Rocky Mountain National Park: The Alpine

After leaving Upper Beaver Meadows, we lurked upslope on Trail Ridge Road, past the treeline and into the alpine. A great deal of this special, hard-to-access habitat is there for your enjoyment in Rocky Mountain National Park. Though the crowds were not a surprise (we first got there in the afternoon), they were still a bummer, but the scenery and wildflowers were awesome.

The birding up here is not necessarily thrilling...its mostly American Pipits and Horned Larks, with the occasional raven and commuting hummingbird. I did see my only Rufous Hummingbird of the trip zip past up here, as well as a subadult Bald Eagle soaring over Lava Cliffs.

Quickly you get used to seeing fat, slothful marmots scattered around, but if you loiter around rocky outcrops, you can find one of the most prized wildlife species of these areas...Pikas! Pikas, as you surely know already, are unique, endearing and hard to see...not because they are elusive or super rare, but because most of us don't happen to live someplace with Pikas nearby. With so much greenery and a cornucopia of flowers in bloom, we arrived during the brief window of easy living for alpine species.

A great many of these luscious yellow paintbrush flowers were beautifying the slopes above treeline.

Everywhere you looked was covered in an array of blossoms. Spectacular.

Cushiony moss campion hugged the ground closely.

Tall chiming-bells and Mountain Bluebirds appear to be cut from the same cloth.

Right before we were about to leave Rock Cut Trail, I decided to cross the street to take a couple scenery shots. The scenery, I was surprised to find, was dominated by this Bighorn Sheep...lifer! It's not often I get lifer megafauna, and I had waited a long time to see one of these. Look how fucking majestic and pastoral this shit is. Downright bucolic.

This ram was super mellow and unconcerned with the handful of tourists who had noticed him, Yellowstone style. Great looks at this sheep, I could not have asked for anything more.

However, my sheeping was interrupted by a Pika running around directly beneath me. I crushed it unapologetically.

So cute it makes me want to throw up.

After the first bighorn wandered off, another appeared on the ridge. Dazzling mammals and crippling views up there.

After deserting the high-elevation mammal outpost, we pulled over at the Lava Cliffs for another target bird. After a short wait, Brown-capped Rosy-Finches started appearing on and next to the snow banks as promised. I have no photos to document this birding victory, so you'll have to take my word that connecting with this species again was good times. I had only seen them once before, and thanks to geribirding (thanks, geribirding) I had not seen a rosy-finch of any sort away from a feeder since 2010. Several more were present here the next day as well.

The Alpine Visitor Center was a complete and total clusterfuck, yeesh. In the midst of the tourist zoo, Mountain Bluebirds had a nest that appeared to be on the verge of successful fledging, despite the bizarre location. Both the male and female dropped by with food deliveries while we were there.

Both birds paused briefly on this beam, casting judgement on the tourists below, before flying to the nest.

The nest, crammed full of big chicks, was humorously built in a hole in the wall outside of the women's bathroom. Interesting approach.

After ditching the visitor's center, I figured some loitering on the trail at Medicine Bow Curve was in order, after all this is the best place in the park for White-tailed Ptarmigan, and Felonious Jive (The Great Ornithologist) always says "Middle of day is best time to make for birding good". I don't know why he talks like that, but he is rarely wrong. The smattering of elk next to the trail were hard to ignore, especially while standing on ridges with epic backdrops.

We dipped on ptarmigan that afternoon (no surprise), but would return early in the morning the next day to punish ourselves again. Sorry I only posted photos of one bird species today, that is super weird, things will be different next time around.

Sierra Bravo In The Sierras

The state list is often an important list, when you have been birding for a long time.  After it becomes difficult to get lifers on a regular basis without travelling absurd distances, the birder begins to realize the beauty of pursuing lists other than the all-important List of Life. It is another shot in the arm, a reminder to seek birds besides those that one has never seen. And so, the state list often becomes the second-tier list, a worthy list...even a source of pride for many people (how embarrassing). In many ways, I am no different than the average birder, although I am much better at finding and identifying birds (#7, hello).  I keep a state list.  My state list is very important to me. It's so important that I have seen most birds that regularly occur in the state, which is hella. It's hard to get state birds now, which is why I now squeeze joy out of life by seeing county birds.  I know...how embarrassing...

