Tag Archives: Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge

The Joy Of Birding

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Avocet Chick – Bear River Migratory bird refuge

Birding is one if those things people do to get outside and commune with nature where many of the wild birds live. Their sole purpose is to look at those birds and say “I saw you, now I can go home and have a beer.” They make a list of all the different kinds of birds they’ve seen over the years and write them down in a little book, which is called their ‘Life List’. This is shown to other birders and gets them Street Cred in the “I saw a bird and you didn’t” world of birding.

This is not a sport for the uneducated. You can’t be stone cold dumb and be a birder. Many birders have attended highly prestigious places of edification where they don’t necessarily teach birding per se, but they do teach Latin which is used to name and classify bird species and confuse non Latin speakers. This makes the Latin user appear to be much brighter than the poor unwashed non Latin speaker and maintains the guild system that we Americans seem to love so much. It also keeps the rif-raf where they belong and the superior, well, superior. This system is primarily human based as the birds themselves couldn’t give a flying fig about what people call them. Except for peacocks, they are so vain.

One of the burning questions in the birding world is where to go to see birds. Where do they live? Are they accessible to Americans? Does one have to quarantine before looking at a bird? Can you see a bird if you don’t know its Latin name? What do they eat? Are they carnivorous? Do they favor the various root vegetables such as Rutabaga or Turnips? We know they don’t like Parsnips, nobody likes parsnips. These are just a few of the questions asked by people who don’t know any better but want to know so they can move up in the birding world.

One of the places where you can go and look at a bird is one of the various wildlife refuges. This is land that the government has deemed to be of absolutely no other use and therefore suitable to warehouse our excessive bird inventory. Species like those little brown birds you see pecking at everything everywhere. They’re all over the place. You’ve probably tripped over them. It’s very likely they have a Latin name of some sort but who knows what it is. Even if you heard it you wouldn’t know what it meant so one can safely discount and ignore them and go on to look at more interesting birds.

Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge near Brigham City, Utah is one of those holding pens where excess birds are held until they’re needed elsewhere. There you can see huge quantities of birds. They have them stacked all over the place. There are whole fields of those little brown birds spoken of before, which has been learned are actually a house sparrow or the Latin named Passer domesticus. There are great huge lumps of the White Faced Ibis piled willy nilly in unsightly stacks anywhere it’s wet. There you can select an assortment of birds for your own migratory bird refuge, if you have one. Way in the back of the refuge where it’s quieter, is an enormous area filled with lockers where larger birds such as the Tundra Swan are kept until it’s time to cut them loose and send them on up to the Tundra where apparently they are desperately needed at different times of the year.

One of the all time favorites for birders is the American Avocet. The image above is of a young Avocet or chick as they’re more vulgarly known. They look surprisingly like an adult Avocet only smaller. Its bill or beak has yet to grow into the graceful recurve that it uses to sweep through and syphon the water for its favorite food, the Rattle-back Shinsnuggler larvae which is only found here at the Bear River Migratory bird refuge. At least it is believed to be the Rattle-back Shinsnuggler larvae. There were no explanatory signs to indicate what the food is so an assumption was made which is believed to be close to what ever it is that the young Avocet or Chick is eating.

If you are interested in ‘Birding’ or its companion sport ‘Snake-ing’ you can contact any sporting goods store where they’ll sell you everything you might possibly need in the way of birding equipment. They also might tell you where to see birds but I wouldn’t count on that. However you already know where to go as you have just been told right here. It’s the Bear River Migratory bird refuge. So, Happy Birding then, and look down occasionally, that’s where the snakes are.

Shadow Racers

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Yeah, a lot of you have been asking ” Hey! What about the first heavier than air, air race that was held on May 23, 1909 – the Prix de Lagatinerie, at the Port-Aviation airport south of Paris, France? And how does that tie in with this new sport we’re hearing about called Shadow Racing?” In fact so many cards and letters have been coming in that we had to assign a special intern just to steam the stamps off the envelopes so we could use them again. We heard you and have been working feverishly to gather the information to put together this article. There’s a whole crock pot of information about this subject and we intend to dredge up every sordid, exciting, non-essential, nearly factual bit we can find.

Air racing as a sport has often included airplanes, some of them made here at home which would be America, and some made other places like Europe which at one time included Great Britain and France and Germany, all countries that fit inside Europe the continent and have had some success with inventing various stuff and then bragging about it constantly. One of these things was Airplanes and their own proprietary version of air racing.

