Desert Destination: Ash Springs

Just off Nevada Highway 93 in the town of Ash Springs, across from the Shell gas station, is Little Ash Springs. An unmarked dirt road leads to some BLM bathrooms, a parking area, and steaming water flowing underneath the cottonwoods.

Next to the parking area is a built-up area for soaking. 

Some signs give a little indication of what's going on: Ash Springs Recreational Site. No camping is allowed, and in fact the sign says that visitors are only allowed to stay two hours. The times I've visited I've only seen a few other people there, but I've heard that the place can be absolutely packed during weekends.

It's not much of a surprise--the water feels wonderful! The temperature varies between 88 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and the water flows from 17 to 23 cubic feet per second.

 
The springs originate from several orifices, although the BLM asks people to stay in the developed area to protect the rest of the spring habitat. With only 1.2 acres in the recreation area, there's not much space for so many people, and trampling and social trails are obvious.

During chilly winter days, the rising steam makes the path of the water especially obvious. The warm water not only attracts humans.

A tiny fish, the White River springfish, (Crenichthys baileyi baileyi) lives in this spring. In fact, it only lives in Ash Springs, and this endangered subspecies only survives where the water is warm, so it doesn't go very far downstream. There are at least three fish in the photo above, each about an inch long. Desert fish often don't get too large because they are limited by the small amount of water in the desert.

The fish swim all over the spring. The BLM held public meetings in November 2008 to solicit public input about how to better manage Ash Springs to reduce vandalism, decrease erosion, help keep trees from falling, and keep the springs accessible to the public. The Caliente Field Office will be writing a development plan for the site. The plan will be discussed at the June 25 & 26, 2009 Resource Advisory Council meeting in Tonopah.

Trying to keep good habitat for the White River springfish while managing the spring for heavy visitation is a challenge. But there's still another challenge--proposed groundwater pumping in nearby areas may reduce the water that emerges from the spring.

Life in the desert is always a little tricky, but especially at Ash Springs. So if you're on Highway 93 and about two hours north of Las Vegas, take a break and check out the springs. The fish are easy to see, the cottonwoods provide some shade in the summer, and the water is enticing. We just have to remember not to take it for granted. 

Golden Eagle

Whenever I see a really large bird of prey, I know it has to be one of two species: bald eagle or golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos). Adult bald eagles have easily distinguished white heads and tails, which means that an all-dark big bird is usually a golden eagle (immature bald eagles are often mostly dark, too, but a little observation makes it fairly easy to tell them apart).

Upon closer inspection, it's easy to see that the head is indeed gold-colored. The wingspan can be six to eight feet. Having such big wings can be a disadvantage at times, though. One of the places I regularly see golden eagles is feeding on road kill. They are slow to move away when a car comes, and getting hit by a car is probably the biggest cause of their demise. So if you ever see a bunch of birds up ahead feasting on a dead animal on the road, slow down to make sure one of those birds isn't a golden eagle--it needs extra time to take flight.

Golden eagles will also eat the normal assortment of small mammals, reptiles, and birds. They mate for life, with the female larger than the male as in the case of most raptors. Similar to red-tailed hawks, golden eagles have eyes eight times more powerful than humans.

We see golden eagles year round in our valley, and thoughout western North America they are fairly common. They still are exciting to see, and generally whenever someone sees one they tell other people about it. There's just something neat about seeing such a large and majestic bird. Fittingly, the golden eagle is the national bird of Mexico.

Rattlesnakes

A few days ago, the question was posed: Am I worried that Desert Boy might run into trouble with a rattlesnake? 

The short answer is no. 

Here's why (aka the long answer):

Right now, during the winter, Desert Boy is perfectly safe, because rattlesnakes have evolved a survival strategy to deal with cold temperatures by hibernating. They are cold-blooded creatures, meaning they can't regulate their body temperature. So if it's too cold, they take cover, and the earth provides a constant temperature for them. Likewise, if it's too hot, they also take cover.

During May through September, the Great Basin variety of rattlesnake  (Crotalus viridis lutosis) is out, but with a few precautions, chances of getting bitten are really slim. Generally a rattlesnake only bites for food or defense, so if you stay far enough away from it, there's no danger. Most snake bites are on people's hands--because they try to handle them.

If you do happen to get bitten, stay calm and go to the nearest hospital. The hospitals around here all carry antivenom. Don't use a tourniquet, and don't cut the wound and suck it out. Try to keep the injury below the level of the heart and relax as much as possible. And keep in mind there's a fairly good chance that the snake didn't inject any poison. 

One other thing that makes me feel better about Desert Boy and rattlesnakes: Henry. Our niece was once protected by her black lab from a rattlesnake (the dog got bitten when she jumped in front of the niece, but ended up being okay). I'm fairly certain Henry would do the same thing. But when it gets warmer in the spring, we'll be more careful, making sure we don't go putting our hands or feet into places we can't see. 

