Bird Banding

I have now had the privilege of handling wild animals. I went banding with the MAPS crew on Monday and again this morning. I managed to extract my first bird from the net today, a Spotted Towhee. He kept trying to bite me (can't blame him) and defecated on me too. But, I got him out! I couldn't believe it.

Here is a better look at a Spotted Towhee in another bander's hands:
This is often what it looks like when you walk up to a net. I feel terrible seeing them like that. This is a Black-Headed Grosbeak:

Black-Headed Grosbeak unwound and in the hand:
A juvenile Anna's Hummingbird. They release these from the net immediately, and do not band them. Very cool to see.

Yellow Warbler

The beautiful, punk-rock Ash-Throated Flycatcher. He had a lot of attitude.

Red-Breasted Sapsucker

Getting him out of the net:
It's amazing to come upon a net and see the birds entangled, and then to be able to set them free and handle them. It seems vaguely mean, but the birds are very hardy creatures and often fly off with a defiant "cheep!" and a trail of poo. They are so light and seem so much smaller in the hand than when you see them through binoculars.

Trip Report

The hike up Chilnualna Falls did not seem as bad this time. I think that I am getting used to the punishment. (And, I do nothing compared to the people who are in the Hetch Hetchy area of the park; they did 40-60 miles. I only did 20-30. I really can't complain.) This time we did the hard front country bushwhacking site the first morning out. The site is called South Entrance. I stumbled upon some cool historical artifacts. I'm not sure what they were - pieces of a stove?

I ended up finishing my points, and then my hike out took an hour and 15 minutes. I was drenched in sweat and had leaves, twigs and a plethora of spider webs carefully nestled in my hair. The thing that took all the time was not the distance, but getting through the incredibly dense brush along that creek. Glad we did that first. Next was a return to another front country site - Wawona Meadow. There is great birdwatching there, so it is a pleasure to do. Then I got to do the hike up to Chilnualna Falls again. We started right about noon - not ideal - and were told by a man heading down the trail on a horse that we should have started earlier. The nerve. I wanted to say, "Thanks, asshole." But instead opted for the more polite, "We couldn't - we were working." By the time we finished Wawona, broke camp, did a car shuttle and made it to the trailhead, it was noon. We couldn't have gone any faster. This time I appreciated the beauty and took some photos.


Melanie (my partner for this leg of the trip) and I did 3 sites that I did last time, and then did a new one. At the last of the old sites is where I saw the bear. The weather this time out was gorgeous. A few chilly nights, but achingly blue-sky days. We wanted to takes bathes every day, but were thwarted by the creeks - the first night there was not enough to bathe in at all. The second night we found a good spot:
This water was pretty cold, so I really had to convince myself to dunk my crotch/torso/head. I was able to do that by thinking how incredibly sweaty I had been while hiking. The third night out the creek was too small to bathe in (again). Fourth night was the new site. It was called Ostrander Lake West, and is in the Glacier Point area of the park. Glacier Point is my new favorite area of the park; it is downright gorgeous, the trails are pretty easy and it is covered in Lodgepole Pines. These pines filter the light beautifully, creating a warm glow underneath them. They seem like proper gentlemen to me, all lined up in their gray suits. Ostrander Lake West is about a half kilometer off trail along another stream. This stream was stunning.

We dropped our packs 500m in, and then went to scout. The followed stream up and it quieted from a loud pulse to a quiet meander through verdant meadows. The crown jewel was the upper meadow, where the forest opened up to reveal the blue sky. There were 2 white rocks, perfectly placed amidst all the green and wildflowers and standing water. Lush.

We got up early the next day as I had to hike out to Bridalveil Campground, switch partners, and then hike back in and go off trail to another site. I realized that we may have gotten up too early because at 4:45 a.m. in a forest with a dense overstory canopy, you can barely see a thing. I couldn't really tell if there were willows at my first few points (the headlamp only shines so far) and it is a little scary to go stumbling around in the dark. Melanie generously volunteered to hike the whole way up to the top meadow (starting at 4 a.m.), so that then we would meet in the middle. She confessed, when we finally ran into each other at 7.30, that it was so dark she couldn't see and followed the wrong fork of the creek. She said she didn't start until 1.5 hours after she left camp. That must have been a little terrifying to realize at 4:45 a.m. that you had gone the wrong way. I was glad she found her way.

Survey time/about 5:00 a.m.
We were hiking out to Bridalveil so that I could switch partners and pick up Rodney, a research scientist at IBP who trained me last year. We have a lot of fun together, so I was looking forward to working with him. Plus, we are the same age, so I could complain about bodily aches and pains to a sympathetic ear.
On the way our, Melanie flushed a bird off a nest and we got this picture of her eggs:
When we got back out to Bridalveil, Bob had a book in which we could look up the eggs. We're thinking Blue Grouse.
As promised by Bob (our fearless leader), an ice-cold beer was dug out of the cooler for me when we arrived at Bridalveil. Some cribbage was played (we are tied in the series), the beverage was drunk and then Rodney and I were on our way in the early afternoon.

