are short of staff right now, down two interns since Jeff and Darin left, and there’s so much going on right now, it being Nest Watch 2011.  I didn’t have a problem with the arrangement though: I’m starting to feel more sure of my footing here. 

I changed the water in the flight pen tonight without incident. There is something so ineffably cool about sharing space with these birds, seeing their darkened forms silhouetted against the bright star-filled night sky, hearing their heavy feathers rustle anxiously above you. You've got to watch out though that they don't get scared and decide to vomit on you. Less ineffable. Also, try not to accidentally step on the rabbit skulls that litter the flight pen blind. Because that's just gross.

As of now, I have yet to be vomited on.

Where is Samuel L. Jackson when you need him?

I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on the motherfuckin' road!