Also known as: The Day of the Birds
The last week has been busy.
Initially, we had two catchments planned. Both catchments overlapped with the National Parks Service monitoring program I collaborate with, so we had planned to meet up with them. They would do the visual surveys, while my tech and I collected eDNA and tissue samples.
The problem (though it wasn't really a probelm) is that they brought 12 people down from Yellowstone to meet up with the Grand Teton crew (2 people) and had offered to train some other folks who work the Aquatic Invasive Species stations in Grand Teton. We ended up being almost 19 people in total. So, despite the fact that we were doing two LARGE catchments, there was not nearly enough work to go around. Oh! And my advisor was visiting. So. Many. {eople.
Because of that, two catchments for which the Grand Teton crews had budgeted SEVEN WORKING DAYS ended up taking us only three.
Which put us, shockingly, ahead of schedule.
That never happens in fieldwork. We even had 2 bad weather days!!
We kept to our original working schedule though, and just moved up one of the catchments we had planned for the following week, and this led to what might have been one of the weirdest days of fieldwork I've experienced.
On Saturday, we saw pretty much everything but amphibians.
We also had some adventures involving birds.
Summarizing everything that happened is gonna take a minute, so you might want to buckle up. Or maybe grab a beer. We sure needed one at the end of the day.
So.
The catchment we visited on Saturday is just south of Signal Mountain in Grand Teton National Park. It's mostly forested, with wetlands and ponds of various sizes hidden throughout. One part of the catchment extends out like a leg, encompasisng a couple more sites in the sagebrush. Luckily, a trail takes us in a good couple of miles before we have to start bush-whacking.
We started off the day with a nice sighting of a western tanager on a branch just at eye level. Tanagers are beautiful little birds, so that was an exciting start.
We had decided to hike all the way into the catchment and then work our way back to the trailhead, hitting sites along the way. So we first hiked all the way out to the sites in the sagebrush, one of which is a very small lake (topographic maps call it a lake, though I'm not sure it qualifies anymore). Last year we took an eDNA samples there but decided not to survey it because it had very little emergent vegetation and was very salty (making it unlikely amphibian habitat). But we were about to survey it anyway this year, even though it hadn't changed much (maybe a little larger thanks to this year's snowmelt) when we heard a huge racket in the air behind us.
We turned around, looked up, and I asked "Geese?"
A second later we saw that they were white and I wondered out loud "Snow Geese?"
And then they landed on the lake.
And I immediately realized what they were.
Swans.
Trumpeter Swans.
A species which I'm pretty sure can be the motivation for wildlife closures in the parks when they're nesting.
So needless to say, we did not survey the lake.
We took our water sample for eDNA from the far side and booked it out of there.
The killdeer that had been nesting in the area also seemed glad to see us leave.
On our way through the sagebrush back to the forest, we came across a fledgling of unknown species. It looked like a sparrow, or some other small brown bird, and frantically flapped its way into a nearby bush when we approached.
The day proceeded without more surprises other than unexpectedly wet sites that had been dry last year. This was the first catchment where we really saw the impact of the increase snow melt and recent rains. Sites were wetter and bigger, some shockingly so.
But as we surveyed one site, a sandhill crane flew around us, croaking its dinosaur-like noise. We didn't see a mate, or a nest, so we proceed with caution and moved on with our day.
We were near the end of the day, counting down site numbers. We wrapped up #3, then walked to #2. On the way, we were startled by a grouse in the woods that unexpectedly made noise right next to us, but we made it to #2. As we took pictures of the dry site, Gage, my tech, looked down and saw a small rodent, possibly a vole (?), twitching and acting oddly.
At first it was on its side, then it tried to move and ended up kind of running in circle. Its tail seemed broken, and we came to the devastating conclusion that one of us had probably stepped on it. Gutted, we acknowledged that it probably was ill to begin with if it didn't feel us coming and get out of the way, but it left us feeling unsettled as we made our way to site #1.
Site #1 is hidden in the woods, a shallow little wetland where we found lots of chorus frog tadpoles last year. As we approached it, we heard a familiar "croak."
Ahead of us, in the wetland, was a sandhill crane with two fuzzy babies.
Realizing we wouldn't be able to surey the wetland, we decided to take the same approach as with the swans: grab the eDNA samples from the far side, and high-tail it out of there.
As we approached the water's edge, we suddenly heard another dinosaur-like croak, from right behind us.
The first crane's mate was not happy we were there.
There's something viscerally frightening about having a large bird creeping around, behind you, in the woods. Sandhill cranes can be up to four and a half feet tall, and seeing something that large appear and disappear behind tree trunks while producing dinosaur noises awakens the part of your brain that says "actually, I am prey."
We frantically grabbed our liter of water for the eDNA sample and were about to book it out of there, when Gage spotted an adult chorus frog. Adults are better for me to include in my study than tadpoles, and so I quickly caught it and started trying to insert a buccal swab in its tiny little mouth. Unfortunately, the swabs I had on me were huge, the mosquitos were getting aggresive in the late afternoon, and the crane behind us was making us increasingly anxious, so we ended up putting the little guy back in the water and heading back to the trail as fast as we could.
Our wildlife encounters for the day just continue though, with us spotting a deer on a nearby hillside on the hike out, driving past a beautiful male elk on the road, and running into two deer at the research station after we got home.
We probably saw less than 20 tadpoles in the whole day.
So it really felt like the day had been full of anything and everything but amphibians.
Exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed, particularly by our crane encounter, we ended our 5 day stint with some pizza and beer at the nearby marina.
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