Site visits

All we're trying to do is catch a Red Crossbill.

All we're trying to do is catch just one Red Crossbill, and put a tiny little radiotransmitter on it.

All we're trying to do, really, is catch JUST ONE Red Crossbill, and put a tiny little radiotransmitter on it, a special new one that can broadcast heart rate. And then follow it, on foot, wherever it flies, through the wilderness of Grand Teton National Park, hiking straight through the woods, off-trail and over deadfall and up bluffs and down cliffs and over rivers, through what they call "serious bear country". Wherever that little bird goes, for 72 hours nonstop. Or until the transmitter batteries die, whichever comes first. Just the two of us, me and Jamie, carrying huge packs with all of our radio gear, our sleeping bags, bear bells and a tiny bit of food.

And then after that we'd like to catch nineteen more crossbills and do the same thing. Then another twenty in the winter. That's all we're trying to do.

The whole idea might completely fail, of course. The two huge obvious problems are, first, we might never catch a Red Crossbill in the first place. Second, even if we catch one and get a transmitter on him, the little guy might up and fly to Alaska the second we release him. (Red Crossbills are famously nomadic - that's one reason we're interested in them, actually.)

But if we can just get hold of a bird, and if we are lucky enough to get a local bird, one who will stay within a reasonably sized home range, and if he doesn't fly out over the lakes - well, then, we might have a chance of getting some cool data.

Anyway, to do this, we have to catch a bird. (Luckily, we have a couple of captive Red Crossbills who are pure geniuses at spotting other Red Crossbills, and at enticing them to come closer. We usually carry one around with us in a little cage.) And we have to be in a relatively open landscape where we can pick up radio signals from far away. So we've spent the whole first week just scoping out the landscape. Red Crossbills love conifers, so we've been visiting as many conifer-forest spots as we can get to, all around Grand Teton National Park and through the whole valley of Jackson Hole, looking for good spots to capture crossbills. We have been aided enormously in this by my old friend Tom Hahn, who knows this valley, and its crossbill habitat, better than the back of his hand. We've been investigating his favorite little side nooks, trailheads, hidden back roads and little-known turnouts, and passes and bluffs and buttes.

Everywhere we go we inspect the trees. It took me a while to realize that when Tom or Jaime hop out of a car and stare up with their binoculars, they're often not looking for birds - they're studying the trees for cones. Studying crossbills means studying their favorite trees, the conifers, and especially, searching the tree tops for those precious NEW CONES that the trees might (or might not) be growing this year. New cones stuffed with the seeds that the crossbills love to feed on.

So everywhere we go we study the trees - the species present, and whether or not they have cones; and the topography of the land; and always, always, we're listening for crossbills. Ears alert for that little "chip!" in the distance. (Jamie and Tom, both long-time crossbill experts, can hear that tell-tale "chip!" a half mile off, jumping bolt alert in the middle of a conversation. Me, it has to be five feet away from me before I notice it, but I'm getting quicker at it.)

It's only been one week so far and I feel like I've been here for months, because every day has had about 4 major excursions in it.

A typical day:

Get up at 5am, stuff down a quick bowl of cereal. Stagger to the truck and drive to a trailhead, and spend three hours hiking up (say) Blacktail Butte, skidding and scrambling our way up an exhausting narrow switch-back trail. A 1-hour grueling hike, an hour bushwhacking our way around on the Butte looking for crossbills and checking out trees, and another hour picking our way carefully down through the steep, crumbly slope. All in the most idyllic scenary possible: dark conifers and slender white-barked aspen, magnificent alpine wildflowers all around...the sun rising over the sage, the pearly moon sinking toward the mountains on the other side of the sky, all the birds around us waking and singing.