The heyday of this sport was in the 1930’s and 40’s and even later in which the races were set at different venues and various contestants got airplanes and raced them. Many spectators attended these races and got sore necks from looking up all the time. Some even got all over dizzy of a second and had to lay down for a while. The planes themselves were interesting in that they all were heavier than air and took some skill to fly them. Every one who had a plane was extremely proud of their aircraft, even more so if it didn’t fall out of the sky and crash and these owners would go on and on about the safety of this new mode of transportation called aviation until you were just sick of it and began avoiding them whenever possible. In the early 20’s you had planes with names like the Albatross L 69 from Germany, the de Havilland DH.71 Tiger Moth from England. Even earlier you had the Deprussian 1912 Racing Monoplane from France. Those early planes were special in that they were constructed of things like, wood, wire, paper, canvas and glue and other non-essential materials that were cheap and readily available.

 Later in the 40’s you had the Caproni Bergamaschi PL.3 from Italy, and the Condor Shoestring from the U.S. There was even one from The USSR called the Yakolev Yak – 11. However there is no record of it ever winning a race or even flying for that matter which may have something to do with its namesake, as the only time Yaks fly is when they’re tumbling through space after falling off one of the high mountain cliffs in which they’re found. But you know the Russians they got to get their two cents in there. Even if it is to brag about their dumb named plane which supposedly crashed into a tree upon take off and never flew again. It wasn’t even a very tall tree.

All of  this sky racing stuff was not lost on our feathered friends, the birds, who have been flying for years and have gotten highly skilled at it. Birds are great mimickers and saw the fun that people were having racing their planes around and sometimes getting big bucks for doing so and thought “Wait a minute! I’m a bird! I can do that!” and soon were putting on their own airshows and races and pulling in big crowds.

One of the big events they created was the sport of Shadow Racing. This is when a single bird or sometimes many of them, builds up a head of steam way up in the air and comes screaming in, diving as low as they can over the ground, trying to out race their shadows. In the image above you can see this streamlined racing gull, a tried and true model that hasn’t changed its shape for many years, slowly but easily out distancing its shadow. Cool, right? This sport is growing in popularity and gaining big crowds at flyways like Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge both important areas for bird flying. We mustn’t forget Padre Island and those long sandy beaches perfect for this event. Even the lumbering old Pelicans, the C-130’s  of the bird world compete there. There is even some talk of a nationally televised race sponsored by Red Bull and Budweiser, but as yet no dates have been set.

We for one, look forward to this seasons many Shadow Racing events and will be on hand to capture the excitement of it with our cameras. In fact we have been busy designing our own Shadow Racing bird and believe we can do well in the shorter Shadow Racing Sprints. Wish us luck. Hope to see you there.

Out Of The Darkness

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OutDarkness7922click image to enlarge

One of the pure joys of being a photographer is being witness to singular moments of beauty. Sights and events that suddenly appear before you that stop you in your tracks and stun you with their absolute clarity and simplicity. Regardless of what you choose to photograph there will be moments that occur when everything seems to come together to produce an image that sums up why you return to nature over and over again hoping to see an amazing occurrence and capture it.

Walking along the bank of a pond in Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge late one afternoon hoping for a shot of a Black-crowned Night Heron I had spotted earlier before the sun dropped lower making it too dark to shoot into the reeds where they like to stand, this plover suddenly flushed and rose into the air out of the darkness, into the sunlight above the reeds.

As it rose higher the sunlight caught its wings outstretched, highlighting the translucent primary feathers, gently illuminating the soft white under belly with a greenish reflection from the reeds below. The golden light caused the dark area on the back of its head and neck to turn into a gorgeous mahogany hue. My vantage point allowed me to capture it against the dark reeds and nearly black water below making it standout in gorgeous contrast.

These moments last for mere seconds and the plover with a few powerful wing-beats was soon gone, flying off into the distance. My camera had been set for shooting into the darkness of the reeds where I expected the heron to be and it was just sheer luck that those settings worked for this image also. A lot of these situations are serendipitous in that everything is totally spontaneous and unexpected and you have only moments to react and capture the scene. When you do successfully however it simply adds to the need to get back out there and try to make it happen again.

The Egg Inspector

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EggInspector7575

In our long-standing tradition of bringing forth new and unusual information about our animal neighbors the Director and instructors here at The Institute would like to unveil a new program. It is called Our Animal Friends At Work or OAFAW. Periodically we will feature the occupations of our animal neighbors and highlight their activities and responsibilities.

