Posts Tagged ‘Utah’

Gray Squirrels?

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Thursday, April 28th, 2011


A quiet Sunday afternoon in the hills. The sun tries bravely to shine through dark clouds, heavy with rain, but is only occasionally successful. The peaks towering above remain ice-entombed, seeming to glower down disapprovingly, jealously, on the riot of green beginning to emerge at their feet. The stream rumbles, turbid, turgid with rain and melting snow but above it one can still hear the birds, for they are many.

A pair of gray squirrels scurry back and forth from a rocky hillside to a large pile of corn lying on the ground near the barn. They seem to be trying to shuttle the enormous pile to their den, one large mouthful at a time. But I find myself wondering, while these squirrels are gray, are they truly Gray Squirrels?

The Sciuridae family includes squirrels, chipmunks, marmots and prairie dogs. At least 67 species are known in North America. Of these, 35 are squirrels and 22 are chipmunks. Not entirely sure as to the technical distinction between the two, I make the mistake of looking it up. Chipmunks are described as small striped squirrels.

I persist. I find myself amazed by the volume of squirrelly information available online. There are three Gray Squirrel species, Western, Eastern, and Arizona, none of which are found in Utah. There are however twelve squirrel and five chipmunk species that are observed in the state. I find myself checking photographs, range maps, and reading specie reports. It’s a bit too much like work for a lazy afternoon but curiosity compels me and it must be done. At last my persistence pays a dividend. I find that I am watching rock squirrels, which are gray squirrels, but which are not Gray Squirrels. I am not sure how long it has been since they emerged from hibernation, but breeding season is already here or nearly so. They continue their trips at a frenetic pace. It is wearying to watch. The sun peaks through the clouds and warms the air, just for a few moments but it is enough. Exhausted vicariously, I fade into a few moments of well-earned slumber. Meanwhile, the squirrels work on.

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Au Revoir, My Friends

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Tuesday, March 29th, 2011


A second winter of feeding the local turkeys is near its end. The spring hunt begins on April 9th and continues through the end of May. If the hunt doesn’t scatter them the primal call to breed and nest will soon irresistibly send them up into the surrounding hills. They won’t go far, but go they will. We hoped that the offer of free corn would keep them around last summer. We were utterly disappointed.

Still, two days ago I re-filled the feeder with 250 pounds of corn. I also spread another fifty pounds on the ground but there’s no trace of it today. There is such a thing as a free lunch and the turkeys take advantage of it while they can.

It’s a blustery March afternoon, too warm to be Winter, too cold to be Spring. It snowed half-heartedly last night but all that fell has melted, leaving the ground damp and cold. The skies look as though they’d like to try again but haven’t the energy to do anything more than threaten. The sun is barely visible through the clouds and will drop below the west rim of the canyon in less than an hour. A northern flicker whinnies and drums atop a tree that stands on the banks of the creek. Magpies squawk back and forth to each other from the oak brush. A robin calls, house finches sing, a pair of ravens fly silently overhead, but the turkeys are quiet and not to be seen.

I walk to the barn, remove a fifty pound bag of corn from the tack shed, slit a long gash in it and then heave it over my shoulder, leaving a trail of corn where ever I wander. I throw the empty bag in the back of my truck, walk to the feeder and activate it. The feeder makes a noise the turkeys well know and they respond promptly. Nearly two dozen birds emerge from the brush along the creek and sprint across the pasture to the feeding ground. I know there are more but they make me wait. Turkeys are remarkably bright but seem to be very much creatures of habit.

At 6:30 p.m. the feeder begins the first of its three scheduled evening broadcasts. Chaos erupts. A horde of turkeys emerge from the creek bottom, dozens more whoosh in from the east, and a multitude of the birds scamper through the oak brush, down the steep hillside to the west. This west-hill group seems to have the largest toms. Based on the length of their beards and the size of their spurs, some of these males are at least four years old. I marvel, thinking of the hunts they’ve survived, of the winters they’ve endured. Most of the birds, male and female alike, are content to eat but one of the toms begins to strut, and then another. It’s too dark to use my camera but I refuse to let the laws of physics deter me. I do not know if the birds will remain when I next return. I want photographs as well as memories. The birds are many and they devour everything: all of the corn thrown by the feeder, all of the corn I dropped from the bag, any stray kernels that might have been missed from earlier feedings, heaven only knows how. I watch them wander away, through the growing gloom, and I wonder which of these birds and how many will return in November, when food again becomes scarce and winter again lays claim to the canyon.

