Episode 5: What I did on my Summer Vacation

Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/9knnpbc3

In this episode, I'm going to take you along on my summer vacations and some wild birding adventures. This episodes featured birds are Spotted Sandpiper and California Condor.

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Transcript

Episode 5: What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Well, here we are again for episode 5 of Here, birdy, birdy, birdy! Wow! Five episodes already. It seems like only yesterday this was just a whim, but here I am committed to bringing you a monthly episode. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that I'm recording this today on land taken from the Lenei Lenapi tribe in what we now call Pennsylvania. #honor native land

Here's to October and the change of seasons. In this episode, I'm going to take you along on my summer vacations the past few months. After over a year at home and after being vaccinated, like many of you, I was feeling the itch to get out and about - away from my normal haunts, so I got to planning and boy did I plan! 

In May over Memorial Day weekend, my partner, David and I drove up to Utah to spend three days exploring the national parks, mainly Zion and Bryce. I'm sure you've all heard how very crowded Zion was on Memorial Day weekend, but we got there on the Thursday afternoon before the big weekend. It was crowded, but we were able to find a space in the small parking lot just inside of the park. There's parking for probably 250 to 300 cars, so it's very small. Getting there late in the day helped though. One of my favorite YouTube couples, Jason and Abbey Epperson of RV Miles do a lot of national park traveling and they recommended getting to the parks later in the day - after 4pm when they're much less crowded. That strategy worked well for us in Zion. 

You can't drive directly into canyon at Zion, you park in the lot or in the nearby town of Springdale and then you have to take a bus into the canyon. At the time we went, you needed to reserve a ticket for the bus and use it within that hour specified. Even though we were a little late, the ranger told us to get in line, so we were able to get on the bus with only a few minutes wait. There were many buses running and the rangers were making sure only exactly enough people got on the bus to allow everyone a seat. It all went very smoothly and we rode to the top of the bus route to the last stop, the Temple of Sinawava. There we got out and walked the riverside trail. From this stop many people were coming and going from the Narrows. The National Park Service site describes the Narrows hike: "at least 60% of the hike is spent wading, walking, and sometimes swimming in the river. Travel is rough and slippery in cold, fast flowing water." But we had no intention of taking that hike that day. We really just wanted to stretch our legs and experience a little of Zion. 

So we got off the bus and started along the Riverside Walk which is an easy trail along the Virgin River that runs through the canyon. Not 100 feet in, we crossed a bridge and saw an American Dipper! That was our second this year. A few yards further on and we saw a second dipper. Three dippers in one year! I think that's totally a record for us.

Despite the large crowds and the fact that it was late afternoon, we also saw a single spotted towhee in a grassy area along the trail and a northern flicker of the red-shafted variety. 

Someone we met on the trip said he always thinks of Zion as being on the bottom and looking up at the walls of the canyon and Bryce being at the top looking down at the canyon. I found this to be exactly true. At Zion, you're on the floor of the canyon walking up into it. The walls are so beautiful and they almost seem to touch the sky. 

Oh! I can't forget to tell you the most thrilling part of getting to Zion. As you enter the park, you go through a tunnel that is one lane and I mean exactly one lane wide each way. And it is pitch black except for three or four "windows" cut out of the mountain. It was a little white knuckle-y for the 2 miles. Then after you exit the tunnel, the road zigs and zags and zigs and zags downward until you don't know whether to zig or zag. It's a beautiful and fun drive, but be careful!

Our evenings were spent at the Bryce Zion KOA near Glendale, Utah. We rented a Kabin with a "K." If you're not into camping, but still love the outdoors, I highly recommend cabin camping. These cabins usually have a full- or queen-sized bed and bunk twin beds in a cozy log cabin-esque setting. You cook outdoors and use the campground bath house, but it really beats sleeping on the ground and you have electricity and a water spigot available. This campground had the added feature of very gentle horses on-site and big starry skies at night. A bonus is that it's halfway between Zion and Bryce parks. So that was a very convenient stay.

So the next day, Friday, we drove up to explore Bryce canyon and true to form, you drive along the rim of the canyon and look down into it from the parking lots. There's a nice walking/biking trail that runs along the top, so if you're up for it, you can do that and get some really awesome views. It was hot there though! In both parks we took our camelbacks, being the desert rats that we are. I was pleased to see that there were not only water fountains, but also water pumps for a really big gush of water to fill our packs. 

