Between the Facts

What a team Lindsey and I are! Can it get any better than this? We are kicking ass with these dawn walk-ins!

Let me explain. Start at the beginning. Start with what we do.

When we do a walk-in, you see, we have a set of goals. At each site, over the course of the season, there is a checklist of things we must accomplish. First, obviously, we must find the owls. We must find both the male and the female of a pair, or go in often enough to confirm a solo owl.  Next, we need to ID each bird. If it’s banded, resight it. Which leg is the band on? Which color? What pattern? What color is the tab? Check the tail – is it an adult? A subadult? If unbanded, have both members of the crew confirm that fact, then come back when all else is done, capture it, band it.

Another task: get protocol. This is, perhaps, one of the most important, second only to the resight. Is this pair nesting? This is where the mice come in. If an individual owl eats or caches (or some combination of both) four mice in a row, you have non-nesting protocol. If there’s a nest, the overwhelming chance is that the owl will take one of the first four mice to the nest. That means running blindly after the owl, eyes half in the air following the bird, half on the ground attempting to watch where you’re going, as the owl swoops through the trees in the dark.

If you get non-nesting protocol, they could still be nesting. So you need two non-nesting protocols over the season to confirm they’re not nesting. You could find a nest, but the nest can fail. So you go back in later, do a nest check. Confirm it still exists. Look for fledged juveniles. And, eventually, you capture those juvys, band them.

Final task. If there’s no nest, or you’re not sure, you need to roost them. Roost the male. Roost the female. Go in at dawn and follow them around until they settle in for the day, until their eyes droop and you can be confident that that’s where they intend to spend the day.

Those are the tasks. Find them. ID them. Get protocol. Roost them. If necessary, capture them, band them. Typically, this takes many trips, many walk-ins, tasks slowly getting checked off.

That is, until you put Lindsey and I together on a gorgeous, sunny, lucky week.

Tuesday morning we head into Greek, where the pair has only been seen once and there have been no IDs, no protocol, no roosts. We find them and roost them both, watching happily as the affectionate pair settles in for the day in a shady copse of cedar and fir saplings. They coo at each other, groom each other, follow each other from branch to branch, looking for all the world like a young couple early in their relationship, madly and comfortably in love.

Then Wednesday morning we head out to Dixy, and we get it all. We find them both. ID them both. Get protocol. Roost them both. In a matter of an hour and a half we’ve checked Dixy off our list for the season. Tasks complete. Dixy is done. And we are thrilled.

Yet we aren’t done yet. Our luck isn’t over. There’s still Thursday morning, our walk-in with Res. We go in expecting a single male. Our task is to ID him, to get protocol, and/or to roost him. For a while we don’t think we’re going to find him. Then we hear him. Then, to our surprise and confusion, we hear her.

He has a her!  What a treat! And we find them. We ID them. We get protocol. Both are excellent and eager mousers. Complicatedly so. We have to block one owl from the mouse while we try to get the other to take it. At one point, they almost trick us. Shit. Which one took it? Was it her? Wait! They’re switching! Did he give it to her or did he take it from her? Urrrrmmmmnnn….

Then she hoots and we’re saved. He took it. Gave it to her. She ate it. One mouse later, we have non-nesting protocol. And we’re happy. Content. Satisfied. We were hoping to roost them but we lose them downslope. Alas.

One last look. Why not? Lindsey sounds confident they crossed the road. So we walk down. Just to take a look. It’s very difficult to find the owls at this point. It’s getting light and they aren’t hooting anymore. The song birds are chirping up a storm. To find a roost, you have to follow them. You don’t happen across them. But we have a general area. We might get lucky.

And we do. We walk down, and, by chance, I see movement out of the corner of my eye as one of them hops to a different branch. Got ‘em!

Fifteen minutes later, after another adorable cuddly grooming session, we are confident they’re there for the day. We roosted the pair. Success!

A good team, Lindsey and I, or a good lucky week. Take your pick. Either way, we kicked ass! J

It looks like a Teddy Bear. A soft cuddly Teddy Bear. That small. That adorable.

Lindsey and I each let out a squeal of excited shock when we see it, then again as we round the bend and Mama Bear and Brother Bear come into view. Even from the truck it’s incredibly exciting.

Bear cubs! We just saw two baby bear cubs! We know now that it’s going to be a great rest of the week. Hell, everything from here on out could be a disaster and we’d still be satisfied. Bear cubs. That made our week.

“Whoa. Hello.”

I stop behind Lindsey and look around in the branches overhead.

“What? Do you see one of them?”

She points in front of her and I follow her finger, directed low. There on a branch no more than four feet off the ground and less than ten feet in front of us is a Spotted Owl. He looks at us, then away, back to the ground in front of him. It’s barely past 1900 Owl and still light, yet here he is, hunting already.

We need protocol on these birds so we toss out a mouse and I circle around the back of him to attempt an ID. He’s unbanded, that’s easy enough to see when he’s this low. And his tail. His tail is tipped with white triangular points. I’m excited.