Given the sheer size of our collective national parks, monuments, refuges, natural areas and other places where the public can come and view the scenic wonders and abundant animal life, humans cannot perform all the jobs required to maintain and keep these areas in working order. Consequently some of these operations have to be delegated to our animal partners.

Our first featured guest employee is a hard-working dedicated individual who is in charge of a very important position at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah. Meet Chief Inspector Long-tailed Weasel, or simply LT as he is known to his colleagues. He has a very important job here at the refuge in maintaining the integrity and quality of the eggs that are produced by all the different species of migrating birds that stop off here at the refuge on their way to somewhere else.

 Literally thousands and thousands of migrating birds pass through the refuge and many will stop off and lay their eggs in nests, depressions in the ground, nests hanging from the bullrushes ringing the shoreline, or for those who can’t be bothered just laying them anywhere they happen to feel like. Without supervision and guidance there is ample opportunity for mishap or just a general lessening of quality of the eggs produced here. That’s where LT the Egg Inspector comes in.

He works tirelessly but ceaselessly, observing, locating and entering every nest he can to check the egg clusters integrity. When he finds a nest his first job is to check on the eggs within for quantity, color, size, conformation, shell integrity, and the well-being of the contents inside the egg. This he does by performing a procedure called CIOEIU (pronounced SEE-Oh-E-EEW)  or Cracking It Open, Eating It Up. If in his opinion the egg contents bear further investigation he will proceed to perform CIOEIU on each egg in the nest until he is sure the viability of the eggs is correct. This is a thankless task as he gets little or no support from the owners of the nest, in fact he is harassed and discouraged from performing his duties at every nest he checks. But he perseveres because that is his job and he must perform it regardless of public opinion.

There are many selfless dedicated animal volunteers that perform thankless tasks like this every day of the year to keep our natural areas open and operating at peak efficiency. Without them we would be overcome with problems that we would be hard pressed to solve ourselves, so we thank you Chief Inspector Long-tailed Weasel and all others like you for doing what needs to be done. Because of you Nature is a better place.