Bryce canyon has several opportunities to climb down into the canyon. We chose Wall Street which looked pretty easy, but quickly turned into a steep descent, although the trail was wide and smooth enough. Oh my gosh, it was sooo beautiful! You're walking along or among these hoo-doos that are hundreds of feet tall. The trail winds through the hoo-doos and I imagine you could wander in them for hours. We didn't see many birds that day. I do remember seeing a single acorn woodpecker sitting atop one of the hoodoos and a very curious chipmunk along the Navajo Loop trail where we stopped for lunch. We had a nice hike down and across the floor. Coming up on the other hand, was a lot harder! The day was getting hot and it was all uphill. We trudged on and on and eventually got back to our car and some cold drinks. But wow, it was so worth it. It was amazing!

Our third day in the area, Saturday, we explored the areas just north of our campground in Dixie National Forest. We stopped at a couple of areas and got some good looks at western tanager, mountain chickadee, red-naped sapsucker, northern flicker, juniper titmouse and yellow warbler. We then birded Navajo Lake a few miles up the road where we saw cinnamon teal, gadwall, ring-necked duck, mallard, and spotted sandpipers. 

Spotted sandpiper is one sandpiper that I love because it's one of the few sandpipers that are easy to identify. Its breast is covered in brown spots, so its name gives it away (I'm looking at you, Dunlin!). You can find these guys anywhere in the United States, in freshwater streams and lakes or near saltwater. They aren't very picky about their habitat as long as there's shoreline. They aren't very picky about what they eat either (I'm looking at you, Limpkin!). Spotted sandpipers mostly eat small insects like mayflies and midges, but they will also eat larger insects and small crustaceans. Guess what they also eat…small fish, just like the Dipper. Unlike the dipper though, the spotted sandpiper won't be going under the water, They are often seen wandering along the shoreline probing into crevices or darting at prey. Besides its spots, the most distinctive thing about spotted sandpipers are that they almost constantly bob their tails in an up and down motion. So it's like pumping its tail up and down all the time.

The information for the spotted sandpiper comes from Cornell's All About Birds website and on there I learned something really fascinating about them. The male and female roles are reversed. The female is larger and more aggressive than the males. The male typically takes care of incubating the eggs and nurturing the nestlings. Some female spotted sandpipers even practice polyandry where they mate with several different males and lay eggs in each of their nests. So they could have up to four or five nests with eggs during the breeding season with the males taking take of the nestlings. Some of this behavior may be accounted for because during breeding season, the female's testosterone level increases 7 times its non-breeding value. 

On Monday, on our way back to Tucson, we went back to Zion early in the day to see if we could find the Spotted Owls that are reported to live in Refrigerator Canyon. Once again, we went through the tunnel, zigged and zagged, but when we got to the parking lot, there were no spaces. We needed to drive into the town of Springdale and it took us almost an hour to find parking, so again, if you're going to go to a popular national park, you will find less crowds if you go very early in the morning or in the evening. We eventually found parking and rode the shuttle to the park, entered the park, and by now the park had stopped requiring tickets for the bus into the canyon. We stood in much longer lines and the busses were very crowded with people standing in the aisles. Everyone still had to be masked and I saw a few people that actually decided to walk the canyon instead of putting on a mask. 

On a side note, later in the summer, I read that verbal abuse over having to wear face masks led five shuttle bus drivers to quit. You know… the drivers don't make the rules, they're just doing their jobs. Who is it hurting to put on a mask for a 15-minute ride and why are you giving the shuttle driver crap about it? Don't be a jerk. Just put on the mask if they ask you to. I know none of my listeners would do that. None of them.

Anyway, this time we didn't go all the way to the end of the line, we stopped at the grotto which is across from the trailhead to the West Rim Trail. The West Rim Trail leads up to Angel's Landing. And you may have heard about Angel's Landing. It's a 1488 foot rock that juts out over Zion canyon. This small trail is carved into the rock and has metal chain handholds to the top. They warn you to not take young children, backpacks, or go if you are acrophobic, so that left me out. There was no way I was going to attempt that hike with bifocals either. That turned out to be a good thing because there was about 3-hour wait to get onto that trail. You needed to sign a liability waiver and get a special bracelet before you were allowed on the trail. They were only allowing a certain number of people go up at a time so that the summit didn’t become too crowded. I don't know whether this was from Covid or is standard procedure, but that's what they were doing.

