Rolling like thunder

Ok, it’s been a ridiculously long time since I’ve posted anything, much less some new content.  But I’m finally getting caught up with various writing and recording projects so it’s time to get back in the blogging game. Like everyone else, my schedule was turned upside down by Covid-19.  I work from home and I’m fairly anti-social by nature, so it didn’t affect my day to day living much, but it wrecked my springtime recording schedule.  One big trip I had planned down to the Mexican border was cancelled.  And with stay at home orders in place, it was hard to know if it was safe or advisable to go camping in the hinterlands to collect recordings.  On one hand, social distancing wouldn’t be a problem, as I am usually miles from the nearest other people.  On the other hand, if my 21-year-old micro-camper broke down, I might be exposing myself or others to the virus when I went somewhere for repairs. 

Finally I ventured out at the start of June, staying within a day’s drive from home, and only approaching civilization to refuel the car. Although I stayed mostly in the Great Basin, where I’ve recorded many times before, I decided to try to visit only new places this time.  For the most part, that was the case, even though sometimes that was just a campsite down the road from where I’ve stayed before.  The late start meant I missed some of the early bird breeding behavior at lower elevations, but that was also coupled with a really dry winter.  So I did pick up a number of new bird songs this summer, but overall, activity seem a bit low to me.  But I have plenty of interesting recordings to share, which I will do in the coming weeks and months.

A couple of weeks ago, I headed north, and a little further from home than I have been so far all summer.  I spent about 5 days at various spots in the Warner Mountains of northeastern California and southern Oregon, plus a night near the Gearhart Wilderness west of Lakeview Oregon, and finally spent the last night at the Sheldon Wildlife Refuge in northern Nevada.   I camped at Fish Springs; a spot I also visited last year, but earlier in the season.  I was curious what birds might still be around and singing, but primarily, I was there to do some astrophotography.  That part of Nevada has wonderful dark skies and is a great place to view and photograph the stars. 

It was just past the full moon, so I would have  at most a couple of hours after the sunset and before the moon rose to get good dark skies.  There were a couple of meteor showers occurring at the time, so I was hoping to be able to get some shots of shooting stars. But my short window of darkness was stolen by a thunderstorm that rolled in early in the afternoon and stayed until sunset.  The clouds were still hanging around as the moon rose (enough to block the moonrise).  So no meteor shower for me.  This was the leading edge of the violent spate of thunderstorms that caused a huge outbreak of wildfires in California. I’ve also been practicing my time-lapse photography lately, and I’ve been wanting to combine a time-lapse video with simultaneous audio.  This is pretty tricky, as the video is made from shots taken over a long time span, so the audio has to be mixed carefully to cover the same span.  A thunderstorm seemed to be an ideal time to see if this would work.  I was able to get a couple of hours of time-lapse photos, plus about 5 hours (not continuous) of audio during the storm.  I don’t have the proper gear to leave my camera out in the rain, so the photography stopped when it really started raining.  I was able to get some audio of the rain by putting the mics under my camping table, but it also picked up the pings off the car. 

Many of the sagebrush specialist birds were still around – the sagebrush sparrows, sage thrashers, and Brewer’s sparrow, but were not singing much at all.  The dawn chorus was pretty bland and mostly drowned out by wind.  I had hoped to hear some sage grouse, but no such luck.  But hours worth of great thunderstorm audio made the trip worth it.