The Maiden Voyage of the Bokeh Maru – Day 13

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Today my goal was to reach the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah. It was my third visit here and I was anxious to see if there had been any changes made while I was gone. You know that this is a federally funded, federally managed, tax dollar supported organization under the strict control of the Federal Government, who rigidly sets the standards by which it is run and although occasionally there are errors that severely impact the users, they are here to help you. Wait… that ‘s the IRS. I meant to say that this is a wonderful place run by the state of Utah and free to the public. It caters to birds of all types without thought of race, creed or color. BearRiver7828 Having said that I must point out that this is a managed refuge and there are regulations in place to make this a better place for both birds, and the people that watch them. In this case there has been and ongoing problem with undocumented birds using and abusing the system. Consequently the powers that be thought it would be prudent to build a fence to limit the number of users that can be in the park at any one time. One of the most abusive groups that need to be managed are the Canadian Barn Swallows, a raucous but law-abiding group shown here waiting for their permits to be issued before they can enter the refuge and abuse it. They will line up on this fence for miles squawking and ruffling their feathers demanding that the fence be taken down and they be granted full use privileges. so far their demands have not been met. BearRiver8096 To better inform the public about birds and bird related species, each week the refuge chooses one bird to feature. The bird of the week this week is the Black-Necked Stilt, a largish shore bird closely related to the Not-So-Black-necked Stilt or as it is colloquially known here, the Grey-necked Stilt. It eats small stuff that it finds in the water, roots and berries and lasagna. It’s call is a soothing “HeyyyyyyyyyyWhatttttttsForDinnnnnner” followed by a chkk-chhkkk-charump. This week the refuge is absolutely saturated with them. BearRiver8092 The typical Black-necked Stilt has many personalities. This one reminds me of that guy you see at the fairgrounds, you know that guy, the one just standing there with his hands In his pockets looking around. Probably waiting for his wife or maybe for the kids to get off the Tilt-A-Whirl. He’s there because the kids like it and his wife can shop the booths along the midway. He’d rather be home sitting in his chair with a beer watching Wild Kingdom or Birds in Flight or something on the box. He could be a moult inspector or have some kind of 8-5 job and this is how he spends the week-ends. Basically a good guy. BearRiver8167 This is another kind of bird. They’re Grebe’s, there’s about a dozen different kind. This is this kind. They swim around, eat stuff, get married, have kids, and winter in the warmer parts of wherever. One is the male and the other is the female. I know, they kind a look a like, the way old people who have lived together for 70-80 years do. BearRiver8087 This might be a Grebe Egg. Their numbers are diminishing because they’re too lazy to build nests and lay their eggs instead in the middle of the road where dump trucks drive back and forth and you can see what happens. In doing the forensic work on this egg we determined that the egg fits perfectly between the spaces of the lugs in the dump truck tire and as the truck drove over the egg it broke it, but didn’t crush it. It is entirely possible that the chick was stuck between the lugs and after a certain number of tire revolutions was thrown free, dizzy but intact. Whether the youngster was ever reunited with the adults is unknown. Apparently Grebes have short memories and may have even forgot they laid this egg. There is talk of limiting dump truck travel in Utah during the Grebe breeding season but so far there has been no action in the Utah legislature. BearRiver8226 Lest you get the impression that life is harsh in a forbidding setting I want to reassure you that t here is beauty here too. This is the White-faced Ibis shallows where you see the calm serenity that can be found here on alternate Thursdays. BearRiver8216 Of course in a place as large and diverse as this refuge is, you can always find diversity amongst the flocks. This is the melting pot of Birdland as it were, and anything is possible in a biological way. Apparently there was a large meet and greet and a Jamaican oil-drum steel band was playing there and this young but naïve coot spent some time with the parrot who played lead drum and later as will happen, she was blessed with several chicks who seemingly took after their father. There are no value judgments here, after all this is nature, and there is no right or wrong in nature. BearRiver8233 Remember we talked earlier of the quota system being imposed on certain species of birds, well this is why. This is a distinct sub-group of the Canadian Barn Swallow, the Mud-Pluckers as they’re known, and their abusive use of the resources here at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. They are the primary reason sanctions are being imposed on these birds. Here they are caught red-handed, plucking mud out of the shoreline and flying off with it. Thousands, if not a bunch of thousands, of these mud stealing little birds have been depleting the shore line of its life-sustaining mud and disappearing. No one knows why. Mud just disappears, one beak full at a time. It is thought that the ponds and rivers in the refuge have been lowered by as much as 16 feet by the constant, continuous excavation of the shoreline by these Mud-Pluckers. If this isn’t reversed we may see nothing but giant sinkholes with a little water a the bottom. What’ll happen then, eh? We may have to stop these birds at the border. I don’t even want to think of what that might do to the already shaky relationship we have with our mud less neighbors to the North. BearRiver8289 Even after showing the dark side of the refuge it is still a hauntingly beautiful place. If you have any interest in birds or nature or life in general you must visit. If you don’t, nevermind, it’s just a flat place with some ponds, a ditch or two, and a lot of mosquitos, in fact I heard there’s a good movie playing down at the multiplex you should check it out. But if you are one of those who revel in nature and all that she has to offer, then you’re in luck, because the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge is just down the road in Utah. See you there next time. Tomorrow I point The Bokeh Maru homeward and back to civilization as we know it.

I must go down to the roads again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is the Bokeh Maru and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the roads I face, and a grey dawn breaking,
See you tomorrow .

The Case of the Limping Ibis

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Limping Ibis1484White-faced Ibis   Northern Colorado                            click to enlarge

May 8th 6:07 PM. I had been hired by a small bird refuge in Florida to ascertain the where abouts of a certain White-faced Ibis and her brood. She had skipped out without paying her food tab and the refuge wanted their moola. Why any bird refuge would go to these lengths to collect on a food bill was beyond me but then I was just a flat-footed gumshoe with a camera in his hand and a need to feed my habit of taking pictures, and I didn’t need to know everything. I was just there to find the bird, take her picture and collect my 40 simoleons. Forty simoleons doesn’t sound like much but when you’re down on your luck you’ll do a lot of things for not much money. Besides I was getting low on pixels and needed to fill my cards up.

When I did my initial interview with the director of the refuge, a short little rat-faced weasel with too tight shoes and a comb-over I found out a few of the facts I needed to know to start this job. The first was this guy needed to brush his teeth, his breath smelled like burning tires and unfortunately he had to open his mouth to talk and that made matters even worse, if they could be. He also needed to change his ” I ♥ Ibis ” t-shirt, too much of his pasty skin was showing. It didn’t help that there were what looked like Ibis feathers stuck in his teeth. Who licenses these places anyway I asked myself, but then I thought about the dough and moved upwind.

The second fact was more useful. It seems that this particular Ibis had a limp. A very pronounced limp and she was traveling with her two off-spring who were following in Mom’s every footstep. Both of them had records going back to when they were eggs. Petty theft, missing school, selling slightly used crustaceans to the younger ibis, some sordid behavior with a juvenile spoonbill, the list went on and on. No wonder they were on the lam. Every bird refuge in southern Florida wanted these three. It began to make sense that they were up here in the backwaters of Northern Colorado.