By 8 or 9am we've scrambled back to the truck and have finished our first site visit. It's starting to get warm now. Shed the fleece jacket. On with the sunblock and the deet. Switch from hiking boots from sandals. Head to our next stop. (At this point we often hit bison rush hour, and its associated tourist-car road block, as our local herd of bison starts the first of its two daily crossings of the main road out of camp.) The next site visit might be a tour up Signal Mountain (up a paved road, thankfully); or a mild sunny morning chasing chipping sparrows around the romantic Sewage Lagoons; or maybe bushwhacking our way up a steep trailless pine-covered glacial moraine, right at the foot of the Teton glaciers, crawling hands-and-knees and nearly vertically through a jumbled jungle-gym nightmare of thousands of toppled fir trees. Some of these woods have the worst treefalls I've ever seen - let alone tried to climb through, on a steep slope, while carrying a birdcage with a live bird in it. I took some pride in getting our little bird through all of that without him even ruffling his feathers.

Around noon, a lunch break at camp; check on our captive birds, on the solar panel, on the rechargable batteries, check our supplies and gas and propane and whatnot; call the National Park Service about something or other, haul 10 gallons of water back to camp, buy a new tripod or duct tape or whatever other new thing we suddenly need; fiddle with some element of the trailer that is inexplicably falling apart. Every day I think I'll have time to take a nap, and every day there seem to be hours of these errands!

Third site visit, late afternoon, starting around 3 or 4pm. Maybe it's a visit to sunny, peaceful, inappropriately named Death Canyon to check out the cone crop and listen for crossbills; or to the much more appropriately named Mosquito Creek; or maybe a three-hour rough drive through the rutted National Forest roads in back of the Triangle X ranch; or maybe a hike up through the heartbreakingly beautiful lupine-flower alpine meadows near Phillips Pass.

Last of all, early evening, 6-8pm or so, the fourth site visit. My favorite of all of these evening site visits was a 5-mile hike through the astonishing wildflowers of the Taggart Lake Trail and deep into the Valley Trail. This was on a park trail that went right under the brooding face of Grand Teton itself - the greatest and craggiest of the Teton range, with its glaciers hanging seemingly over our heads. I carried the bird almost the whole way on that hike. By this time Jaime and I felt we knew this particular little bird quite well - he's quite a cutie actually. He clearly needed a name at this point, so he's now "Jackson" (in honor of Michael Jackson; and also because we are working in Jackson Hole.) Jackson has been on so many hikes with us now that he is totally blase about it, preening, eating and even singing while we're carrying him up a cliff or over a stream. He seems to like it; maybe he likes being chauffered around like this?

Jackson and I, with Jamie right behind us, spooked a whole herd of elk on the Valley Trail - and then spooked the same elk all over again on our way back, an hour later.

Every night we stagger into camp at about 8:30 or 9pm. We still need to make dinner, Jamie and me, on our tiny propane stove in our beloved "vintage" (= falling apart) 1971 Silver Streak trailer. One of us cooks, the other cleans, and cleaning dishes when you have no running water is rather a slow process. We scrupulously tidy everything and lock the food out of sight - this is bear country, after all. Suddenly it's 10:15pm and we're supposed to get up at (say) 4:30am tomorrow. Dang, how did that happen again? We make our way over to the equally old tent ("Don't try to open the back zipper. Or the bottom left zipper. Oh and, don't open the right zipper more than halfway. Actually, it would be better if you never left the tent at all")

Tumble into bed, set the alarm for six hours from now.

Come awake several times in the night: what's that? A coyote? A bison? A nighthawk?

Suddenly the alarm goes off. It's 4:30 and the first birds are already singing. Up and out! Where are we going today? Jenny Lake? Granite Canyon? Or maybe, if we're lucky, the oh-so-romantic Sewage Lagoons?

Over it all - always present, every day - the massive, unbelievable Tetons. The most beautiful mountain view I have ever seen. The Tetons rear shockingly abruptly from the edge of the peaceful sagebrush valley (Jackson Hole) where we are camped. They are like a child's sketch of mountains, the idealized mountains of dreams - huge triangular jagged peaks, snow-covered, with two huge glaciers, even. Looming always across the western sky, so close and so high and so vivid that it is hard to escape the impression that they are looking down at you, watching over you. They are stern and fierce and amazing, but somehow also comforting. It would be hard to feel lonely in this place, when there are so many birds all around, talking all the time in their thousands of voices; and the rivers are running, and the bison walking by, and the Tetons right there watching over everything.