This field season has gone by incredibly quickly. It doesn’t feel that long ago that Jessica and I were struggling day after day to access the leks through the unyielding snow, spending hours digging our vehicles out of the snow again and again. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we hauled out all those fake-rock speakers and those cinder-block filled boxes and those heavy-ass batteries. It wasn’t long ago that we laid everything out and wired everything up and got the noise project running. A few months ago, only, when we pounded in all those section stakes and flagged all the routes and viewpoints.
Yet here we are, our normal morning counts officially done, already beginning to disassemble our lek set-ups.
I’d forgotten how heavy and ungainly those massive speakers are. And yet, really, after lugging around those batteries all season, it’s not really even all that bad this time around. And that’s all there is to it. Everything else is fast and easy. There are no spray-painted cans nailed into the ground to locate, just pull out the stakes and tare off the flagging and pile it into the truck. There are no wires to cut and strip and twine together, just peel off the electrical tape, unscrew the wire nuts, and coil up the wires. There are no MP3 players or PDAs to tinker with, no gain to adjust, no wiring harnesses to attach. There is no risk of spending 3+ hours digging the truck out of the snow. No longer.
Even with one last project to set up and impliment, I believe today marks the beginning of the end.