But county birding is not why we are here...sorry to disappoint you nerds. When I was approached by one Amy Patten to make a quick, two day run to the Eastiern Sierra, I jumped at the chance. The Eastern Sierra is a special place, and I have a long and twisted history with the place known as Lee Vining. I am forced to keep going back, though it typically results in hangovers, and usually much yelling.  And although I'm sure you would like to hear more about the Yelling Club, that is not what I thought of when this opportunity came to be.

I thought of rosy-finches.

Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch has been the low-hanging, visually delicious fruit that I have been eyeing for years now. And by low-hanging, I mean they hang over 9,000 feet for a good piece of the year. In California, rosy-finches do not live where people live, so one must travel far (and wide) to seek them out. It turns out there are exactly two (2) places in the state where you can find a rosy-finch, with great ease, without having to embark on a high-elevation death march...or in my case, more like a wheezing walk that is a grim reminder of how out of shape I am and an all too real glimpse of my own mortality.

So after a night of drinking next to Lee Vining Creek, talking baseball with the Grub, and getting shitty morning coffee in Lee Vinging, it was up to Virginia Lakes for rosy-finching. The rosy-finches were mellow, despite their outward brilliance (look at those hot pink wings!).  Lounging on the deck of the store of the Virginia Lakes Resort, it was just a brief wait before this crippling beast came in for seed gobbling. The proprietors of the resort feed birds with reckless abandon, and a few rosy-finches come down from rocky slopes to gorge themselves on the regular.  The lady behind this operation told us that one in particular waits for her outside the door early every morning "and hovers around like a [goddamn] harrier" before she can even get the seed out, which appeared to be somewhat true...when someone came out on the porch where the seed was, instead of flying away sometimes this bird would just hover a few feet away and wait for the person to go back inside. So if you need an easy rosy-finch and enjoy some good geri birding, head up to Virginia Lakes.

For the first time since the Common Scoter, my state list has grown even more swollen and bloated. Sierra bravo! New Lower 48 bird! Lifer subspecies! Great success!

Rosy-finches weren't the only things taking advantage of the seed bonanza. Cassin's Finches were one of the most common birds there, which I was pretty stoked on. I've never seen so many so close before, and I have now rectified my chronic problem of not crushing Cassin's Finches. The cycle has been broken, and the Cassin's Finch has been crushed.  This is a juvenile, you can still see a few wisps of down on its crown.

Here is a male.  The lighting was kinda gnarly, but I'm pretty happy how geri photo sesh went considering I was baptizing a new lens.

It was really nice to be surrounded by Finches of Cassin, instead of Finches of House for a change. It was also cool to get blasted by a variety of Cassin's Finch vocalizations, since these days I get to hear them even more rarely I get to see them it seems. Getting rust on one's birding by ear skills is not something that I encourage, and I recommend avoiding it at all costs.

Hello White-crowned Sparrow.  But you are not just any White-crowned Sparrow, no...you are not nuttalli, our coastal resident, nor are you of our other relatively common California subspecies, gambelii or pugentensis.  You breed in the Sierras, your bill is pink, and lord have mercy, your lores are black. Black as midnight on a moonless night, if you want to get scientific about it. This is oriantha, a bird of deserts and mountains, a White-crowned Sparrow that thinks making babies at 9,770 feet (the elevation of Virginia Lakes Resort) is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Here is a juvenile oriantha, a life plumage for me. Just look at those broad, dark lores...weird.

