They’re letting me do it. Well, Frank is — even after he corrected my final Bird Quiz and scored it 25/40. I mistook Say’s phoebe singing for killdeer. We’ve heard Say’s phoebe a lot during training. Frank was easygoing about it. In our last conversation he showed me a GPS “trail of breadcrumbs” he made last season that should help me route-find on an infamous backpacking survey I’ll do in June. Nothing about birds. He trusts me. Or needs me.
I took a break from the birds that afternoon. Since the first morning of training I’d been listening to recordings even while driving. The exhaustion from being on edge for the past 72 hours broke like a wave. I scraped a drunk frat boy’s car while backing out of a freaking grocery store parking spot and it was completely my fault. (I saw that he was drunk when he emerged from his vehicle for my insurance information, 250 pounds of slack flesh.) First car accident I’ve ever been in. I need to just move past the self blame and anxiety and frustration because there’s nothing I can change and too much else to think about.
I slept in the car at a pronghorn viewing area on a quiet road east of Denver. I’m glad I didn’t notice the “open dawn to dusk” sign until morning. On top of my bird worries, I’ve been anxious about finding a camping spot near the metropolis.
Today I did my first surveys by myself, in the southwest corner of an air force base near Denver where I’ll cover a 159-point grid over the next few weeks. I’m sure I didn’t hear everything, but I knew most of what I heard. WEME’s (Western meadowlark, ubiquitous here) make a sound that seems indistinguishable from a CHSP (chipping sparrow). There were a few confusing sparrows today. I need to field-learn their songs, not just the Larkwire ones I’ve been using. A moment of pride was piecing together a VESP (vesper sparrow) ID. Also a COYE (common yellowthroat) song – I concluded that sometimes they reduce their 3-syllable uneven-wheel sound to 2. There were about 3 or 4 (or 5) sounds the whole time that I heard clearly but that stumped me, so I didn’t write anything down for them.
I’m so tired. Hope I find a rhythm – I haven’t even tried the data entry side of this job yet. It is beautiful here, though. Dream well, sleep deep, see you in 8 hours.
