One more week at Sheldon

The birds are silent, the vegetation analysis and data entry are almost done, and I will be leaving Sheldon in a week. Next I am headed to Glacier, Montana, to live in another cabin without electricity and work on a bull trout study. Here are a few more sheldon pictures. My nighthawk eggs hatched, and the baby nighthawks look absurd, just little balls of fluff with no discernable heads or wings.
Last day off, Michelle and I hiked up to a backcountry lake in the Warner Mountains. The Warners are beautiful, but their distance from major cities and lack of excessively craggy peaks makes them virtually unknown, and we had the trail to ourselves.


The Mule's Ears that grow in the mountains have enormous leaves.

Evening on Badger Mountain, with Great Basin wild rye (ELCI) in the foreground.

Trees and rivers?! Climbing!

For our two days off, Michelle and I headed up to Bend, Oregon, for some climbing. As we got closer, the sagebrush steppe turned to ponderosa pine forest, and we started to see lakes and rivers. Although I have loved living in the desert, I do miss trees. The first night we camped off a forest service road in the ponderosas, and could see the sillouettes of tall pines against the darkening sky and smell the soil and trees and growing things. The desert smells like dust and sagebrush.
We met up with a few local climbers, who showed us volcanic cliffs to toprope along the Deschutes River. They also showed me how to set nuts and hexes in the rock and I practiced setting trad protection on a climb (but while still on a toprope). The friendliness of complete strangers is one of the excellent things about the climbing community. We had called random gear shops the night before asking about where to climb, and found someone who offered to take us climbing.

The next day we bouldered down by the river - here is Michelle on a traverse.

After climbing on the sun-baked basalt, we jumped in some bouldery pools along a rapid on the river, and had fun with the waterproof feature of my camera. It was tricky to swim against the current - below are my arms frantically grabbing onto a rock so I don't get swept away.


Upper Klamath Lake, seen on the way up.





re
For our two day break, Michelle and I headed to Bend, O

coolest birds ever

Loggerhead shrikes are predatory passerines, which have a habit of stashing their kills on thorns or barbed wire fences for later (like a jaguar would). For such a small bird, they are pretty vicious and awesome.

Shrike nestlings. When I climb their tree to check the nest, the parents flap around the tree screeching at me.


Common nighthawks are odd looking birds. And very well camoflaged. Once, when checking this nest I thought the bird had abandoned the nest because I couldn't see it. Then I realized that I was staring right at it. They are also lazy birds. Why build a nest when you can just lay eggs on the ground?

Life at Badger Cabin

Our home while working on Sheldon is Badger Cabin, on Badger Mountain (and I saw a Badger yesterday while nest-seaching. It was funny and waddled around). Here at Badger we lack things such as electricity and running water, but have views of the sagebrush, a washers court, and other excellent things. This is our horsealope skull, which guards the cabin. The house wren perching on the antler is nesting in the brain cavity.


Though we are in the middle of the sagebrush, we have quite a few amenities. Here is our lovely outdoor shower - just hang your towel on the deer antler, divert the spring, hook up the pump to the 12V car battery, and crank up the propane heater.

We can only get AM radio out here...FM won't come in. Most of what we do get on the field truck radios is conservative talk radio. So, after a day of work, we can hear excessively patriotic music, opinions such as "wind power will never work cause windmills were invented in the dark ages," and overuse of the phrase "You're a great American."

Our water comes from a small spring near the cabin, and the little pool below it doubles excellently as a beer cooler. Although, being in the spring the labels get rather sun-bleached and it is sometimes necessary to scrape algae of your bottle before opening it up.

A Badger Cabin sunrise (we see a lot, starting work at dawn when the birds awake).

not bleak and gray

I have heard some people say the deserts and the sagebrush steppe look bleak and colorless. I would like to correct that notion... below: buckwheat, horsemint, lupine, phlox, arrowleaf balsamroot, and an unidentified flower.








A few people have commented that the pictures of the sagebrush look bleak and colorless. It can be at first glance, but if you look closer, its actually very colorful. Below: buckwheat, horsemint, lupine, phlox, arrowleaf balsamroot, and an unidentified flower.

Thousand Creek Canyon

Thousand Creek Canyon is one of the more dramatically scenic and commonly visited areas of Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge. But...since Sheldon is out in the middle of the sagebrush, commonly visited does not mean the same thing it would in a national park. We hiked all day without seeing anyone else, and the trail marked on the map turned out to not really be a trail.

And, we saw (and caught) awesome herps. This lizard displayed quite the rock climbing prowess, and we also found this pacific treefrog. And subsequently lapsed into biology dorkiness and had a debate about whether it was in the genus Pseudacris or Hyla. In case you were wondering, it's Pseudacris regilla.

the birds are nesting

With the snow and cold behind us (hopefully!) the birds are nesting and beginning to have fledgelings. This vesper sparrow is singing to defend his territory.

Brewers sparrow nest in a clump of bluebunch wheatgrass.

A vesper sparrow nestling, still at that stage where nestlings are very strange and ugly looking.


There is a sparrow sitting on a nest in this sagebrush. Can you see it? When incubating, birds often won't flush until you're about a foot away. Thus, one nest finding method is to wander around hitting likely looking shrubs with a nest stick. Some species won't move even if you poke them with a nest stick.