Looking at it from the other side, life is tough for a rattlesnake. Only about ten percent make it to sexual maturity, they rarely venture more than a few miles from their den, and competition is fierce. You can learn lots more about rattlesnakes at this website.

There are quite a few non-venomous snakes around here: gopher snakes, garter snakes, and racers, to name a few. They are all really good at helping control rodent populations, so I'm glad to have snakes around. In fact, I think I'd much rather have snakes in my neighborhood than mosquitoes. And because we live in the desert and don't have much water that mosquitoes need for breeding, I usually get fewer than five mosquito bites a year. 

Red-tailed Hawks

Yesterday morning as I was leaving the house, I noticed this pair of red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) perched high in a tree near our house. It was only about 20 degrees F, so they have their feathers fluffed out to give them extra insulation. 

Red-tailed hawks are the most common hawks in the area, and in fact they're found throughout North America. They have adapted to almost every type of habitat, from deserts to forests to urban areas. In the wild, they can live to about 20 years of age.

 
These hawks were silently watching the morning unfold, but they have sharp, piercing calls. I always giggle (or cringe) when I hear the kree-aw sound of a red-tailed hawk on television regardless of what hawk or eagle they're picturing. It's true, the red-tailed hawk has a memorable call, but come on movie and TV industry, we know the same bird isn't making the same sound in all the landscapes we're supposed to think of as wild. (Okay, I'm getting off my soapbox now.)

Female red-tailed hawks generally weigh between 2-4 pounds, while males are about 25% smaller. This is called sexual dimorphism and is common in raptors (and ducks, insects, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, and many fish).

Red-tailed hawks usually hunt from perches, swooping down to prey on small mammals, particularly small rodents. They will also occasionally eat birds, reptiles, insects, and fish. It so happens that this diet overlaps a great deal with Great Horned Owls. The owls hunt at night (and often perch on the same tree!), while the hawks hunt during the day. During twilight the battle is on.

Here's a good shot of the front and back of the red-tailed hawks. They have many color variations, called morphs that are generally categorized into light, dark, and intermediate. The morphs may be due to age, regional characteristics, and of course, genes.

Although the moon might appear far away to us, red-tailed hawks have eyes eight times more powerful than humans.

Bald Eagles

In the winter, we are often fortunate to have a couple bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) take up residence in our valley. Their bright white heads and tail feathers sure contrast with their dark brown bodies. Although bald eagles' favorite food is fish, they are opportunistic. That's a good thing, because there aren't too many fish out here in the desert! 

We were driving along when we spotted them, and when we stopped to take a photo, they flew off. Every winter we see two or three bald eagles, and they stay several months. We get excited seeing these huge birds, and I always am thankful they've decided to visit--and curious where they came from and why they choose this valley.

Tracking a Bobcat

A coworker told me about a bobcat she saw. It ran across the road in front of her and into a sagebrush and grass meadow. I've only seen a couple bobcats in my life, so I went over to investigate. It didn't take long to find the tracks. Bobcat tracks are like most cat tracks, with four toes that are curved around the paw. The paw itself has two lobes at the top of it (instead of a single lobe like a dog), but because the rear foot of a bobcat often steps on top of the front foot track, the two lobes can be obscured.

By the stride of the tracks, I can see the bobcat was walking. It also appeared to have been dragging its feet even though the snow was no more than three inches deep. Bobcats are generally solitary and nocturnal, and although they might wander more than 25 miles, they frequently stay in the same two-mile radius.

Here's a closeup of the paw print. It's not very large, only about 2 inches long and 2 inches wide. (It's very common for tracks to appear a little larger when the snow melts.) An adult bobcat weighs between 11 and 20 pounds. They are expert tree climbers.

One of the reasons I wanted to follow the bobcat is to see how it moves. It curved around bushes, and I could just imagine it sniffing around, trying to locate small mammals or birds, its favorite food. Before long, in February, bobcats start mating season. The kittens are born two months later and stay with their mom until autumn.

I followed the tracks until they started getting too far away. It's really fun tracking, and I have to admit there's always a little surge of adrenalin as I follow tracks around a tree, wondering if I've somehow caught up to the animal. So far I never have. But maybe someday.

Wild Turkeys

When  I was doing the Christmas Bird Count a few weeks ago, I found some turkeys up one of the canyons. As I mentioned in a previous post, wild turkeys are not native to this area, but were introduced by the state wildlife agency. So whenever I see them, I think of Thanksgiving dinner.

The turkeys must sense this, because once they saw me, they turned around and hurried back into the brush.

I waited for awhile, and sure enough, they came trotting out, crossing the road in front of me.

If you're wondering about the house in the background, yes, it is awesome. It is currently run as a bed and breakfast and is very popular for weddings and family reunions. The landscape around it is fantastic, with steep cliffs, a maze of mountain roads, and views of peaks over 10,000 feet tall.

