Category — Animals/Nature

October 11, 2006
Pine Edge Cabins
Silver Gate, Montana

We were in the park early again this morning. The ride down was more like the one we’re used to – minus the ghostly look of the snow, which has melted for the most part from yesterday.

The Lamar was silent, buffalo the only herd animals in sight. We stopped at Slough Creek and drove north down the road toward the campgrounds near where we left last night. There are a host of Wolf Watchers set up here. Rick McIntyre’s telemetry says the Slough wolves are out there. They are howling up a storm. But like last night at sunset, nobody can find them.

I feel a bit like those ivory-billed woodpecker folks who spend hours and hours in swampy, water-moccasin-infested water looking for something, anything. Everything I spot in my scope, upon closer inspection, turns into a rock or a bison.

This goes on for about a half hour. Nobody else can find them, either. Finally, Deirdre motions us over to the scope, and there they are under a stand of dead aspen. At first I see three, then three blacks and the grey, but after awhile all eight are in various states of lounging. Seven females and the alpha male Number 490. The Slough Creek pack that we watched yesterday. We get a half hour of wolf stuff. Lying down and raising their heads to look at each other. Urinating. Stretching.

Someone says there is a kill about a half mile away down by Slough Creek. Perhaps they are resting and howling after last night’s gorging.

A bunch of coyotes shriek back, but the wolves’ long, more mournful howls and harmonies dominate the airspace. The grey gets up and walks down a swale, sitting down maybe 30 yards away before walking back up and joining the rest again for another round of howling.

When they got up and started moving uphill, you could see the individual wolves, especially after a friendly older fellow brought out a Questar telescope. In the telescope, you could see expression and color in the wolves’ faces more than a half mile away. Soon they out of sight heading north over the hill.

Our reverie is disturbed by a shout from the woman with the beatific smile who we met yesterday. She has scoped a grizzly bear walking along a high ridge far above us south of the road. It’s the same ridge where we saw the Slough wolves running as we left yesterday. This one looks pretty large, especially the hump, but it’s hard to tell much from this distance. He finally disappears into the timber stage left.

About ten minutes later, following exactly the same trail, moving a little more quickly, is another grizzly. A little later, someone picks them up on an even higher ridge following each other over the pass into the Lamar Valley.

We are moving on to the Norris Geyser Basin today, which one website describes as perhaps “the hottest geyser area in Yellowstone.” In 1929, it says, an oil rig sustained damage trying to determine subsurface temperatures that rose to 401 degrees.

The barren, sulphrous environment at Norris is a result of the extreme acidity that makes it difficult for vegetation to grow and easy for algae and bacteria to thrive. We read that the sulphur, which has a smell that most people find unpleasant but that I have grown to like as a part of the hot-water experience, is pretty toxic stuff.

Steamboat Geyser, though less-known and less-active than Old Faithful, is actually the world’s largest geyser. Today, like all days we have been here, it is gurgling and spitting erratically out of the rock, almost ominously. The eruptions measure from two to perhaps ten feet, like a cauldron waiting for its chance to blow. When it really explodes, water cascades up to 300 feet. Steamboat exploded in 2000, in 2002, and twice in 2003, on March 26 and April 27. Below, about thirty feet from the hole, a steam vent loudly exhales like a locomotive in an old cartoon.

The Norris landscape is ever in turmoil and change. Leo Whittlesey notes in Death in Yellowstone: “An 1883 park employee, George Thomas, cautioned travelers that walking at Norris had to be ‘slow and careful’ because of the danger of ‘dropping into a hole and being scalded to death.’ Five years later, a warning sign was posted: ‘Visitors ought not to cross this basin without a competent guide, and then it is at the risk of their lives.’

Photos show that by 1905 wooden planks were being built (and rebuilt) to allow people safer access. Whittlesey can find no actual deaths at Norris, although that doesn’t mean early travelers might not have met their end by falling through into some remote hot pool.

