The Halfway Point

Tomorrow marks the halfway point of my work here in Wyoming. I will have worked at the BLM for 2.5 months, and thus will only have 2.5 months left! Looking back it seems as if the time has gone by quickly, but when I look forward, it feels like I have a long way to go.

Lately, work has seemed to be rolling along at a strange pace, somewhere inconsistently between too fast and too slow. I've been out checking raptor nests this week. After the labor of tracking down landowner's phone numbers and making countless (many of which were unsuccessful) calls, I managed to start visiting the nests in earnest. I mentioned last week the difficulty finding the correct nest location amidst a endless sea of grass, sage, and unmarked two-track roads. This week was no exception.

The great thing about finding nests is that they're almost always in live cottonwood trees. Cottonwoods, as you might imagine, really stick out in a prairie landscape. Unless the hills become particularly steep, it's generally easy to pick out trees. They almost always grow in drainages and draws, and are usually very tall.

The not-so-great things about finding nests is that they're nearly all in Niobrara county, more than 70 miles south of here, and they're infrequently near roads. The roads I need to be on in order to get somewhat close to a nest are a tangled mess of overgrown and under-used two-tracks that are 1) generally on private land, 2) often near houses which may or may not be occupied by suspicious and/or unhappy landowners, 3) poorly maintained, 4) washed out in several locations due to recent rains, and 5) nearly impossible to navigate.

So this week, I worked on having faith. Faith in the tolerance of landowners, faith in my navigational abilities, faith in the shocks on the Durango, faith in the universe. Sometimes my faith seemed misplaced, particularly when I was trying to find a turn off a county road. I'm fortunate enough to have access to decent maps, courtesy of the BLM, as well as a rudimentary working knowledge of GIS (or Geographic Information Systems), an information database and map-making program which has a myriad of cool features and uses.

GIS will get me a self-made map showing some roads, which I can lay over a satellite photo. Only some of the roads have been recorded on our GIS program, most of them highways, county roads, and oil-well access roads. The satellite photos help (somewhat) in finding the other roads (the mess of two-tracks on which I need to drive), because they're often visible from the sky. The problem is that cow trails, certain drainages, and dried-out creek beds also look like roads from the sky. So I may plan out a route to access a nest only to find (after spending half an hour trying to find a nonexistent two-track) that my route was based mostly on cow trails, and that I'll have to hike the additional two miles from the county road.

Then there's the opposite side, wherein I spend half an hour trying to find a two-track, decide there must not be one, and hike the additional two miles in only to find that there was a two-track, but that it's infrequently used and thus has become overgrown and difficult to see from the county road.

Such is life.

Ultimately, this week has been a mix of good and bad. Ferruginous hawks, golden eagles, northern harriers, loggerhead shrike, a pronghorn mother with triplets, deer, and an incredibly rare sighting of five bull elk out on the prairie. On the bad side lies the incredible challenge of finding my way around, the long distance between the field office in Newcastle and the nests I have to find, and two gorgeous coyotes I happened across on BLM land that had been shot and killed by a sheep rancher.

Additionally, I told Dwayne I'd have the nests all checked and my surveys of prairie dog colonies finished before the 1st of September, which puts me on a tight schedule. I initially wanted to check six or seven nests a day, but with the challenges of navigation I've fallen short. I've had to work three 10+ hours days just to visit the first 15.

What it all boils down to is this: the last five days (last Friday, and then this Monday through today) I've worked anywhere from 10 to 11 hours each day. The last three days (since this Tuesday), the weather has been hot, with temperatures of 94, 94, and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot becomes hotter when hiking around the prairie all day, where shade is virtually nonexistent. My nerves are frayed from hours spent trying to find a single tree in a sea of sage. And I'm tired of driving 140 miles or more round-trip to get to the BLM land in Niobrara county.

I so badly felt in need of a break today that I decided to go grousing. I generally go after sage-grouse on Fridays, but today I couldn't convince myself of a good reason to wait. It's amazing how palliative grousing can be. It's incredibly familiar, requires no navigation (since I memorized the routes long ago), occurs far closer to the office than nest checks, and can be very rewarding. Even moreso today, as I finally found one of my two lost females, a hen I haven't located for nearly a month and a half. Although I'm still missing a grouse, I found four of five today, a far better score than I've achieved previously.

I was feeling so good when I got back to the office this afternoon that I decided to keep the streak going and take tomorrow off. I haven't had a day off in almost two months, and working long hours I've accumulated more than five days-worth of flex time. So this evening when I left work I borrowed a movie from the library, came home, walked Capone, ordered that pizza I've been craving since last Thursday, took a shower, and crashed on the couch. Tomorrow I'll sleep in, relax, and work with the rats. Who knows... maybe I'll even take the camera out somewhere or hit up the black hills for a hike.

I hope you all are doing well.