Rodney and I did 2 nights back country and then returned to Bridalveil for our last night. We woke up to do McGurk Meadow. It ended up being one of those vaguely disastrous mornings. The meadow was much larger than it appeared when we had scouted it the previous day. I was walking towards what looked like a glittering white patch, trying to figure out what it was. I first thought snow (it was that cold that morning), then lake/water, then frost (there was frost on all the other grass in the meadow). As I approached I realized it was a whole huge other arm of the meadow, covered in silvery frost and with tendrils of mist drifting over it. It was like stepping onto some other planet. Other than that, Rodney stepped in the creek and topped over his boots and I got trapped in what was essentially quickmud. Rodney had to pull me out as I had both legs in over my knees, was sinking, and not able to extricate myself. He thanked me for testing out the dangerous terrain. I'm generous that way.

The softer side of McGurk Meadow - wildflowers


Random Photos

The damage from the off trail wandering:

My home away from home

Billboard/Laundromat in Sonora

The Snap of a Twig

I'm back. I'm alive. Over 30 miles, 9 days and 11 different sites surveyed. It was difficult and fantastic. I saw some incredibly beautiful things that (most likely) few others have. That's what you get when you go off trail. You also get some pretty nasty cuts/bruises on your shins. Pictures will be posted Tuesday or Wednesday.

I'll relate my most harrowing experience, and then properly document the whole trip in a few days. Listen up, Jamie and Q! I have stared down a predator .....

It was somewhere around 6 a.m. at Empire Meadows SE, a site that I did my first time out also (oh - I was wrong - I did not go to Hetch Hetchy, but returned to the Wawona/Chilnualna Falls area of the park). I was busily looking up trying to find one of the woodpeckers that was doing some loud drumming. I thought it might be a Pileated Woodpecker, so was very interested in seeing it. It is our largest woodpecker. I moved to my next point, looking up (birds) and down (water), then settled in to take a GPS. As I was waiting for the satellites to pinpoint my location, I heard the snap of wood behind me. Now, I have heard this hundreds of times and turned around to find .... nothing. This time I turned around to find a furry brown creature with a lighter latte-colored nose looking at me. He was about 30-40 meters away. He stared at me. I stared at him. I thought perhaps it would be best to address the situation, so I said (calmly I like to imagine), "Go away, Bear." This did not have the desired effect. Mind you, I have seen a handful of bears in the last 2 summers, and they have always been 1) at least hundreds of meters away and 2) seemingly very intimidated by me. This one was neither of those. So, I tried again. "GO AWAY, BEAR." This produced a slight half-step forward. Not the intended result. I had the presence of mind to reach in my pocket for my camera. I continued my monologue by saying things like "I'M BIGGER THAN YOU." "I CAN KICK YOUR ASS." Etc., Etc. All blatant lies. I took a picture. Shit! The flash was on and he was hard to see, so I was trying to zoom in more and turn off the flash, but I realized this was fruitless as my hand was shaking way too much to hold the camera steady, and I did not want take my eyes off the bear for too long just so you all could see a picture of him. That would be a bit foolish. He ran a little away and then stopped, so I just kept at it: "GO AWAY, BEAR. I'M BIGGER THAN YOU." There was another half step forward, then he fled into the woods. I was downright amazed at how much my hand was shaking. It only lasted a minute or so.
I realized after he left that he was not that huge. When I showed people the picture later, they surmised that perhaps s/he was a 2-3 year old. Maybe this explains the curiosity? I also saw a bear with my partner across a meadow later in the week, and this thing looked the size of a bison even from hundreds of meters away, which convinced me that I had an encounter with a little guy. Still, scared the shit out of me!

Off Again

Tomorrow we go out again. This time for 10 days. I've never been unshowered for that long. This should be interesting, or catastrophic. I am going to an area of the park called Hetch Hetchy.

If you don't hear from me again that means I crumpled up on the ground, and disintegrated into a whining heap of humanity who just couldn't go on.

Random Photos

All geared up for the first survey in Wawona Meadow. I am in full raingear because the grass is very tall and there is lots of dew at 5:00 a.m. The wire is the cable that connects my CD player to my speaker.
The white thing is the speaker. The yellow item is my GPS.


Here I am sitting in some of the shorter grass. It was tiring to walk through - much of it was waist/belly high. Also, you often couldn't see if there was water or ground at the roots.

This is from South Entrance, the site where I had to do a lot of bushwhacking:

This is a cool plant I see a lot - a snow plant:


I went with some kayakers down to the put-in on the Tuolumne River today, because they wanted me to drive their Ram Charger 1500 back to the house in Groveland. The put-in is down a rocky 5-mile dirt road. This is Bob kayaking - he's our group leader:

I Hate the Cold/Part Two

It's been a few days. I'm still recovering - eating, drinking and sleeping until 7:00 a.m.
Back to our story, already in progress ...