“Dude! Look at that tail! He’s a subadult. He was just a juvy last year.”

It explains a lot. As we soon discover, he’s not so good at the hunting yet. Not so good at the mousing. An unbanded subadult in the SNAMP area, he’s still a rookie. Still inexperienced. I come to love him for it.

It takes him a lot of staring and a few swoops before he takes the first mouse, only to drop it. A few minutes later he has it again, but it’s another 15 before he manages to eat it all. Most of the birds down it in one quick gulp. Not so with Greek. He keeps trying but just can’t get it down, so he resorts to tearing and nibbling and dragging it all out.

When he finally finishes (his female having flown in in the meantime to visit), we toss out a second mouse. He takes it much faster this time, but unfortunately grabs a few twigs along with it. That, in turn, gives him a bit of trouble when he attempts to eat the mouse, and he very nearly drops it in his attempt to let go of the sticks in his grip.

Poor Boy. It’s comical. How, we wonder, is this guy still alive? Hopefully he’ll learn soon.

He is cute though. And a good mate, I must admit. He gives both the second and third mouse to his female. Unfortunately for us, she takes off and we lose her both times, and we fail to get protocol.

Maybe next time. After Mr. Greek has had a little more practice. A bit more experience. At the very least, when he’s learned to eat a tiny mouse in under 15 minutes.

‘The point should be just around this bend,’ says Lindsey, consulting the map. We’re half-way through our second night survey of the evening, having spent most of the last few hours hooting for owls and getting no responses. There are no previous detections at the sites we’re covering now, but you never know. We might get something. And so we hoot.

‘Is that one of us?’ We round the bend to find the vague outline of a truck parked at the turnoff for our survey point. It looks like a crew truck, but as I pull up towards it, we note the stickered decal on the rear window. ‘Nope, not ours.’

‘Is there someone inside?’

I’ve parked a few meters away from the truck, next to a pine from whose extended branch hangs our green survey-point flagging.

‘I didn’t see anyone.’

‘Why would they park here? Is there a trail nearby?’

‘I don’t think so. Weird.’

We hesitate a moment, looking back at the truck.

‘Maybe they have a Meth lab,’ we joke.

‘Or maybe they’re just sleeping inside the truck.’ I’d hate to startle someone awake with a bunch of imitation hooting, but we step out of the truck and start anyway. In the distance we can see the lights of another vehicle.

‘What’s with all these cars anyway?’ We had unexpectedly passed a car earlier in our survey, speeding by us in the opposite direction, and heard another while at our last point. It’s odd. We’re usually alone out here.

‘I don’t know. Who would be out here now anyway? I mean other than us. It’s after midnight, people time.’

We shrug it off and continue hooting as the roar of a vehicle approaches, and moments later the lights of the distant truck fall over us.

‘Dammit. I hope they don’t stop.’ The truck slows momentarily then speeds off, and we sigh in relief. Too soon. Moments later, just as our 10 minutes are almost up, we hear a roar approaching from the opposite direction and the lights are on us again.

‘Dammit.’

‘Is that the same truck?’

‘They must be lost.’ Sure enough they pull over and I walk to the front of our truck, resigned to socializing, to giving directions and explaining why we’re out here.

The passenger door opens and a young guy steps out and I smile a tired greeting, expecting to hear him say ‘Hey, do you know how to get to…’

But instead, in a rush, we get: ‘Hey, do you know who did that to that truck?’

‘..huh?….Did what?’

We follow him to the abandoned truck and see, for the first time, that all four tires have been slashed. He explains that he and his buddies ran out of gas and parked it and took off in their second vehicle, and came back to find this. Slashed tires. The instrument panel inside tampered with as if someone had been trying to steal their stereo system but failed or got scared off half-way through.

There are 5 or 6 of these boys, all angry and flustered and frustrated, yet still with a sense of humor.

‘When we drove by and saw your truck, we were afraid the culprits had come back to finish the job. We didn’t know what to do.’ But then they saw it was us: just two girls standing by their truck. Hooting. I guess we weren’t too intimidating.

Darn.

We, of course, feel a bit stupid. A bit oblivious. We didn’t even notice the slashed tires. We had been standing there for 10 minutes, after all, and had even been discussing the truck. Sure, we were making a point of not looking at the vehicle, uncertain if someone was inside of it or not. Yet even so. We feel foolish.

Not to mention concerned. We leave our trucks on these roads all the time while we do cruises and walk-ins. What if that happened to us? I know from now on we’ll be more mindful of where we park. Who would have thought there’d be tire-slashing bastards roaming these remote forest roads in the middle of the night?

I can deal with bears and cougars and other wildlife. I can deal with poison oak and Manzanita and white thorn, with ticks and mosquitoes. I can deal with rain and hail and snow. I can deal with fallen trees and inaccessible roads, and even with campers interrupting our survey plans. But to have to worry about this as well? That’s just ridiculous.

Tim perks up immediately when he sees it.

Hey look there’s a bear!

I had noticed it already but registered it only as he said it. It was a huge dark shape lumbering along the road we were driving on.

