Back in the middle of May, I packed up my car and my dog and headed east to meet up with some friends in South Dakota. Lang Elliott and Beth Bannister were heading west from New York state to get some prairie sound recordings, beginning in Kansas, moving west to eastern Colorado, then heading north to western Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Saskatchewan. Originally, I had planned on meeting them in eastern Colorado, but right before I was to leave, I came down with Covid. Luckily, it was a relatively mild case, although it didn’t feel like it at the time, and only set me back a week. But it meant I missed the eastern Colorado and Nebraska portions of the trip, so I planned on meeting them somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
This trip included two major changes from my previous recording trips – a new car and a new dog. Although my 1999 CR-V is still running well, with 305,000 miles on it I was becoming uncomfortable with the possibility of a catastrophic breakdown far from home. So, after a ridiculous number of hours researching a replacement SUV, I finally settled on a 2018 Nissan Rogue. I picked it up just a couple of weeks before leaving on the trip, so it was a mad rush to turn it into a camper. I will detail the changes I made later, but the big one was removing the back seats and building a low platform to provide a flat sleeping place and storage. Much of this I did while suffering from a high fever with Covid, and I actually have very little memory of building the platform. Surprisingly, it came out very well, and the slight increase in cargo area compared to the CR-V made it very comfortable to sleep in.
The second change was a new dog. After Shadow’s passing last August, I knew I would get another dog. I wanted a young dog, but not a real young puppy, as that would have meant the pup would have been around 9-10 months old for this trip, and I didn’t want to worry about having all my gear chewed up. I started checking with rescue organizations in the area, and immediately heard back from a rescue organization in Reno about a dog named Caddie. She was described as a cattle dog-German shepherd cross about 5 years old, and well-trained and super sweet to everyone. I drove up to Reno to meet her, and although she was a bit barky at first, I decided to give her a try. I found myself on the other end of the leash of a very reactive dog, who lunged, barked, and growled at anything that looked like a human or dog or large vehicle. I expressed my concerns to her foster with the rescue organization, but she reassured me that she would settle down. She did not, and when they finally sent her paperwork along, I found out she was 10 years old, not 5. Months and months of training followed, along with high doses of pharmaceuticals. She is much better now but I still have a way to go before I can take her for a hike or camping without worrying about her freaking out at the sight of another dog. On familiar ground, she (now called Sage because she’s gnarly and aromatic) is a great dog, calm and affectionate, obedient and respectful. But she gets quite anxious in new situations. Luckily, she adapted to camping right away although she wasn’t thrilled having other people around at campgrounds.
So, I headed east on May 20 with an untested car and an untested dog. We headed to eastern Nevada, to a nice campground called Cleve Creek, NE of Ely. I’ve camped and recorded there before. It has a permanent stream cascading down from the mountains, with a rich cottonwood gallery shading the campground. It’s one of the few places in Nevada where I’ve recorded Yellow-breasted Chats. Most of the times I’ve been there has been in early July, so I wanted to take the opportunity to record there earlier in the year to see what was around.
By the time we arrived at the campground, it was cloudy and windy, an unfortunate harbinger for the rest of the trip. The clouds thickened as darkness approached, so I decided to keep my recording gear in and hope for better conditions in the morning. The wind died and the clouds thinned out before dawn, so I got up at first light and set out my microphones then went back to bed. About an hour and half later, I rolled out of my comfy bed, and Sage (who slept very quietly in the car) and I went for a walk with the tail-end of the dawn chorus twittering through the trees with the rush of the stream in the background.
The sound was a bit different than recorded in early July, some years earlier.
The more subtle recording in May might reflect that it is a bit early for the breeding birds, or they were just recovering from a cold, windy night. I recorded more bird species in May 2024 than in July 2012, but some of those may have been migrants just passing through, or they might have been present in July 2012, but not singing as much due to their stage in the breeding cycle. It’s really hard (and dangerous) to draw any conclusions from two brief recordings but I was happy to hear both Yellow-breasted Chats and Bullock’s Orioles in both recordings.
After breakfast, we hit the road again, on a long breezy trip across Utah. I had planned on staying in the Uintah Mountains, but the clouds descended and it started snowing as we drove over the pass. So, I drove down to Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and found a sheltered, unexciting camping spot in a parking lot near a marina. With a busy highway up above, I opted not to even try recording.
The next day, more clouds and high winds across Wyoming. I had planned on staying at Thunder Basin National Grassland, but didn’t relish a night of high winds rocking the car. So, I drove across the South Dakota border, to the base of the Black Hills, and that’s where I’ll pick up the next installment.