Hola!

Hola from sunny Arizona!

We started out from Boise Monday morning in mist and snow, and roamed near Hagerman, Idaho, looking for cottonwood trees chock full of Bald Eagles. We found the tree, or the grove and yes, the limbs were festooned with Bald Eagles, looking to me like those Christmas cards painted with conifers decorated with candles. No, the eagles weren’t red and yellow—they were brown and white-headed—but the way they sat in those trees was ornamental.

The snow spit and the mist and fog shrouded everything south until we hit Jackpot on the Nevada-Idaho border and then the sun peeped out from behind sailing clouds and the farther south we drove under an ever more dazzling sun, the more snow we encountered on the ground. At Ely, the fresh snow was five or six inches deep.

Line Shack, Western Utah © Ken Rodgers 2014

From Ely we turned west over the edge of Great Basin National Park and then southeast through Baker and into Utah, across one valley after another, only three or four cars besides us in over eighty miles of big country. The wide, flat spaces between the mountain ranges reminded us of tundra and we must not have been too far wrong because on one road marker after another, the Rough-legged Hawks sat watching for prey, only to be alarmed by our coming, lifting off just before we arrived. Their escapes afforded glimpses of the black and white bands on their tails. We could see the white under-parts of the wings with the dark spots that reminded me of elbows. In winter, Rough-legged Hawks come south from the tundra of the north country.

The southwestern part of Utah has a lot of these big tundra-like flats and the snow cover made the sage look like it might collapse beneath the wet of the last storm. We passed juniper-dotted hills and line shacks and cattle, Ravens, Prairie Falcons and occasionally a Golden Eagle.

Zion Canyon © Ken Rodgers 2014

Yesterday we went through the southern part of Zion National Park on our way south from St. George to Phoenix. We hit the red cliffs as the sun came up and the colors were like tints pilfered from a painter’s palette.

Fresh snow was captured on the sheer cliffs of the cold sides. Once, we saw the winds sweep snow off a cliff, reminding me of gossamer garlands twisting in a breeze. It took us quite a while to drive the s-curves and tunnels of Utah Route 9 from the southwestern entrance to the eastern entrance of Zion. We snapped a lot of photos.

Up top, a bison herd filed by as we headed east. They rambled west below a pine-crested ridge foregrounded by a meadow full of fresh snow.

Just before Kanab on US Highway 89 we encountered a road closure so we had to turn a one-eighty north through the small communities of the upper Virgin River Valley, and at Glendale learned we could take a detour around that road closure. I had my doubts, but the folks at the local post office assured Betty that we could conquer whatever obstacles the road threw at us. It was rough and unpaved and luckily frozen or we’d have hauled a load of Utah red mud all the way to Arizona.

Vermilion Cliffs © Ken Rodgers 2014

We motored by the Vermilion Cliffs in the Arizona Strip. We have been there many times before but “can’t not” come and stop if we are anywhere close. As Betty says, “They are majestic.” And yes they are vermilion, and red and rust and yellow and purple depending on light and the rocks’ mineral content. We also stopped at nearby Navajo Bridge at Marble Canyon looking for California Condors, but the wind was feisty and nothing moved except the humans, what few passed by pulling livestock trailers. The Navajo ladies at the bridge selling painted gourds and turquoise bracelets braved the lusty lashes of the winds inside the cabs of their pickups, Led Zeppelin pulsing through the floorboards.

Marble Canyon from Navajo Bridge © Ken Rodgers 2014

We then turned south towards Phoenix, and saguaro and ocotillo and jumping cactus. On Interstate 17 just north of Phoenix at New River, a familiar mountain reared up just to the west. I said to Betty, “I can remember looking at that mountain as a kid and thinking we had so far to go.”

That was when my mother and I went south from Flagstaff, where my older sister went to college, towards our home in Casa Grande, south of the Valley of the Sun.

But now the years have sped up and the trips have too, what was long and arduous and never ending passes by us almost before we can enjoy it.

On Raptors, Rattlesnakes and Environmentalists

For the last several months my wife Betty and I, along with our friend and bird watcher extraordinaire Leanne Lloyd-Fairey, have helped conduct a raptor watch for the Oregon, southwestern Idaho and southern Washington region. A lot of people are involved in this effort and we are a small cog in the machine that makes the survey work.

We have our own route, one we have surveyed in December, January, February and which we will survey in March. It’s about fifty miles in length and basically runs in the country north of Emmett, Idaho and west, bordered by the Payette River on the South and the foothills to the north.

I will probably insult someone here but just for those who don’t know, raptors are birds that hunt other living creatures. Hawks and falcons and eagles are raptors. But ravens are not and we often wonder why ravens are not since they are consummate hunters. Maybe it’s because they are more omnivorous than eagles. They eat bread and crack walnuts by dropping them on the pavement from thirty feet in the air. I doubt the things that differentiate ravens and their corvid relatives from raptors are as simple as diet. In our survey, owls are also raptors, but some of the bird books stick owls off by themselves.

Regardless, we usually get in our Honda and head north out of Boise about dawn and begin our route not long after the sun shows up. All of our route is in rural areas where they farm or raise livestock. There are some tree farms and a small taxidermist and slaughter house facility. There are some rural churches, some feedlots, a rural meeting place and dance hall, a school.

