YERC goes birding for LandNET!!!!
A yellow warbler is a common site in riparian areas of Montana. Males are not shy and find conspicuous perches to show off their bright colors and melodic songs.
Point counts are a fairly standard method for monitoring bird populations, determining an ecosystem’s local bird community, typically done to collect data on bird diversity or abundance for a given area. Not only is this important for the sake of monitoring those bird communities themselves, but often point counts are used because bird communities can be effective and useful indicators of greater ecological processes like overall ecosystem health: more in line with YERC’s interests with LandNet. All this to say, we can learn an awful lot from studying our local birds. Which is where I come in! I’m here performing avian point counts for LandNet, which means my main responsibilities are to go out and listen for birds every morning. When you love birding as much as I do, this hardly seems like a job and more a dream. I struggle to find the words fitting to describe some of those mornings. Watching the sunrise over the Absarokas, still peaked with snow, as I drown in the symphony of meadowlarks and magpies, wrens and warblers. Who could want more?
Granted, no good comes for free; these counts must start early; 5:30 in the morning early. If that’s not bad enough, the locations for these counts could be anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours away, which could have me setting my alarm for 3:00 AM. It’s a fair price, and one I am entirely willing to pay. I’d say I spend my days right.
YERC avian technician, Richard Rich, conducting an early morning bird point count and prepared with waders and layers for cold creek crossings.
I wake up early, giving myself enough time to get everything together and drive to the points. Once there, I navigate between seven to ten pre-established points and perform the counts, which entails standing silently for ten minutes at a time while I frantically write down every individual bird observation I make, often in the form of hearing a bird’s song. As far as field work goes, this isn’t too physically strenuous, especially considering most of my points are in floodplains or prairies or generally flat areas. What is challenging, however, is making accurate observations. It’s one thing to go birding as a hobby, to give yourself as much leeway as you want to accurately identify the sparrow in front of you, but it’s another game entirely to record every single bird you hear, down not only to species but also sex and distance, keeping track of how you observed the bird, be it visual, through a song, a call, or any combination thereof, and making sure not to record the same bird twice. During busier counts it can be difficult to juggle everything in a mental gymnastics act, an internal Cirque du Soleil. Thankfully, I’ve spent the better part of my adult life training my ears and eyes for bird identification, and it’s a lot more fun than it may sound. The first time you identify a birdsong confidently the instant you hear it is exhilarating. Validating. A moment to be proud of. Hearing a song and determining it to be a MacGillivray’s warbler, and not in fact a yellow warbler or Wilson’s warbler or yellow-rumped warbler as you first thought, is a badge on your birding sash. A puzzle to be solved, a challenge to be won. Judging whether I just heard a Lincoln’s sparrow or a song sparrow is for me how I imagine completing a thousand-piece jigsaw is to someone less avi-philic.
Clark’s Nutcrackers are an iconic species of the high country with their ability to withstand the winters and alpine winds. They take part in a unique commensalist relationship with local bears and white-bark pines where all benefit from each other in their alpine community.
But that ignores the true core of why I love what I do. Treating bird ID like a fun puzzle is all well and good, but that’s only a “surface-level deep” kind of feeling. A game. To stand out in the wild however, especially a place so grand as Paradise Valley, or Yellowstone National Park, and experience, with all your senses, the nature around you is a more intimate experience. To count as many as thirty individual birds of twenty species within fifty meters of you, to watch the sunrise over the mountains and feel the sun warm you and burn away the frost or dew, to notice how the bird activity slows and quiets as the morning wanes, that is to know a place, and to know nature, in a new way. A meaningful way. A sort of quasi-spiritual connection with the ecosystem you had not before. Co-existence. It’s the sort of experience greater writers than myself have sought after and then failed to describe. Thoreau and Emerson, Leopold and Carson, they were right; going out there yourself is the only way to truly understand. And after all, a greater understanding of our ecosystem and what it means to be a part of it is exactly what YERC is trying to cultivate and share.
Richard Rich is YERC’s 2020 avian field technician for LandNET.
You can find out more about the LandNET project and techs at www.yellowstoneresearch.org