The chaos continues. In March 2003, about the same time Steamboat Geyser blew twice in a month, a new thermal feature appeared west of Nymph Lake. Porkchop Geyser, a familiar landmark since its appearance in 1971, erupted and left the temperature of the water in the pool significantly hotter, which closed the area for awhile and necessitated the moving of the trail away from it. Porkchop is more active than the last time I was here.

By the time we got back to Silver Gate, the clouds overhead are moving west and south, and at ground level, the wind is keeping the Montana flag down at the general store almost prone in the opposite direction. Such is climate in Silver Gate. We’ll be home tomorrow.

Sunday October 8, 2006
Pine Edge Cabins
Silver Gate, Montana

We left Thermopolis this morning. On our way to Cody, we saw the Squaw Teats formation for the first time, though just barely, at exactly the spot where our Roadside Geology of Wyoming said it would be. When I typed Squaw Teats into Google, the first entry linked to a 2000 story on stateline.org that says that “more than 1,000 different geographical features had Squaw in them” in the United States. Some states, Maine is mentioned in the story, are working to change all those names. Apparently, this Wyoming rock formation has escaped the wrath of politically correct Native Americans. It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t complained about Teats, too.

Looking at the map, there is serious wilderness on our left. That is the Wind River Range out there, and it contains many of the highest peaks in the state. No major roads for sixty to eighty miles in any direction and hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness, it is an important buffer for wildlife coming in and out of Yellowstone from the east and south.

If the state has its way in a protracted struggle with the federal government wolf delisting plan, it would also be a place where a Wyoming citizen could kill wolves, for any reason, a position contrary to the wishes of the federal government, environmentalists or anybody with a lick of sense in their heads. This wilderness is the wolves’ best protection, and Wyoming wants to turn it into a shooting gallery. Assholes would line up twenty deep to kill a wolf.

After we stopped for a couple of forgotten items and lattes in Cody, we head out Wyoming 120 and then Wyoming 72 for Red Lodge, where we pick up Beartooth Pass. After stopping for the sublime banana-cream pie at the Hungry Bear restaurant in Bearcreek, Montana, we head up the steep drive out of Bearcreek valley, above the lovely-in-the-fall town of Red Lodge and onto U.S. Highway 212.

The 70-mile-long Beartooth, opened in 1934, was called “America’s most beautiful highway” by Charles Kuralt, but it still doesn’t bring a wave of tourists into the northeast entrance to Yellowstone. It crosses from Montana into Wyoming and back again during this part of its route.

There are two passes that lead into the northeast entrance, and we try to use both. This year we are going in over Beartooth and back on Chief Joseph Scenic Highway. Beartooth was closed last year after mud and debris slammed down and damaged the switchbacks in a couple of places. Beartooth is only open about five months max anyway, and it usually closes sometime in October.

The valley west of Red Lodge, heavily reminiscent of German alpine terrain, was socked in a heavy fogbank, which continued more than 4,000 feet through the narrow switchbacks, hairpin and U-curves that lead to the mesa at the top. We pulled out at one spot at about 6,000 feet and were blessed with a view of what we had just driven through, now looking like an overdose of whipped cream lapping at the entire valley.

At this turn-out, I finally solved a personal mystery. We stopped at this same spot on our first trip over this pass in the nineteen eighties, and I remembered the Precambrian rock across the valley looked like the crumbling remnants of ancient civilizations. When we came across two years ago, I couldn’t find this place. And though I couldn’t see ancient Jerusalem this time, I realized that it was the same rocks. The shadows of the early morning sun had given me that moment almost two decades ago.

As we climbed to treeline, snow was blowing across the road and sticking, and the swirling clouds limited our exposure to the twenty peaks of the Beartooth Range that are above 12,000 feet. You never think that you’ll ever reach the top after what seems like hundreds of switchbacks. It was a stirring passage, and the Aerostar performed admirably all the way up to 11,000 feet and back down.

Riding across the mesa at the top, I always like looking back down into the Bighorn Basin from whence we came this morning, but it was far too socked in for those kinds of views, which gave us time to concentrate on the wonders along the side of the road itself — rows of cliffs, scattered rocks and fissures and frigid lakes. The western slopes were blissfully free of snow, and we were in Silver Gate by three. By 4:30, with Anne Whitbeck, our friend and longtime wolf guide onboard with her walkie-talkie, the Aerostar was heading into the park.