Fog started to roll in, and with it, increasing cold. The rain was on & off - enough to make me wish I had not taken my raincoat out of my pack and left it in the car, but not enough to curse the day I was born. We finally made it to the point where we had to go off trail and find a campsite to set up for the next day's survey. The creek we were surveying was in a steep, cold, dark canyon. We had to climb a ways uphill to find a spot flat enough to camp on. It was my partner's turn to cook, and she had an ambitious lentil curry planned. I watched this boil for about 45 minutes at our elevation of 6800 ft., while all of the blood in my body started to retreat to my core. I had on all of my clothes - long johns, pants, 2 shirts, my Zoic vest, Zoic fleece jacket, gloves and a hat. At 8.45 p.m., a spurt of logic emerged and I realized the lentils she was boiling were never going to cook because the pot was not big enough to hold the amount of water that was required to make them edible. I hastily made my excuses and beat a path toward my sleeping bag before any chance of ever feeling warm again escaped me. I went to bed hungry and cold.

A few days later, we had a good laugh about the curry incident. As it turns out, she didn't eat it either, and she had to pack it out; we're not supposed to bury the stuff. (This came back to haunt her as the bag she stored it in exploded when we went to a higher elevation, and she ended up with rotten curry all over herself. More hilarity ensued when she told me about this.)

Next day, my tent was frosted over, and the 1 side of my sleeping bag was wet. I had not staked out my tent properly, so the side of my fly hit the tent and the frost was melted by my warm respiration.

Our fingers cracked from the cold. We ate almost all of our food trying to stay warm for the 3 days we were out. We did not find any Willow Flycatchers. I did see a bear running away into the forest in front of me when we were hiking. This was on the day we hiked to our 2nd to last site, where it briefly snow flurried (the white dots in this photo):

That night we ate dinner at 6.00 p.m. I escaped to my tent at 7 and thought, "I will just lay here with my eyes closed and see what happens." Next thing I knew it was 4.30 a.m. and time to get up. My partner had to wake me up - again. I thought my watch battery was almost dead, but then realized that the light and alarm - and even the time display - wasn't functioning very well because it was so #$%^%&$& cold. The solution was to snuggle up with all the electronics (the batteries, my camera, my watch, the GPS) in my sleeping bag. Mmmmm .... cozy.

The next morning, I had a lovely 5:00 a.m. moment with the moon and the evergreens:

After this site, we had another 6-mile hike to Chilnualna Creek - at 7500 ft., our highest site. This is where the curry exploded. After we finished the hike, I dropped my pack, laid on the ground and fell asleep:

We finished up there and headed back out on Friday morning. The cold weather broke for us on Thursday, so the 7-mile hike out on Friday was beautiful. I got documentary evidence that the trail map was correct:

And, I truly appreciated the beauty of the falls:



Twenty-some miles round trip. Coldest weather veteran members of the crew could remember in the Sierras. And - we didn't even get the worst of it. One couple got snow/hail/rain in a different part of the park. I guess I'm just a lucky gal.

I Hate the Cold/Part One

Our first week of real work. A front country site (campground), then on with the packs and off into the Sierras. The weather gods were obviously awaiting our trip with great glee.
Tuesday morning we worked a site that is an off-trail creek. Once we left the trail we had to walk through the forest for 400 meters (all our distances for this scientific work are measured in meters, so I am with the rest of the world on this) before we arrived at Big Creek. When we scouted it the day before I got my first crack at orienteering with a compass and map. I found it disconcerting to walk off a trail and into the forest. I also found it disconcerting to almost impale myself when some dead branches broke on this log I was trying to cross. No impalement, but a CSI-worthy bruise on my thigh (yes, my co-workers, many reference photos have been taken, and many more will be as the colors change). I also ripped the ass of my pants on this stunt, and had to tape it together with duct tape as I had no other pants to wear for the next 4 days. This is a real classy look as my duct tape is bright red. Although, I don't know that a more subtle color would be any classier. The actual survey involved lots and lots of bushwhacking as I followed the creek into wilderness. Not just any bushwhacking, but bushwhacking while trying to avoid poison oak. Reverse course on the way back (after 5 hours of surveying). I managed to top over each of my boots on separate jumps criss-crossing the creek. (Sometimes one of the sides would turn into a sheer rock precipice that I had no ability/interest in climbing, so I had to cross.) This didn't bode well for the hike into the backcountry, which our crew leader Bob said couldn't be 5.6 miles, even though that's what the trail map said.
Well, not only was the majority of it 5.6 miles (and not the 2.5 or so that he had imagined), it was 2300-ft. elevation gain. It was hard to climb that with a 35-lb. pack on my back (I really don't know how much it all weighs - don't want to know). It started to rain, too, as we hiked up the trail to Chilnualna Falls. The weather turned very cold. I had a feeling it was beautiful, but was too cold, tired and crabby to care. Once we got to the new site, we had to scout that (mind you, we had been up since 4.15 a.m., surveyed the creek in the morning - about 3k of hiking - and then had this massive uphill slog). And, it was getting colder by the minute. The fog rolling in did not bode well.

More tomorrow. I have a bottle of wine to drink.