It has been a dry year in Idaho and most of what we have seen is the regulars, red tail hawks and kestrels. Each month it’s a battle between the two to see who is most populous. Red tails are large buteos that are shaped kind of like a football. They like to sit in the tops of trees and then soar and hunt from the air. Kestrels are small falcons that generally sit on telephone wires looking down for something very small to eat, an insect (but probably not in winter) or some small vertebrate. When I see kestrels sitting up there on the wire they remind me of old monks sitting on a stage looking down on their congregation, judging each. Kestrels are beautiful things, russet and blue with masks that are in some form, common on many falcons. Though visually attractive, these small birds are ferocious hunters.

This last go around, in February we saw a number of red tail hawks on or near the nest and even spotted a pair of dark morphs nest-building in a cottonwood tree in a marshy draw loaded with pheasants and quail. It was news to me, but evidently, to see two dark morphs on a single nest is unusual.

We also saw our first eagles of the survey, a golden eagle flying west over the foothills and a bald eagle flying west down river. We also saw a lot of northern harriers. Some people call them marsh hawks, and they do hunt over marshes but they also like to kite and sail and flit low over farm ground and pasture. The males were all out doing a harrier aerial dance, I suppose to impress the females. Not unlike most of the rest of us males in that regard.

I have always had an affinity for raptors and was trying to figure them out long before I got interested in watching birds of a different feather, to steal an overworked metaphor. Other than raptors the only birds I was interested in were the kind I could shoot. Wild turkeys, pheasants, quail, chukkar, dove, wild pigeons.

Although Betty and I began trying to identify individual bird species many years back, I usually pigeon-holed bird watchers in with environmentalists. For years environmentalists were my enemy mostly because I toiled in some aspect of the ag economy and we were often engaged in combat—intellectual, ethical and political—with the early environmental movement. I wouldn’t call myself an environmentalist now, but I do wonder why we need to wipe out large numbers of species so that we aren’t obliged to alter our consumption behavior.

When I reckon on my past, I believe it was early on when I was still submerged in the high times of cattle and sheep that I might have begun to fathom that killing for fun and profit might not always be the best thing for the planet and inevitably for humans.

I was out hunting with my friends and colleagues, Robert and Ed Moser. We had just finished killing our limits of Gambel’s quail out south of Arizona City, Arizona in the Sonoran Desert. The country is flat there, with wide sweeps running up to jagged peaks that erupt out of the plains. There was a lot of mesquite and grease wood and Indian wheat and fillaree and the year had been wet and there had been three hatches of young quail and the hunting was fantastic.

We shared a six-pack of Coors and smoked cigarettes and, flushed with the thrill of the kill, admired the winter sun as it shone its low light across the flats, beaming over the northern shoulder of the Silver Reef Mountains on the Papago Indian Reservation to our west.

As we loaded up our weapons and cleaned up our mess, we spotted a small diamondback rattlesnake lying not far from where we had been killing our quail and killing our Coors. We went over to bother it with a stick. It tried to escape but looked like it had been run over by our, or someone’s, truck tire. For some reason, we did not kill that snake. We let it live. I don’t know if our relenting was caused by some sort of pity because it was damaged. I was always raised that if you saw a rattlesnake, you killed it. So I doubt it was pity. I suspect it was something more akin to an early recognition that everything has a right to live. And it just wasn’t me, it was my hunting buddies who seemed to feel the same way.

Since then, over the years, and there have been thirty-three of them, I have slowly come to understand that varieties of life convey value to our existence. I am not averse to hunting (like raptors and rattlesnakes, we are predators), to ranching, to farming, to energy exploitation, I just think it needs to be done with an eye to something besides money.

As for that maimed snake I didn’t kill. I suspect a blue darter or Harris hawk or some other raptor finished it off and consumed it, so that predator bird could continue on doing what it does.

Cowboy Reggae on the Road to Elko

Scattered clouds that reminded me of lace, of lenses, of mackerel backs dodged the sun and swamped the tops of mountains. Scattered patches of ice gave way to spots of snow, then as we ascended into the Owyhee highland country, snow masked the bottoms of sagebrush.

We climbed out of the Snake River Valley and up to Grasmere where a herd of pronghorns galloped west, then east, then stopped and watched us as the sun lit up their shiny white rumps. They looked like bright lights.

Pronghorn at Grassmere

On the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Reservation, caballos stopped foraging and watched us as we sped by towards the towns of Owyhee and Mountain City and on into the Owyhee River Canyon. Dark red willows, orange-yellow willows loomed over patches of ice and patches of dark water peopled with mallards and buffleheads.

Duck Valley Caballos

Halfway between Mountain City and Wild Horse Reservoir a golden eagle sat on top of a pinnacle of rock and fought off a persistent wind. We stopped below but he acted more interested in keeping balance on his perch than on the photography we attempted.

Owyhee Canyon Eaqle

Ice fishermen on snow machines made patterns on the reservoir and sat on their perches as we drove on and turned into the long high plain that drains off into the Humboldt River. The clouds reminded me of cotton swabs cleansing the tops of the mountains between us and Tuscarora and the Spanish Ranch.

View from Highway 255: The Road to Elko

In Elko, we checked into the Esquire Inn and then went to dinner. Later we attended a show by the Ronstadt Generation, members of the famous Tucson musical tribe. Two guitars and a cello; one father, two sons. The father can warble. The emphasis this year at Elko and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering turns on the southwest, so we tapped our feet and kept time with our hands to cowboy tunes, ballads and lullabies sung in Spanish. We heard jazz and blues with Woodie Guthrie tunes thrown in. In a Paul Simon piece with a strong sense of reggae, the cello sounded like the steel drums one would hear on the streets of Jamaica.

I didn’t want to go to the show, but I am glad I did. From “Malagueña” to Muddy Waters, and “Sixteen Tons” with a cello solo. Vavoom!