I got my first break in the case when I was going into town one rainy overcast day. I needed smokes, I didn’t smoke but we’re required to carry them in case some sultry dame with long red hair, gams that go up to there, and knowing eyes asked us for one. It ‘s part of the gumshoe code. My warning light came on to tell me I was low on gas. Great, the 40 clams promised by ratzo the Ibis lover hadn’t come in yet, so much for the checks in the mail bit, I was out of smokes, low on gas and all I’d had to eat in the last three days were a can of anchovies, a few soggy saltines and some grey stuff I found on the top shelf of the fridge. I was feeling so low that whale shit looked like star-dust. I missed Angie too. She wasn’t much of a secretary, my girl Thursday, but she could make a mean enchilada. And the fact that she had curves in all the right places didn’t hurt, much. She knew how to make a man feel good though and that’s a skill that is worth its weight in gold. I let her down as is my habit with women, I answered her truthfully when she asked me if those fishnets made her butt look big. I should have lied to her. That’s another part of the gumshoes code. Lie to them if you have to. Women want it, hell they need it. I was sinking fast.

I was thinking real hard about whether I should just dump this lousy crate into the bar ditch and put it and me out of misery when I noticed three dark shapes moving amongst the marsh grass. What the hell, I thought, could they be Ibis and then swear to god, they were. White-faced Ibis looking for food in all the wrong places. I couldn’t believe it, was I gonna get a break here or what. I wasn’t close enough to see if any of them were limping, so cutting across two lanes of traffic and one very large Navajo freightliner, luckily both his horn and his brakes worked, I pulled up to where I could see them better. They didn’t see me, Ibis don’t look in truck windows. There it was, she was limping, I could hardly breathe. She looked exactly as I expected her to, the kids had a few new tattoos but otherwise they fit the bill, I had them. All I needed was a picture.

I reached for my trusty Nikon D700 with its 80-400 VRII image stabilizing lens and quickly checked its settings, this was no time to screw things up by not having my crap together. I always carry my gear with me, my camera and lens are my bread & butter, I couldn’t live without them. They’re to me what the splits are to VanDamme, what wide teeth are to a game show host, what cleavage is to Sophia Veraga, well you get the picture. When Angie left she took the big screen, the microwave, my socks, the front floor pads out of my truck but she didn’t touch my gear. I guess there might be a small amount of human kindness left in that black chunk of basalt she calls a heart. Then I thought nah, she just missed them.

Just as I was ready to squeeze off a shot a car with Florida plates comes skidding to a stop, two idiots dressed like it was Plaid day at the senior center jump out with point and shoot cameras and flash those birds right in their little red eyes. Then before I could even get out my stun gun out to give a friendly birders welcome to those bozos the Ibis were gone. All I heard was one warning squawk and the hard flapping of wings and the marsh was empty again. When the rage cleared and I was able to locate the three they were just specks in the sky heading north along the foothills. The Hyundai the two intruders were driving was slowly wobbling after them, I must have luckily been able to slash their rear tire as they went by. They’d be able to follow my birds until the tire came off the rim then they’d be off-line for a while. Mad, sure I was, mad as a blind potato farmer with a dull shovel, but I wasn’t out of the game. I had a hunch where those three birds were going and it wasn’t Disney world. It was a much cooler place, a place where they could blend in with other white-faced Ibis and disappear.

They were going to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and so was I.

To be continued……

Sittin’ In The Morning Sun

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SittinInTheNoonDaySun4325click to enlarge

It’s time to take a break. It’s fall the kids are back in school learning how to catch all the little creatures that live in the mud and the shallow water. All the nest duties are over and about all that’s left to do is to decide if they want to winter in Texas or Southern Cal.

Right now Southern Cal is looking pretty good. The entire summer has been spent making a nest, sitting on eggs, watching the kids, running off gulls who get too close for comfort, keeping on guard at night so weasels or coyotes don’t come in get a chick or two. All in all it’s been exhausting so a little R&R on the beach seems like a pretty good deal. Plus the surf always sounds so cool in the winter months.

However their reservations don’t kick in for another month so sneaking in an occasional nap or catching some rays feels really good. The only problem is making sure the spouse stays awake while she’s catching some z’s. You can’t ever let your guard down when you’re a shorebird because who knows who is lurking in the tall weeds, but today all is good and the sun feels wonderful on her bill. Just a short nap, then we’ll start thinking about closing down the nest for the season.