Anne caught us up on the latest news about wolves, bears and the Wolf Watchers who keep track of them. The road across Dunraven Pass is closing tonight, and there has been activity up there, both wolves and bears.

And she informs us that Beartooth Pass also closes tonight.

No wonder it was so weird up there at the top of the world this afternoon. We were among the last few to get over before it was closed.

Anne’s unerring senses are on once again, and we spend half an hour with four black bears in the high forest along the newly paved road.

First was a mother and cubs who walked along about fifteen or twenty feet from the road on a shelf about ten feet below us. They were foraging in the snow, mostly oblivious to the 20 people taking snapshots, pointing and shooting – when will these show up on YouTube?

They are in search of pine cones, and the mother gives two lessons: 1) how bears find food and 2) why they tell you not to climb a tree to get away from a black bear. Mom suddenly bolts up this conifer, and in less than a minute she is near the top, about 35 feet, after no real effort whatsoever. When she gets to the top, she begins to break off limbs with pine cones and dropping them for the young ones. (Her move appears to signal that she isn’t concerned about our proximity to the cubs, although I’ll bet she could come back down just as quickly and easily.

About a minute later, one of the cubs climbs an adjacent tree, just like a pro. Black bears learn to climb trees to avoid danger at a young age, and there are good reasons for that. I have seen a black bear treed by a grizzly over in Slough Creek, so if you’re a black bear, it’s a good skill.

But the cubbie, once it gets to the top, doesn’t seem to know what to do and is just swinging back and forth up there in the wind. Soon enough, both of them climb back down just as easily as they ascended, and soon the trio have disappeared down into the shadows of the forest. About a mile farther, we get a pretty good look at a cinnamon black bear beneath Mt. Washburn. It seems to indicate a desire to cross the road at one point but scampers back up in the trees high above the road as the voyeurs gather. Good bear.

It was our first time over the pass on the new road, which was completed again this year, and we stopped at a new pull-off with signage about the activity here – the major eruptions that have taken place here and the magma changes below Lake Yellowstone going on today.

One of the reasons we climbed Mt. Washburn two years ago was to stand at the northern end of that last eruption, and this place offers another good angle on the gap created more than 250,000 years ago. As the sun went down, the snow-capped mountains to the south turned first a fiery orange, gray and, finally, metallic blue.

Another journal entry from Yellowstone. Save for Alaska, there is no place we love more than the area around the Lamar Valley, the valley of the wolves. If you have never been there, you owe it to yourself to see this place.

Silver Gate, Montana
Fall 2004

It’s past dark, and I am lost in Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s ravishing novel about a spiritually overactive Indian boy, the son of a zookeeper, who is left in a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger as companion. It is equal parts Robinson Crusoe and The Revelation of St. John.

The novel’s narrative gets stranger and more trancelike as their ordeal continues. Near the end, the narrator, delirious, mad with thirst and hunger and close to death, includes a chapter about coming upon a strange, algae island that, without giving much away, is kind of a dream-state Meerkat Manor in the middle of the ocean. The chapter is delicious, an absolute hoot to read, very eerie and strange.

So I am tangled in the vines of this hallucinogenic chapter, with a little high-end bud and a gin & tonic going, when both our ears perk up. At first we write off the noise as a couple of college kids hollering at the moon before turning into their tents. Like what we might hear in Martin Acres from Roddy and the Boys behind us on 43rd Street on Saturday night.

But it’s not the weekend, and there aren’t any hard-partying kids up here in Silver Gate.

As soon as we get the cabin door open, it’s apparent immediately that the sound is not human. We can’t tell where it’s coming from, mostly because the cruel screams are bouncing around in the valley.

It sounded to me like more than one animal, some almost hyena-like screaming and a chorus of snarling victory and terrifying defeat. Billie heard it as screechy yipping, and she heard pain and howling, too.

This went on for almost ten minutes. A few minutes after it starts, another voice, this one a woman, from somewhere in town behind us, calls for her dog to come inside.