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The Big Dance

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Friday, March 18th, 2011

Winter is dying. If sap is flowing in the trees it does not yet show. There are no flowers, no green grass yet peeking through the snow. But the birds know. Hen turkeys gather every afternoon in the flats in the canyon bottom just over the hill from our home to watch the toms strut, just like giddy school girls ogling the football team in their letter jackets at a pep rally. Greater sage grouse have also begun to respond to their rising blood. They assemble well before dawn at leks, places to see and be seen, strutting grounds that may have been used for generations by the birds. The males watch each other and the females so intently that they sometimes forget to keep an eye skyward for marauding golden eagles that come commonly cruising for breakfast.

Their smaller cousins, sharp-tailed grouse, also feel the call of Spring in their bones. These birds were once found across much of the Great Basin but loss of habitat to cultivation and grazing has reduced their numbers severely in the region. A few leks remain in Utah and Nevada. They are isolated and often inaccessible during breeding season, deeply drifted snow blocking the roads, protecting them from human intrusion.

If the roads are open and passable you must arrive early at a lek, an hour or more before dawn. Some birds will already be present, and they will not appreciate your appearance, but if you sit quietly, patiently, and do not disturb them more will come. You sit in your car with the engine off until the birds disperse, sometimes an hour or more after sunrise. Dress warmly and bring blankets. You’ll probably still be cold, even with the sun. Be sure to make that last “pit stop” before you arrive at the lek and be very attentive to the volume and types of fluids you drink. A three hour wait with a full bladder will be as memorable as the birds but far less pleasant. You do not for any reason exit your car, start your engine, make loud noises or sudden movements. The males are generally difficult to deter but wary all the same. A loud voice, a slammed car door, even the appearance of an ignoramus with a camera hanging too far out a window can be enough to spook the birds and bring an abrupt, premature end to the morning.

Sit quietly, patiently, watch, and listen. The birds call to each other, sounding a bit like turkeys exhaling helium. Their tails rattle like paper fans. They stomp their feet. Pairs of males will circle each other, staring. At times they fly at their adversary, beating each other with their wings. But more often they circle until they stop and then they sit, still staring, often for minutes at a time until one or the other grows bored or distracted and wanders away.

Eventually the birds disperse. You start your engine, roll up your windows, turn the heater on high, stamp your feet and wiggle your toes until their tingling assures you they have not frozen off, and you begin to pick your way through deep mud and snow drifts to a world too loud and fast and brash for dancing grouse. And if their magic has touched you, you may just find yourself wondering why you cannot stay.

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Snow Geese

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Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

One of the marvels of migration is the precision and the predictability with which certain species move toward their nesting grounds. Late in January the snow geese that winter in California’s Imperial Valley begin the journey to their nesting territories on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. The birds are strong fliers. Flocks have been tracked in the air non-stop for up to 60 hours, covering distances in excess of 1,700 miles. But as vegetarians it makes little sense to fly directly to a land entombed in ice. Instead, they follow winter as it retreats to the north, often stopping for lengthy periods in snow-free areas to forage for seeds, stems, leaves, tubers, roots, and newly sprouting shoots. Every year large flocks of snow geese spend the last days of February and the first days of March at the ranches and farms of Delta, Utah. The town may host as many as ten to fifteen thousand geese at one time during these few weeks. Their arrival is always celebrated although, in the end, the hordes of hungry birds are “encouraged” to continue northward by hunters. The large flocks are loud and cacophonous but visually overwhelming, even at times sublime.

Within the enormous flocks snow geese often travel as families. The birds are monogamous and breed for life, usually pairing during their second winter or second spring migration. They may live together for ten to fifteen years or longer. Young geese remain with their family through winter and during spring migration, dispersing only after their parents begin to nest and incubate. However, if they fail to breed or lose their clutch, the young may return and spend a second winter with their parents.

The urge to move northward is relentless, even without human encouragement. There is a direct correlation between nesting success and starting as early as possible. The first returning snow geese begin to arrive at their nesting territories in mid-May, as the arctic ice beings to melt and life reanimates the tundra. Nests are often simple and hasty, at times little more than scrapes in the ground. Incubation lasts a few weeks. The young are born precocious, down-covered, almost immediately able to walk, swim, dive, and feed themselves. Their parents lead them away from the nest within twenty-four hours of hatching, wandering as far as several miles in a day in search of food. They fledge at about six weeks. Earlier hatching birds enjoy a greater availability of food. Better fed goslings mature more rapidly, reach larger adult sizes, are overall healthier, and are far more likely to survive the brutal conditions and multitudes of predators from which their parents cannot protect them.

