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.