So from the grotto, you cross the road and start to ascend the West Rim trail and that soon turns into some crazy switchbacks. You go higher and higher and when you think you're at the top, you look up and there are people high above you still doing switchbacks! Finally, you get to the top and enter Refrigerator Canyon. This is where we were headed. It's a wonderful respite after the grueling heat and climb from the grotto, so we spent a little time here. Being memorial day, the trail was pretty crowded and needless to say we dipped on the spotted owls. We did take our time to look and listen carefully, but I think there were just too many people and too much tromping. After a while we got to the next part of the hike which is Walters Wiggles and just for kicks and giggles we started up. These are more switchbacks that are shorter, but steeper than those we encountered earlier in this hike which made them no less painful. Finally, we made it to the top and Walter's Wiggles takes you to Scout's Lookout where there are fantastic views. From Scout's Landing you can watch the hikers going up to Angels' Landing. We sat here for a while looking for condors or other birds of prey, but we only saw ravens. It was time start back down so we could head home. As we reached the entry to Refrigerator Canyon, David pointed up in the sky to three California condors sailing above us. We got great looks at these guys before they flew out of sight. David even got some great pictures of them.

If you ever see a California Condor, it is a glorious sight. These birds are huge - they have a 9-foot wingspan and have brilliant white patches underneath their wings. They can draft for hours - just float on the air - for hours and can rise up to 15,00 feet in the air. That is just amazing to me. Each pair lays only one egg a year, so if that chick doesn't make it, well, that's not good news. In 1987, there were only 22 birds left. All of them were captured and brought in for a breeding program. We're now releasing new California Condors into the wild and there are about 200 of them between the U.S. and Mexico and while that's great success, the species is not out of the woods yet. Their journey to the brink of extinction wasn't brought on by DDT like many other birds of prey, but the lead in hunter's bullets is what is doing them in. Condors are scavengers and feed off of animal carcasses left by hunters. Sometimes the hunters have just left the entrails still containing bullets or maybe they're not able to recover the carcass due to extremes in landscape, but when a lead bullet left in a carcass is consumed by the condor, it gets lead poisoning and dies. In 2018, the Journal of Wildlife Management published an article in which scientists from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey studied the effects of a non-invasive way to tell if condors had lead poisoning. They were trying to get a better way to test birds since they involve catching and drawing blood on the birds. Unfortunately, the method they tested didn't pan out, but they are still looking for other ways to safely identify birds that may need to be treated for lead poisoning. If you have a hunter in your life, please ask them to use lead-free bullets since lead is not just a problem to condors, but to all scavengers large and small.

Finally, in August, we took a cross country camping trip back to Pennsylvania to attend some family affairs that had been postponed from last year. David and I have driven across the country a couple of times now and have always taken the shortest, fastest route, so this time we decided to do something a little different. We planned a more northward route to see some country we've never seen before and to escape the heat in the southern states. I've had South Dakota and Mount Rushmore on my mind for a while now, so we hit the road with a goal of staying at Mount Rushmore for a day or two. 

From Tucson, we headed east on I-10 and used the cut-off in Deming to get to our first stop - lunch at Sparky's in Hatch, New Mexico. Sparky's serves burgers, bar-be-ques and beverages from the heart of New Mexico. They've got a veggie patty so I was able to sub that into a green chili burger with some amazing fries that put my hunger on hold. From there, we jumped onto I-25 which divides New Mexico in half from top to bottom, and traveled north and then west to Jemez Falls campground in Valles Caldera National Preserve. The campground was relatively small and I had reserved a spot in the tent section which meant we had no electricity. There were vault toilets and a water spigot nearby. We slept in the car that night to try out our newly made platform bed. It worked great. We used plastic shelving and made a wooden platform for it and then added some 3-inch foam on top of it. We slept with the windows open - they were covered with mosquito netting. The next morning it was pretty quiet for a while, but suddenly a little flock of birds came through. We had 2 hairy woodpeckers, a couple of white-breasted nuthatches, and 4 pygmy nuthatches. There was also a warbler hanging out with these guys and I'll bet you can guess who it was. If you guessed a Yellow-rumped Warbler, you'd be correct! Writing this made me go back and check the range for a yellow-rump or "butter butts" as they are lovingly known and sure enough, they are literally everywhere in the US, Canada, and Mexico at some point in the year. So, it turns out that these little guys breed in northern New Mexico, so it's not unlikely to see they there.