But all of this is in the back of my mind as I watch them, ten thousand strong or more, socializing on a small desert reservoir just outside of Delta. Flock after flock after flock of the birds come into view, beginning as tiny, noisy white specks in an iron gray sky, growing larger as they approach, and then they descend, noisily, dropping casually from the winter sky to the cold gray water and their waiting families and friends. Is their appeal the promise of spring they carry with them? their enthusiasm in spite of the wintery conditions? their good-natured garrulity? I cannot say. I only know that next February they will return, as will I to witness their passage.

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Antelope Island Buffalo

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Thursday, December 16th, 2010

Antelope Island is the largest of the eleven islands found in the Great Salt Lake. It is a rocky and arid place. The island is uncomfortably hot in summer, infested with biting flies, and often smells like the southbound end of a northbound horse when the breeze comes in from the lake. It is a miserably cold place in winter although the bugs and the smell are mercifully absent. The island is roughly the size of the District of Columbia although given its conspicuous lack of politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists I find it an infinitely more appealing place. Briefly considered for national park status in the 1950s, a small portion of the island was made a state park by Utah in 1969. The remainder of the island was granted state park status in 1981. A causeway links the island with the mainland.

Despite its drawbacks Antelope Island is a remarkable and often spectacular place. It is a haven for wildlife, particularly birds. Oddly, its eponymous animal was extirpated from the island before the beginning of the Second World War. In 1983 the state re-introduced 27 antelope to the island. They thrived. An additional 100 animals were released in 2003. They are often seen as one drives the island’s roads.

More numerous and more conspicuous than the antelope on the island are American bison. In 1893, with buffalo on the brink of extinction, the island’s owner somehow managed to carry twelve of the very large animals in a very small boat safely to their new home. For decades the beasts were at the heart of various commercial schemes and in constant competition with the island’s cattle population for its meager resources. Still, they flourished. Utah acquired control of the bison when the island was transferred from private ownership to the state. It is one of the largest publically owned buffalo herds in the world, typically numbering from six to seven hundred individuals. It is difficult to visit the island and to not see bison. They often graze along the roads and sometimes wander slowly in front of traffic, moving arrogantly, indifferently, to a time and a rhythm their forebears followed for millennia. Those who visit Garr Ranch, a favorite birding stop at the island’s south end, often find tufts of wooly brown fur clinging to low-hanging branches, and more: while birding around the springs at Garr Ranch one must keep one eye on the trees above and the other on the ground beneath. I myself learned the hard way that a steaming fresh pile of buffalo dung is deeper than my walking shoes are tall.

The herd ranges freely across the island most of the year. In late October or early November the animals are driven to holding pens at the island’s north end where each is weighed, checked, inoculated against brucellosis and other infectious diseases, and tagged with a microchip that includes the individual’s medical history. Surplus animals, typically calves, are sold to help maintain the island’s population at a sustainable level. They mill restlessly, several per pen, their eyes wide with – curiosity? fear? excitement? I cannot say. The parade of trucks and trailers streaming across the causeway on auction days is remarkable. Vehicles from all of the western and central states and even further may be seen. But when the tumult ends and the buffalo are released they run, wild and free, as magnificent as their ancestors that once roamed the Great Plains.

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White Owls

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Thursday, December 9th, 2010

A few winters back a good friend approached me, nearly breathless with excitement. He had learned from a neighbor where he could see a “white owl” and wanted to share the information. The news came like an electric shock. Snowy owls have been documented in Utah twelve times in one hundred years, only twice in the last decade. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. But as my friend spoke I started to think about it. I grew skeptical and rightfully so. A short drive led us to a barn owl, a lovely bird but a disappointment. I have since revised my opinion.

Barn owls are listed as uncommon permanent residents of the state. They are most often seen in the agricultural areas in northern and central Utah, although one April evening I heard one shriek from a cottonwood tree in Beaver Dam Wash, deep in the heart of the hot desert. It is thought that they do not migrate although they are ill-prepared for bitter Great Basin winters. A member of the family Tytonidae, barn owls are better suited for tropical conditions. Their plumage does not insulate them nearly as well as that of their great-horned and great gray cousins. Barn owls struggle in the cold.