The sound of the animals, the woman’s increasingly nervous, plaintive calls and my absorption in the algae island tale convinced me that the poor dog being sought by its master was being torn apart by hyenas, or maybe a Bengal tiger.

Then, in a moment, silence again.

Coyotes? Wolves? Raccoons? Mountain lions?

I finished the chapter in Life of Pi before falling into restless sleep. I would hear the screams again sometime before dawn, and when I got up one time to pee, I looked out the window, imagining long-legged canine shapes moving in the shadows of the Whispering Pines motel, red stains on their coats, meerkats in their mouths, eyes blazing, on their way to Cooke City.

Another journal entry from Yellowstone. Save for Alaska, there is no place we love more than the area around the Lamar Valley, the valley of the wolves.

Anne says she thinks there is a gutpile at the west end of the valley that we can check out, so we are in the Lamar by quarter to seven. Lots of clouds and dark, so we sit out at the spot where we left the wolves last night and just listen.

It’s not the finding, it’s the looking, as John the Ranger says.

We are listening for wolf howls, which are usually faint but can echo across the valley when you’re lucky. All we could hear was a bison across the road snoring. Making a real racket, too.

Then it was over to Slough Creek, where we spotted Carl, a friend of Anne’s and a WMD. He’s got a couple of Christian women from Livingston who have paid him a couple hundred bucks each to show them megafauna and take pictures.

With Carl at the helm, it is money well spent; these women have a power stronger than prayer. We drove it yesterday, so we know that Livingston is a good two hours away. It’s seven fifteen a.m., and they beat us here — do the math. Carl is on the gutpile hotline, too.

The carcass is down below us in a valley of dense sage near the river. I know the spot well, having watched bears and coyotes feed on a kill in the sage a couple years ago when a grizz treed a black bear while a mom and cubs chewed down the carcass.

We’re not more than a hundred and fifty yards from a grizzly tearing at a hunk of bison. A shrub conceals the carcass, but at one point you can see him lift the rib cage, pulling for another chop.

Gutpiles are important to lots of critters. Five very healthy looking coyotes, coats shining, are around the carcass, too, skittering around waiting for their chance at scraps. We are downwind, and you begin to notice the change in smell, which quickly brings on nausea even at this distance. Remembering bears’ powerful sense of smell, if it affects me this far away, how far away can bears smell it? Bears and humans are alike in so many aspects, but here we part ways; the more rancid the carcass, the more bears seem to enjoy it.

The coyotes go off on a tear, yipping, yelping, making those strange coyote noises. Since we are so close, we don’t want to disturb the bear, so Anne goes to move the car, Carl heads off for the Lamar with the Christian ladies and Billie and I watch the bear for awhile, scratching and tearing at what’s left of the carcass.

Suddenly, it heads off, and the coyotes take over. In a moment, the bear disappears behind a knoll, and for a few disconcerting moments, I’m trying to figure out if it might be heading in our direction or down where Anne is parking the car.

As it turns out, the bear had already crossed the road by the time I got to Anne. In minutes, he is in the high country and a boulder field hides his path.

- October 13, 2005

Each year since 2001 Billie and I have gone to Yellowstone at this time of year. We went up the first time because we were curious about the reintroduction of the wolves and how the park might have been changed by their presence. As you will see below, we found much more than we bargained for. Now our primary activity in the park is watching wolves, and a few grizzly bears when we’re lucky. We have seen some incredible things, most of them visible from the side of the road.

Due to some scheduling conflicts, we won’t make it this year. So I thought I would post a few of my journal entries from our Yellowstone years during the next few days. Save for Alaska, there is no place I love more than Yellowstone, and especially the Lamar Valley, the valley of the wolves. And it all began on this spring day.

17 June 2001
Silver Gate, Montana

It was just getting light, just before five, when Kim’s knock came at the cabin door. I was already awake, and it didn’t take us ten minutes to throw on some clothes and brush our teeth.

