Wow, where did the summer go? It seems like just yesterday I was waking up to some lovely dawn choruses and now many of the birds have already migrated south. With breeding season over, even most of the resident birds have quieted down, so the steppe and woods surrounding my home are much quieter now.
It was a busy summer. I had a lot of home repairs and home renovating to do, but I did get out on a number of recording trips. I focused on the Great Basin, particularly the northern and western portions. I was trying to get some decent recordings of the suite of bird species that use or are dependent upon sage steppe habitats.
In early June, I stopped by Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Nevada. When I arrived, I chose a campsite on the edge of the campground, with a large patch of sagebrush next to it. I spent the afternoon and evening recording at the marsh, but set up to record the dawn chorus from camp. Surprisingly, the only sagebrush birds singing were western meadowlarks and spotted towhees (neither closely tied to sagebrush). So late the next morning, on my way to a small mountain range in Idaho, I stopped by the far northeast corner of the refuge. There I found a couple of Brewer’s sparrows and a sage thrasher singing their hearts out:
Big sagebrush habitat on Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.
I was especially thrilled to hear the sage thrasher. Although I’ve seen a number of them in the Great Basin, I hadn’t heard any. I guess much like curve-billed thrashers, they quit singing once nesting gets underway. Brewer’s sparrows typically sing a short song during the day, leaving their long-drawn out trills and buzzes to dawn and dusk. But in this case, it was late morning when I found these songsters, so it must have been prime breeding season.
Several weeks later, I headed for Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, to get away from 4th of July crowds, enjoy some beautiful night skies, and see what birds were singing in the sage. In addition to Brewer’s sparrows and sage thrashers, gray flycatchers and vesper sparrows were in the area. The first night I was there was windy, so I stayed 2 nights to try to catch a decent, “sagey” dawn chorus. On the second night, I set up one set of mics to run from the car, and another set near a spring about a half a mile from camp.
The dawn chorus began just as the first hint of light was on the horizon, so the Brewer’s sparrows, gray flycatchers, and meadowlarks joined the poorwills and nighthawks:
Camp in the wide open sage steppe at Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge.
Things were even more raucous at the spring. I had attached a set of fur-covered mics to an old fence post. They were assaulted several times during the night, but I couldn’t tell if it was by predators or birds attacking what they thought might be a predator. A pronghorn and fawn paused at the spring to drink (verified by tracks in the morning). A sage grouse hen and her chicks flew in and the recorder picked up their very unique vocalizations. I haven’t been able to find any other examples of these sounds online, but I knew what they were because a year earlier I ran into a hen and her chicks crossing a road not far from this spot, and pulled over to take photos. They were making this same vocalization:
Fledgling sage thrashers were everywhere, and with nesting over, the sage thrashers were very quiet. I find it interesting what beautiful singers these sage birds are, yet how plainly they are marked. All of them are quite plain and brown or gray. They are also quite shy, and dart into the sage at the sign of any danger. The gray flycatcher must take the award for the most boring bird, with it’s almost uniform gray-brown coloring (albeit with mild wing bars) and monotonous “chirrup” call.
After a couple of days of recording at Sheldon, I headed over to the Santa Rosa Mountains. Neither area has much in the way of trees, although the Santa Rosas have aspens along the streams. I felt an unease coming over me and realized I needed the comfort of the forest again. So with the songs of the sage winding down for the season, I focused my efforts for the rest of the summer on the conifer forests in and around the Great Basin.