When snow covers the ground it makes things even worse. Despite their acute night vision and supremely keen hearing, their talons lack the strength to penetrate the snow once it becomes crusty. The rodents they feed on burrow just beneath the icy surface, protected, tantilizingly close but just out of reach. Their hunger makes barn owls desperate, careless. During winter dead barn owls are frequently seen along the highway sides. In taking advantage of the open road surfaces as hunting grounds they become so intent on their pursuit that they become oblivious to the dangers of oncoming traffic.

Barn owls will soon begin to hunt during daylight hours if they haven’t begun already. They are sometimes seen patrolling frozen marshes along with short-eared owls and northern harriers, looking for dinner. They cannot choose the company they keep or be fussy about the hours. Every barn owl seen hunting during the short winter days is a participant in a contest with death. It is not uncommon for state wildlife officers making spring checks of roosts and nest boxes to find hundreds of dead barn owls, starved and frozen. Truly, only the strong survive.

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Buckhorn Wash

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Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

A very, very long time ago nomads roamed the Great Basin deserts. Compelled by the circumstances of their unfriendly environment they wandered. Hunting and gathering provided the basis for their lives. Very little is known about these archaic people but a few facts are certain. They suffered unimaginable hardships in their arid home, which differs little now from then in most fundamental respects. In summer the sun was relentless and merciless and insects tormented them constantly. In winter the cold froze them, sometimes to death. Hunger and thirst were often their daily companions. They stood by helplessly and watched their children die slowly from disease, malnutrition, and starvation. As adults they lived short lives and then they too died, frequently from accidents or injuries, occasionally as the victims of predation, both from animals and other humans. But they fostered some of the most remarkable artists the world has ever seen.

The archaic people who chose south-central Utah as their home were contemporary with the Egyptians or even older. There is evidence that they may have been present and eking out their existence 7,000 years ago or more. They did not leave pyramids as their memorials. They were too few in number and working too hard to remain alive to erect stone monuments. These ancient ones are known almost exclusively through the images with which they decorated the walls of the desert canyons they traveled. The art in their large and distinctive panels is referred to as Barrier Canyon style. Some of the images were painstakingly pecked into the rock but more commonly they were painted with assiduous, loving care on the sandstone canvas, using pigments that have defied weather and the millennia. The figures are usually enormous, life-sized or larger, and often abstract, at times other-worldly. Certain figures are easy to recognize as they depict desert bighorn sheep, elk, deer, and other animals and plants that, now as then, are native to the area. Other images defy interpretation. The art of these ancient ones speaks to us, but in a language we no longer understand. Their message is forever lost.

There is a Barrier Canyon style panel in Buckhorn Wash, a water-carved corridor that gently rises from the San Rafael River through thick layers of rock to the desert above. It looks now very much as it must have looked then. People come and go, plants live and die, but the rocks change little and the autumn sky is just as blue, the October sun as friendly. The wash bottom is lined with Fremont cottonwoods, mostly sporting the beautiful brilliant golden leaves with which they decorate themselves at the end of every summer. I share the panel with a small flock of dark-eyed juncoes, mountain dwellers that have fled as winter besieges their home. The mural is roughly fifty yards long. It takes time and a bit of care before one can begin to take it all in, but the juncoes and I are mostly undisturbed in our studies.

The panel shows a number of things but it prominently features humans interacting with snakes. Mostly likely these are rattlesnakes, which abound in this area. It is difficult to imagine that the figures represent more benign reptiles and yet the humans approach and handle them, willingly and with seeming respect. I am always unavoidably and irresistibly drawn to one particular scene in this mural: a coiled serpent rears upward, to shoulder height, as a human throws or offers it – something, but what, exactly, is obscure. I do not understand this scene but I am perpetually fascinated by it. Various interpretations have been offered but truly, no one knows what it means. Our lives are immeasurably easier, less painful and more convenient than those of the ancient ones, but at what price? What have we lost? What could we have learned from a people who revered snakes rather than feared them?

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Hot Desert

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Friday, October 8th, 2010

It is the last day of September and at three o’ clock in the afternoon it is 103 degrees, even though the skies are overcast. The hills around me rise up like the mountains of Mordor, made of burnt, tortured rock. The few plants are equally inhospitable. Most are covered in spines while those with flowers are buzzing madly with what appear to be bees on methamphetamine, undoubtedly the Africanized honey bees that made their first appearance in the area two years ago. Other than the bees the world is quiet, waiting silently for the sun to set and the heat to ease.