Hurry, follow it!

And so I keep pace with it for a while as the bear continues to run along the road, his vast form rolling and shifting with an odd mixture of movement that was both crude and natural. He exuded power with every heavy step. He was austere in his beauty. And he was large.

Then he turned and shambled off into the woods, and we drove on, excited by the sighting. We see a lot of wildlife, driving around in these nighttime woods.

There is a reason we don’t work on Memorial Day, and it’s not because it’s a national holiday that we are required to take off. No. It’s simply because there are too many campers around to get any work done.

It is not Memorial Day, but alas, not all the Memorial Day campers have packed up and left just yet. They are here, still, a few of them. They are here, camped out for the week and making work difficult.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against campers. I am a camper after all. But this week, well…I could have done without them. This week, already crippled by the weather, was only worse because of them.

It started on Tuesday. It started with Glenn. There we were, Tim and I, driving out to our priority site, to the birds we were instructed above all else to try to find. We had our map with all the previous detections, clustered in a relatively small group not too far from the dotted-line path of a road. This road. The road we were currently driving on. And there we are, there’s where we want to be, there’s the spot where the detections were, there’s where we want to do our survey, where we want to do our hooting. Right there. Right where the campers are.

Dammit.

Alright, change of plans then. We speak to them and they’ll be there all week, so we change our plans and head down to Res and Dolly. But it’s raining when we find Res and he doesn’t want to mouse so we decide to try him again later in the week, at dawn, when we can ID him and mouse him and roost him.

So there we are, Thursday morning. It’s not quite 4am owl and we’ve had less than 3 hours sleep. It’s cold and wet and hard to get up. I’m stiff from sleeping in the truck and Tim’s cold from sleeping in the bed. He awoke to find his bag damp and frozen. I just found it hard to step outside. But we did and we began to hike up the road, waiting to hoot until we got closer to our previous detection. Just around that bend. That’s where we’ll start. Res should be right around there.

Dammit.

We round that bend and what do we see but a big plume of grey smoke blowing off of the landing ahead. We round that bend and what do we see but an RV trailer full of campers. More frickin campers.

We stop. We look at each other with our tired you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me eyes. Now what. We whisper for a moment, discussing our options. So Res is out. Now what.

We turn around, hike back to the truck, and move it down to the barracks. Then we crawl back into the truck and sleep. We will check tonight. If the campers are gone we will do a dusk walk in on Res instead of the Dawn one we intended. If they’re still there, we’ll head off to do our last option for the week, a night survey at a site where we don’t expect to find birds. We will play it by ear. Until then, we’ll sleep.

I almost don’t notice it. I’m curled up in the passenger seat, reading a book groggily, debating whether to put the book down and attempt another nap or continue reading. Tim is dozing in the drivers’ seat, having recently returned from a failed fishing attempt in the river that feeds into French Meadows Reservoir. Outside it’s been intermittently cloudy, rainy, and even hailing. It’s not the optimal weather for killing the daylight hours. We’ve been spending most of our time in the truck, doing paperwork, reading, or napping.

Until the sun comes. It never stays for long. The clouds will part and for a few glorious moments the sun’s magnificent rays stream down on us. It lasts a minute, five minutes, never quite ten. We’ve learned to take advantage of it.

I almost don’t notice it this time. I’m about to put the book aside when I realize there is light on it. Natural light. Sun light. I throw my book down and startle Tim out of his nap.

Quick, I say excitedly. Quick! Sun!

And just like that we’ve both hopped out of the truck and are lying on the dirty cement of the Barracks parking lot, soaking in those rays. It’s nice. It’s glorious. It lasts a wonderful seven minutes. Then the clouds come, then the rain, and we’re back in the truck, waiting for the next part in the clouds that will send us outside once again.

Oh Res. Res Res Res. It’s nice to see you, boy. It’s nice to hear you hooting at us, nice to find you perched up there in that tree, just high enough that we can’t make out your bands. But you’re not going to mouse for us are you? You, who, from what I hear, are an excellent mouser. But not tonight. No. You look cold and wet and miserable up there, trying to stay out of the rain. We understand. We too are cold and wet, but we came here for you. And it’s nice to see you. But I know you’re not going to mouse for us.

We will wait for you a little longer. But we can’t leave the mouse out, I’m afraid. You don’t care about it anyway, and it’s too cold and wet for such a little mouse to hang out in. We will return him to his warm group of friends, and we will be content to watch. We will watch you, hope that you move, at least, so we can get a re-sight on you. But that won’t happen either, because there you go. You moved after all, but not to a lower location, no. You’re gone instead. We don’t know where you are. Maybe you’re close, and quiet finally. Or maybe you have gone, off in search of a dryer tree. Because this rain isn’t going to let up anytime soon. It’s not too heavy, but it’s here to stay. Perhaps we should follow your example, and head off to a dryer place.

Goodnight Res. Hopefully the rain will blow off at some point this week. Perhaps we will see you again. In the mean time, try to stay dry.