We are off at 5:30, early enough that there isn’t a ranger at Yellowstone’s Northeast Entrance just a mile from Silver Gate. We drive in silence, following the pick-up of Bob Crabtree, the park’s chief coyote researcher, sipping our coffee and taking in the natural spectacle of the sun blazing on the rocky peaks, Baronnette on the right and Abiathar and the Thunderer to our left, all three at about 10,000 feet, some three thousand feet vertically above us. All blazing gold in the morning’s first rays.

Elk are grazing several hundred yards from the road as we pass through the Pebble Creek area. We were here at this broad meadow late yesterday morning and spent an hour glassing wolves feeding on what was left of an elk or antelope carcass the pack had killed the night before. It wasn’t more than a quarter mile from the road. The caravan pauses for a minute while a couple of people from our group silently glass the treelines for movement.

We pass the burned-out Soda Butte itself, a formation which names this valley and creek, go around a curve or two, and we are below Druid Peak, at the place where Soda Butte Creek flows into the Lamar River and snakes west through a broad valley.

Billie and I took a walk into the meadow here yesterday afternoon, hardly realizing that it was home turf for the Druid wolf pack, at 26 members the largest in the park since the reintroduction of wolves in 1994-’95 and now one of the most observed packs in the world. Their den is high above the road, several hundred yards away.

We learned on that walk that wildlife is plentiful here. We watched a badger in an area where the landscape was crawling with ground squirrels. An unfortunate squirrel was in the badger’s mouth as it walked the ridge eyeing us before disappearing in the short brush.

And we found a large, heavily eroded wallow next to a creek at an intersection of trails. The bark of the trees had been worn smooth by bear scratching that we recognized as similar to trees bear biologist Charles Jonkel showed us at Pine Butte Ranch in Montana last spring. It’s located at a busy

We don’t know if bears scratch trees to announce their presence, mark territory or for the same reason we love our backs scratched. But the trees at this crossroads were crawling with bear hair, and we weren’t more than a mile and a quarter from the road, though out of sight of vehicular park traffic.

But we never realized that every Druid wolf in the den area could, and no doubt did, watch us walking out and back to our car. Which is pretty cool, when you think about it.

Crabtree, who is near the end of a 12-year study of park coyotes, told us during his campfire talk last night that there might be as many as three litters of wolfpups up there in that den. Wolf packs usually only have one set of pups, that of the alpha female, but it’s just another of the many new things we’re learning about wolves as they repopulate the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Crabtree’s truck pulls over, and we all follow suit, get out and head up a steep trail to a location about 75 to 100 feet above the road that offers a great vantage point right above the spot where Soda Butte Creek runs into the Lamar, which then bends and stretches north and west into an immense, broad valley as it heads downriver toward its rendevous with the Yellowstone River.

As we set up and begin to watch, we can see a scattered herd of bison grazing and patches of antelope dispersed in the short grass.

There’s something else going on out there in the meadow, too. Crabtree comes over and sets the scope onto a carcass several hundred yards away. As our eyes become accustomed to the lenses, seven or eight wolves can be seen in the general area around the kill site.

The animals are exhibiting many of the same types of behaviors we saw yesterday morning at the Pebble Creek site. Individual wolves seem to be in a state of anxiety, eating, tearing at the meat, running around, biting and scratching, communicating with each other.

Some are just sitting or lying around, perhaps in the “meat drunk” state the canids enter after “wolfing down” large quantities of meat, their only real food source. Unlike bears, they are true carnivores.

Others are dispersed as much as a half mile from the kill, on the move, sniffing, urinating, running errands, performing their wolfpack duties. They’re interacting with each other in all kinds of ways. One male is trying, rather unsuccessfully, to mount a female.

But as we angle our glasses westward along the plains, we catch the unmistakable gait of something else moving toward the kill site. It’s a grizzly, the hump immediately and plainly visible. And two smaller versions scampering around it. The trio is perhaps two hundred yards from the carcass. No doubt led by that amazing sense of smell, it is a grizzly sow and her two offspring, from their size probably a year old already, maybe even in their second year. The cubs are playing with each other and bouncing around, and they’re heading in the same general direction as the trio we saw last night.