Beaver Dam Wash is the lowest point in Utah. It lies at the confluence of the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Mojave Desert ecosystems although for the most part it is only the latter that is evident. The Mojave Desert ecosystem is classed as a hot desert, one in which the precipitation falls mainly as rain, rather than snow as in cold deserts. The indicator specie for this ecosystem is the Joshua tree. I should be surrounded by a forest of them but this area has been very badly burned in a series of fires over the last decade. All that remains is the occasional badly charred stump, protruding from a landscape more lunar than earthly.

I move from the foothills above the wash to its bottom, a wide green ribbon of life. There is little water in the broad course but enough to make a difference: the stream’s boundaries are marked by groves of cottonwood, mesquite, and catclaw acacia. The wash has been spared by the fires but was transformed by a flood of nearly biblical proportions early in 2005. Flood detritus is ubiquitous here but where there is water Mother Nature nurtures and heals. Life flourishes despite the heat. Gambel’s quail run back and forth in the shadows while white-crowned sparrows call to each other from the brush. A phainopepla, glossy black and elegant, watches me with blood-colored eyes as I make my way carefully through the mesquite and acacia but not carefully enough – the vegetation is dense and the thorns are sharp and unforgiving of those that approach too closely. I hear the call of a verdin and then it appears, bearing golden acacia leaves. It is autumn in the rest of the Great Basin and soon it will snow in the high country, but Fall remains weeks away in the hot desert, while winter is only a whisper in the wind.

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What I Didn't Know About Bees

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Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Summer came late and left early. A few days ago storms pounded the high country. When the clouds veiling the mountains finally parted, the peaks were crowned with newly fallen snow. It had mostly melted by the next day. At the weekend the roads were dry, the skies were blue, and the air was warm. It was almost as if the snow had never fallen. I wandered, lonely as a cloud, through the high meadows, pastures, and woodlands and was cheered by hosts of surviving flowers, although here and there were the dead or dying, mortally wounded by the cold.

A bumble bee patiently and carefully tended to a thistle blossom. The bee’s presence surprised me. I had imagined the cold would have driven the bees away but I was mistaken. I watched it for some time, until it finally flew off. Not far from the first flower I came across another thistle, this one too being attended by a bumble bee, only a larger and differently colored insect. Again I found myself surprised. I was only aware of three bee species, honey bees, invading African bees, and bumble bees. Was it possible that there were two types of bumble bees?

Utah is home to 900 bee species, over 20% of the 4,000 bee species found in the United States. I deliberately use the phrase “bee species” as these numbers are specific for bees and do not include their distant cousins the wasps, hornets, ants, and other members of the order Hymenoptera. World-wide some 19,000 species of bees have been identified and it has been estimated that as many as 10,000 additional species remain to be discovered. In a recent survey of the San Rafael desert, which covers roughly 2,000 square miles in central Utah, 316 species of bees were found. Over 40 of these species had never before been reported.

To put these bee numbers in perspective: 446 bird species have been documented in Utah, while roughly 660 have been observed in the continental United States. There are 10,000 avian species known throughout the world. There are nearly twice as many known bee species as birds. The distinction between the various apian species lie in attributes such as tongue length, the number and length of antennae segments, and the detail of and venation patterns in the wings. Those who study bees typically forego binoculars and field guides, instead requiring microscopes and detailed entomological keys.

Fewer than a dozen of these many species are honey bees, members of the Apis genus. Honey bees are not a species native to the United States. They began to be imported from Europe soon after the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts. The majority of the North American bees are native, naturally occurring species. Although far less frequently mentioned in the popular media than honey bees, these native species are of great ecological and economic significance. Many flowering trees, shrubs, and crop plants are more efficiently pollinated by native species than by the non-native honey bees. In some cases a highly specific relationship has evolved between a species of flowering plant and native bee. Without the precise species of native bee visiting its flowers and carrying its pollen to its sisters, the plant would soon disappear from the face of the earth.

I had wondered if there are two bumble bee species. There are eleven known in northern Utah alone. Differentiating between them is based on the coloration of abdominal segments and differences in thoracic markings. I now have something to watch for besides my feathered friends.

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