The next morning, we drove north into eastern Colorado and ended up in the Pawnee National Grasslands. We found a very small campground called Crow Valley with only 10 sites, but there was waiting for us without even a reservation! That was a good thing because it was looking like rain and we hurried to get the tent up before the storm. It rained for a good 3 minutes and then the storm blew off somewhere else. At least we got the tent up and we were able to stay dry for those three minutes! The first thing I noticed after the rain settled, were the Eurasian-collared Doves. Now, we have a few of this invasive species in Tucson, but there seemed to be tons of them right here in this campground - OK, well it was a dozen of them anyway.

At Crow Valley campground there's a cute little farming museum that has some old farm implements. I really wish we could have stayed there longer. Pawnee national Grasslands is a great place to bird and I definitely need to go there again, but we had to keep moving to get to Mount Rushmore.

We drove another whole day and arrived at the KOA at Palmer Gulch near Custer, South Dakota. Oh boy, this was a bit of a culture shock after the last 2 nights. I think this was hands-down the biggest KOA I've ever seen, but it's not the biggest or even the second biggest - I looked it up. Anyway, this place was humongous! It had a huge pool, hot tub, splash pad, and separate slide pool, and strip of shops where you could get hand-crafted coffee, pizza, ice cream, and wine. They rent out bikes, ATV, and they even rent cars. After 2 nights of no electric, David was adamant that we have an electric site, so I booked an electric site. When we got to our site, we discovered that we were in the full hook-up zone, so we were the only tent among rows and rows of monstrous RVs! We looked really silly with our little green tent, but everyone was super friendly and our dog Princess made lots of friends. 

I'm sad to say that the bird lists from our next day of travel are pretty sad. We didn't actually see a ton of birdlife at Mount Rushmore or the nearby Crazy Horse monument. I can report some Mourning Doves, Americans Crows, Turkey Vultures, American Goldfinches, and Dark-eyed Juncos of the white-winged variety, so that was cool. We ate lunch in a picnic area with zero, absolutely zero bird life, but things got better once we returned to the over-populated campground. The Brewer's blackbirds were coming together for the evening and I saw three common nighthawks which was really cool. We've got Lesser Nighthawks in Tucson and so these were easy to spot because of the similar way they fly and seem to just float in the air. 

The next morning, I spotted about 20 Barn Swallows resting on the ledge of an RV slide out. There were some adult birds with gorgeous dark blue and brick red plumage in there with a bunch of young birds. Those were probably the most beautiful barn swallows I have ever seen!

But alas, we had to move on once again. We drove east into the Badlands to experience that wonderous place for a few hours. This place had the most wildlife we saw on the entire trip. There were bison and many, many prairie dogs right at the entrance to the park and later one we saw some big-horn sheep and I think that was the first time I've ever seen Big-horned Sheep. Best birds there were a bunch of western meadowlarks and 2 pesky black-billed magpies at the visitor's center. If you get a chance to go, be sure to at least drive through there. It's almost another planet.

That night we stayed in a south Dakota state park in Minnehaha County. I just had to say that, Minnehaha! There we saw a group of wild turkeys right outside of the campground. I'm going to cut to just the good parts now cause I don't want to bore you with too many non-birding details! Somewhere in Wisconsin, we were driving along I-90 and I saw 20 common nighthawks flying on the northside of the road over a field and about three minutes later I saw a bald eagle overhead, so those were really great finds at 75 miles an hour!

Well, needless to say, we survived our trip. We still needed more time to bird! Folks, I think it'll soon be time to get an RV so I can stay in places longer and really get some birds. 

I wanted to mention that a link to this podcast is now being featured at the Illbird Press website.  It's run by my friend in birding, David Jurkiewicz who is a fantastic birder and photographer. Check out his website at illbirdpress.com. That's I-L-L-B-I-R-D-P-R-E-S-S.

Also, a couple people have asked me about my podcasting adventure and I have to say, it's been really, really fun! I just started with a microphone and Garage Band on my mac, but there are a ton of free programs as well, including Audacity that you could use or you could use just your cell phone to record. But, to get listed on the podcast platforms, I use Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout makes it super easy to get my Here Birdy Birdy Birdy to you and I get a website to add the shownotes, detailed analytics, and other tools to promote the show. If you're thinking about starting a podcast, I would listen to it, just tell me and I will be your first subscriber! But check out Buzzsprout, B-U-Z-Z-S-P-R-O-U-T, Buzzsprout, and if you use the link in the show notes, you can get a $20 Amazon gift certificate when you sign up for a paid account plus, you'll be showing supporting for your favorite birding show!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Here Birdy Birdy Birdy. Until next time, stay birdy and nerdy my friends!