Damn, take a gander on the bill length of this White-breasted Nuthatch. It's obscene, and I am still struggling to come to grips with it.  This is a member of the Rocky Mountain subspecies (subspecies group?), which sounds absolutely nothing like WBNU in most of California. They have a very narrow range in the state; on the weekend we had them here at Virginia Lakes and further south in Lee Vining Canyon.

For your edification: beneath all the birdlife was a writhing swarm of jiggling Belding's Ground Squirrels.

A walk around part of Saddlebag Lake was not particularly birdy, but had a major highlight in this Pika. A Pika! I've never seen one in California before, and actually pished this one up. That branch to the right is destined to become part of its larder, but with all the greenery the Pika had scattered around on the rocks it didn't look like it was in a hurry to get organized.

Some birds don't like feeders.  Some birds are hard to geri bird. Green-tailed Towhee is one such bird, and is another species I was happy to add to the old year list over the weekend.  Their mellow songs and mild disdain for people brings back many memories of birding Mount Pinos when I was a kid...when lifers were easy to come by, I misidentified birds more often, and I couldn't fucking drive.

And here is a somehat-unsure-of-itself juvenile/fledgling that was following the above adult around. Like the young White-crowned Sparrow above, this bird won't wear this plumage for very long. This also reminds me of being a teenage birder, but for complicated and mostly embarrassing reasons.

Unlike month-old towhees, lilies are very sure of themselves. This is a Sierra Tiger Lily, growing next to a stream at Virginia Lakes.  It is a small lily, modest in size, but big on facemelt. Thanks botany girls for the ID.

Here's a Mariposa lily, I forget what kind, it real pretty though.  A state rich in Calorchortus is a rich state indeed...not sure if I've seen this one before, it was up at Saddlebag Lake.

I'm not a butterfly nerd, but since some of you are here is some kind of copper to gawk at.

The mighty Clark's Nutcracker can be heard bellowing the pines on distant slopes. It is one of the quintessential sounds of the mountains. These birds are one of the most interesting species (bizarrely accurate recall abilities, ties to whitebark pine, etc)  that reside in high elevations, and thankfully they usually aren't very difficult to find. Oh, my friend Jill saw one swallow a Junco fledgling the other day, so they do that too.

The rarest thing we saw over the weekend was a marriage proposal. That is when I learned that proposing in public with all your friends (there were a bunch more dudes lurking out of the frame) awkwardly watching from extremely close range is a thing now. We were actually geri birding when we saw this...geri birding is so good.

Mammally Goodness

Red Crossbill. You can see the pried-open cone he's been working on.

I left Billings, MT before dawn, hoping to make it to Yellowstone at a reasonable time. I failed to do this. Why? The incredible scenery you pass through en route boggles the mind. You must stop. You must bird. And after a few stops you keep telling yourself that you have to keep going, that you'll never make it to Yellowstone at this rate....but that doesn't work either.

The Gallatin National Forest's proximity to Yellowstone is both a blessing and a curse....it doesn't get the attention it deserves, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. As we all know, there is something to be said about roaming around on your own.

Not every day you get to see crossbill tongue.

The drive to Yellowstone took much longer than expected. A flock of Red Crossbills were fun to spend time with...to borrow a birder cliche, they were quite confiding. Of course, an old Midwestern tourist scared them all away, and I wished God's wrath upon him. Further down the road were American Pipits (not something most people are accustomed to seeing in summer), a hunting Red Fox, a Yellow-bellied Marmot and PIKAS. I couldn't believe it....I was getting stoked on mammals, of all things. How embarrassing.

If you plan on making a Yellowstone trip, be sure to check out the area between Cooke City and Red Lodge (this is the northeast access to the park), you will not regret it.

Golden-mantled Ground-Squirrels. Why do they have chipmunk stripes? Tell me.

Red Fox.

Foxy.

Marmot. Is nice, you like?

Pika pika pika pika pika pika.

Yeah, look at this thing. It doesn't even make sense. It's highly evolved to be cute though.

Botanists! Help me out! Cool flower at any rate.