The situation changes rather quickly and dramatically in a very short time. About the time we spot the bears, the wolves at the kill pick up on them, too. Several head over toward the bears at a very high rate of speed, running in that loping style that’s deceptively fast. Soon they all leave the kill site.

Encountering the trio, they immediately begin circling. While the mother&cubs gather themselves together to evaluate their situation, I glass a couple of the straggler wolves, who are hightailing it to join the circle around the three bears.

Quick count: eight wolves; a female sow grizzly and two yearling cubs. At one point, there are bison and antelope, curiously indifferent to the encounter, as well as the bears and most of the wolves, in the ken of our scopes and glasses.

Can this possibly be happening? This part of Yellowstone has been compared to the Serengeti, the wild game preserve in Tanzania, in the richness of its wildlife and beauty of habitat, and we are in no position to argue.

As this curious life-and-death tango between two top predators begins, I’m thinking the wolves have a serious advantage. My sympathies immediately shift to those cubs and their situation, which doesn’t look promising.

The drama intensifies. The wolves continue to circle and stalk, charging occasionally, darting in and out and then backing off. But this doesn’t smack of the almost paramilitary teamwork often attributed to wolf packs. Sometimes, the wolves seem indifferent, walking away from the action, then just as suddenly charging and nipping.

The mother is tenacious. She charges individual wolves several times when they come in too close, once in a dash long enough to make my heart beat a couple of extra times when the bearlings are seemingly left to the whims of the rest of the pack. And the mother can’t seem to control one of the cubs, which is pretty tenacious itself. Two or three times it charges a wolf on its own, just enough to keep them away before backing off closer to mom.

They are too far away for us to hear, but we know from our McNeil experience that mom is no doubt making those scary popping and chuffing noises with her mouth. The wolves are squealing and barking and howling and snarling and yipping as they move in and out of the circle.

“Who’s benefiting from this encounter,” asks Bob Crabtree. A look over at the kill site, now just 50 yards from the bears and unattended, offers one answer: The ravens and other scavengers are getting an extra half hour at the carcass. Crabtree says you can bet there are coyotes hiding somewhere out there on the plain, keeping their distance from the wolves, hoping for their chance at the last pickings from the carcass, too.

I ask him about what’s going on inside their brains, and Crabtree says, “Give me one second inside there.” That would be something, but ’til then, he adds, we can only guess their intentions, and we’re limited by our own perceptions as humans.

The wolves continue to lose ground as the dance progresses ever-so-slowly toward the kill. I catch one wolf leaving the group, going back to the carcass and coming off with a big leg piece that has a chunk of flank attached. spinning it wildly in its mouth so that it hangs funny and throws the wolf off balance before disappearing into a swale of grass.

Crabtree suggests that the wolves could be yearlings themselves and perhaps learning or practicing their pack skills. They are probably low-level pack members, the last wolves at the kill. The alpha is not present. And many of the wolves, while interacting, have their tails down or between their legs, both which indicate submission. It’s the b-team, the scrubs.

It takes awhile, but the mother grizz moves ever closer to the kill, and then, in one motion, moves to take it over and immediately turns to face any wolf who wants to try and take it back. There are no takers, thank you, and the three bears tear into the remains.

Most of the canids immediately give up and head off after she takes the carcass, though a couple stretch out and settle in to watch the action. Most scatter into the timber or down the draw while the bears munch down.

There isn’t much left. After about twenty minutes, the bears head off upriver again and soon are lost to our sight as they head for the wallow where we found the bear hair yesterday afternoon. Hopefully, they spent some time there scratching and smelling our scents from yesterday and making their own marks over them.

Billie points to her watch. It’s five to eight.

Two federal wildlife agents were killed last Friday in a plane crash in Wayne County, Utah. The cause of the accident is pending, but the agents were engaged in killing coyotes from the air under a federal program.

That federal program, innocuously called Wildlife Services, in 2005 killed more than 27,000 animals from the air, and lesser numbers of bobcats, domestic cats, red foxes and wolves. All told, Wildlife Services kills several hundred thousand animals every year, in the guise of protecting ranchers and farmers from livestock losses.

