It’s a windy sunny evening at Lake Pueblo, where this summer’s field techs have gathered for training. Several days of rain are on the way. Country music bounces over from the next campsite: “Your love is moooney, your love is moooney! Your love can make a man feel rich on minimum wage!” In my head I’m both laughing at it and smiling at it, missing L.
Today was my longest day in a while. My scariest, too. They go together. Nothing worthwhile that’s not intimidating. “These people have supernatural bird abilities,” I texted L. I think it was Frank Luntz who said to only take jobs that scare you, but that mantra might as well have come from my subconscious. The question remains, can I learn fast enough to do it? I’m on my own in 3 days. This morning freaked me out.
The five of us met between our cars at 0530 and were practicing a point count in short order. On the vegetation (“veg”) sheet I wrote “N” for the first 5 questions — we’re not on private property, no midstory, no cliffs, no prairie dog towns or prairie dogs — but is there cheatgrass around? I must have spent days of my life uprooting cheatgrass in Sisters in 2019, but I couldn’t conjure up its image. The next spaces on the sheet were to record the five most common tree and shrub species within 50 meters. I looked around, scribbled question marks. Then, “everyone ready?” — and Frank beeped his timer to start our six minute bird count. Clicking rangefinders, racing pencils, and a deeply disturbing amount of hidden bird noise. As I racked my brain for any sound I recognized from Larkwire, trying to appear like I was merely struggling with the 4-letter codes we were supposed to write instead of species’ full names, I realized I’d never held, seen, or even heard of a rangefinder before.
After the six minutes were over we went over what we’d written. The trees all around were juniper. The shrubs were juniper (under 3 meters) and saltbush and skunkbush and rabbitbrush and yucca. That last one really hit me. I thought I knew yucca!!! When the bird prodigy gestured towards where he’d spotted it, I furiously-surreptitiously scoured the area to no avail. I was so busy writing down everything to study that it wasn’t hard to keep my participation to a minimum. But 3 points later, the thing I dreaded came to pass. Frank turned to me and said “Why don’t you tell us what you have?” I reached out and grasped the (true) excuse that I’d gotten tripped up trying to notate a group of about 50 swallows that appeared in the middle of the count. After a few seconds someone else volunteered: “In the first minute, I had Bullock’s oriole, canyon towhee, Audubon’s warbler — there was that curlew that flew over — lazuli bunting, Western kingbird ….” For the record, I had Western kingbird on my paper too, even though I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it before this morning.
Later I caught Frank alone. “I feel like I should tell you I’m concerned because it is pretty clear to me that I have much less experience than everybody else, especially in Colorado, especially birding by ear. I really want to do this. But I’ve only been getting about half as many ID’s as you guys.” We sat down at the campsite picnic table and he told me about the time he felt, and was, unprepared for a bird guiding gig in Brazil. He did it anyway and ended up fine. I like Frank.
Laid out in the back of my Jeep, I tapped through bird sounds on Larkwire and drifted off with a prayer. God, please work something wonderful in my brain as I sleep, and please help me make more ID’s tomorrow.
Into the breach.