That comes at a frightening cost. Since 1989, nine people have died and 34 more injured in helicopter or plane crashes while carrying out this grisly policy. “Aerial gunning is, as Wendy Keefover-Ring of Sinapu, says, “deadly business.” (Read Sinapu’s account of the accident here.

And it is deadly business that we are paying for with our taxes. Millions of dollars are spent every year indiscriminately killing animals and people in a sorry spiral of death.

Contrast that with the story of Stacey Scott, a rancher for more than 30 years in Natrona County, Wyoming, one of the aerial-gunning hotbeds. He has coyotes and fox, bobcats and mountain lions on his property, and many of his neighbors experience losses to coyotes. But he doesn’t shoot coyotes, and he doesn’t have a problem with them, either.

Here is the reason he gave the Star-Tribune in Casper (full story here):

The rancher said there is a direct correlation, a “cause and effect,” between pressures put on coyotes by ranchers, and how coyotes respond. Scott said most of his neighboring ranchers try “to shoot every coyote they see.” If a coyote population is regularly and systematically shot, trapped, gassed or blown up by ranchers and government trappers, the survivors respond with large litters of six to eight pups, he said.

This is the dirty secret about coyotes. The more of them we kill, the more they reproduce. As if to spit in the face of Wildlife Services, there are today more coyotes in the United States than there were when the Wildlife Services program began. And they enjoy a much wider range than ever, since they are more adaptive than humans.

Wildlife Services is a waste of our tax dollars based on a fraudulent premise. The only “service” it provides, for its own employees as much as animals, is death.

Billie & I celebrated our birthdays by spending a couple of days last week with the sandhill cranes on their migration north. We had never done it before, but we will do it again. Here is Part Two of my journal.

Monte Vista, Colorado

The moon rises over the Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge. Perfect weather to watch the sandhill cranes take off in the morning. (Click for larger image.)

Excited by last night’s expedition, Billie is up at 5:30, and we’re on the road about an hour later for the refuge, getting there about half an hour before actual dawn. We pull off the road at a turnout looking east just north of Road 8. You can see where we were last night across the field.

The red light just before sunrise over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains illuminates the cranes, silhouettes standing silently in water turned blood-red by the coming light. It is a gorgeous sight. As actual dawn approaches and waves of birds begin to take flight again, that peculiar energy level begins crackling. By 7:20, all 50 birds are gone, off in search of another field to pick through today.

Fossil records date cranes back millions of years, long enough to say it is the oldest-known surviving bird species. After that long, things certainly changed for the birds after irrigation ditches were built and farming in the valley became a reality. Birds destroyed crops and bird numbers steadily declined, leading to the creation of Monte Vista Refuge in 1952 and nearby Alamosa National Refuge on the Rio Grande ten years later.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife aggressively manages the wetlands refuge and the area around it, mostly through water-diversion rights, trying to keep a subtle balance between bird and landowner needs.

“Because of the importance of water to this region, water management on Monte Vista NWR is particularly important,” reads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife website. “Many irrigation canals built during the 1880s provide water to Monte Vista NWR and other valley water users. Water levels can be manipulated to provide birds with adequate aquatic vegetation for food and escape cover. To provide much of the wetland habitat on both refuges, water is distributed and manipulated by refuge staff through an extensive system of ditches, water control structures, dikes, and levees.”

I am forever skeptical of human efforts to control nature – our track record is atrocious bordering on lunatic — but the balance appears to be working here for the time being. Aubudon.org wrote in 2001: “Researchers have surveyed 171 miles of waterfowl nesting transects at the refuge complex two to three times a year since 1965. San Luis Valley and refuge-wide crane counts are conducted each spring and fall at peak migration.”

After breakfast in town, we’re back in the refuge; we can’t get enough of these birds. There are a couple of dirt roads in the refuge to explore. We find a few ducks in the wetlands on the road behind the headquarters buildings. We slowly drive a couple miles of dirt road farther east and watch a large hawk in a grove of trees for awhile; god, he looked lonely out there on his perch.

A couple of cars have pulled over up the road, so we join them and discover a large group of cranes in the high grass south of the road, their red heads bobbing up and down, their bodies occasionally rising vertically into the dance. It’s a nice way to see the birds interacting and feeding. Listen to the birds here.

These cranes are heading north. Many will nest in Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge in southern Idaho; others will settle in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Canada. Some are coming from Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico south of Santa Fe, others from as far away as northern Mexico.

The whole spectacle most resembles a crane Woodstock or a Burning Man festival. The birds love the wheat, barley and other grains in the fields around here, and apparently they bond here as well. Sandhill cranes bond for life with their mates, something I try to remember whenever we see two cranes flying together.

On our way out, we stop next to a bird perched on a telephone line singing a very distinctive song. We brought some Johnny Cash discs on the trip, and one contained his version of an old favorite, “Wichita Lineman,” and the Jukebox in my Head is playing, in Cash’s primordial voice, “I hear you singing through the wire.” Every thirty seconds or so, its song bursts and echoes through the rental car. Our bird book isn’t very intuitive, and we don’t figure out until later that it is the western meadowlark.

Watching all this is so easy. With a decent pair of binoculars, you can see a lot, and we know enough to stop when we see a few cars parked along the side of the road and people with cameras and binoculars. All the serious activity comes at two distinct times, the half hour around either end of sunrise and sunset, when the birds are taking off and landing.

And though we are here mid-week just a few days after the Crane Festival in Monte Vista, there are just a few other crane-watching cars in the entire refuge.

Not much to do in the daytime unless you want to see the Jack Dempsey Museum in Manassas, the Alligator Farm north of Alamosa or the Sand Dunes another thirty minutes from Alamosa. Pagosa Hot Springs is an hour over Wolf Creek Pass.

Wifi access has been exceptional and helpful. We have read a lot about the cranes. We are able to outline our travels in the refuge with Google maps, even zeroing in on the turnout where we saw all the birds last night.

Web information about birds is generally good. Most ornithological sites agree on crane particulars like size and wingspan, but there are some widely differing opinions about crane lifespans.

WildBirdsSuite: 20-25 years
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: 20 years
Cornell Lab of Ornithology: 20 years
National Geographic: 20
KildeerVirtualWetlandsPreserve: 18-24
IFWIS: 12-15 years
Everything.com: 7-20
Wildprairiestatepark: 12 years
Elmwood (Pa.) Park Zoo: 7 years
Animaldiversity: 7 years

Nobody disputes that the oldest crane ever documented in the wild died at 21.7 years, so the higher averages seem suspect. But who knows?

We got out to the refuge earlier than last night. As it was this morning, the wetlands on the road behind the headquarters buildings is bereft of cranes. So we head for the turnout where we saw so many birds last night. There are a few sandhills in front of us and a larger group much farther away.

The wind is up, and we decide to drive down the county road where we saw the meadowlark and some cranes in a field this morning.

Sure enough, the same group of cranes is spread out across the high grass. Getting out of the car, it’s just us and the birds in the middle of the refuge. We again get a chance to see them doing the ritual dance, although just for very short periods of time. At one point, their heads bob up at the sound of a coyote howling, soon joined by a chorus of his braying brethren. Soon the birds’ heads are back in the grass; they know better than us that the howls come from far away, and they probably also are aware more birds are killed by high wires than coyotes, anyway.

By 7:15, cranes are once again screeching and leaving en masse; large lines are snaking off in all directions. A group of about 50 takes off a couple hundred yards south and heads directly for us. They separate right in front of us. We can hear the precision beating of their wings, tuned like fine engines. It is easy to see their necks stretched out straight, a very un-crane action — all other cranes curve their necks when flying. One individual gets swept off-balance as it rises and bangs into the crane next to it.

Once again it is complete cacophony and energy for ten wonderful sunset minutes as flocks begin taking off. The excitement the birds show as they all get ready to take off, their stately majesty and the sounds they make as they start their nightly search for a wetlands is mightily contagious and seriously addictive. We will return to see these birds again.