Okay, back to the turkeys. It's true domesticated turkeys can't fly, but wild ones can--here is proof. They often perch in trees at night to protect themselves from predators, like mountain lions.

They aren't particularly concerned being near other wildlife, though, as they scramble past the mule deer on the left and continue up the canyon.

Pinyon Jays

I noticed a flash of blue out the living room window yesterday morning and found a bright pinyon jay livening up the evergreen foliage. Pinyon jays usually travel in flocks, and sure enough, as I watched I saw many more pinyon jays. These flocks can consist of up to 500 pinyon jays, and many jays stay in the same flocks for their entire lives. Pinyon jays are only found in the western United States.

These social birds eat pine seeds, and they don't have any feathers at the base of their bills. This enables them to poke their bills deep into pine cones and not get any annoying sap on themselves. Each pinyon jay collects thousands of pine seeds each year, caching and remembering where they are for later months. They have such good memories they can even find the seeds under snow. If only I could remember where I put things around the house!

Survival of the Fittest

One of the best parts of winter is that it's easier to keep track of where animals are. When there's no snow on the ground, the signs of wild animals can be few: scat, bedded areas, munched vegetation. But in the winter, when snow covers the landscape, it becomes apparent that animals are criss-crossing the terrain. What are the large tracks seen in the snow in the above photo? We'll get to that!

Another sign that can occasionally be seen is a blood trail. An animal has been dragged across the grass and gravel.

It's dragged even further down the road, leaving a distinct trail.

The animal is dragged over a bunch of downed logs. What is being dragged? And what is dragging it? We don't have bears or wolves out in this area; the top of the food chain is the mountain lion (Puma concolor). Mountain lions are also called pumas, cougars, or simply lions. They are most active at dawn and dusk or during the night.

Their favorite prey is deer, although they will also eat elk, porcupine, rabbits, and small mammals. One study found that mountain lions generally consume 48 large and 58 small animals a year. It takes a mountain lion a few hours to eat a small mammal, but several days to eat a large animal. On average, a mountain lion kills about one deer a week. 

Thinking about this top predator, which weighs 100-150 pounds, makes seeing its tracks extra exciting. Mountain lion tracks are fairly large and well spaced, with about twelve inches between each footprint.

Mountain lions have four toes, and although they have claws, they usually retract them when walking (although I have seen claw marks in deep snow on steep hills, probably for better traction). The top of the pad has two lobes, which is different from a dog, which only has one lobe. Another big difference between cats and dogs is the position of the toes--cats are straighter across.

Because of their solitary nature and proclivity to be out and about during the dark hours, mountain lions are seldom seen. But with the aid of deer cameras, which are attached to trees and take pictures when the infrared beam is intersected, it's possible to get a better look at these creatures.

Here's a picture of a mountain lion heading towards its cached deer. After a lion takes down a deer, usually with a bite to the neck, it drags it up to 100 yards to its eating place. Then it usually makes an opening in the rib cage and eats the liver, heart, and lungs. Next it removes the rumen and intestines and buries them. The lion eats what it can;  covers up part of the carcass with pine needles, pinecones, dirt, leaves, or snow; and waits nearby until the next night so it can eat some more.

The lion doesn't seem to like the flash of the camera. The timestamp on the photo indicates the picture was taken at 8:04 p.m.

Here you can see the powerful muscles of the mountain lion. It's rare to see more than one lion at a time, unless it's a mother with her kittens. Mountain lions give birth year round, although April to September is the most common time, following a three-month gestation. If you want to see more pictures taken with these remote wildlife cameras, check out this website.

Earlier this week I mentioned in the comments of the Christmas Bird Count post that one of the observers saw an amazing sight: a freshly killed bull elk. She was coming down the trail when she heard a crashing in the woods. She went a little further and saw this elk off the side of the trail. She didn't stay, but kept on heading down the trail towards her car.

A couple days ago I went out to take a look at the elk. It was massive, with a six-point rack. It appeared that two lions had made the kill--one larger, and one smaller, so probably a mom and her kitten. About a month ago the same tracks were seen near a cow elk a few miles away. What makes this find so exciting is that no elk kills have been seen in this area for the last few years. Elk were reintroduced about a decade ago and their numbers are growing. Despite their huge size (cows average about 500 pounds, bulls about 800 pounds), it is apparent that the mountain lions have figured out a way to take them down.

Here's a closer view of the elk, with the eyes eaten out and a gaping hole in its neck. I sure wonder how the kill went down. Mountain lions generally kill by waiting in ambush, so the elk was most likely surprised.

A couple people went with me to look at the elk, including the lady who first found it. A remote camera was installed on the tree and has been taking pictures at night, so in a week or so we may be able to see more amazing photos of who's been feeding on the elk. 

109th Christmas Bird Count

Yesterday I participated in the Christmas Bird Count for our area. It was the thirteenth year it's been held here, but the Christmas Bird Count as a whole has been going 109 years, starting in 1900. Back in those days, there weren't many bird watchers, but there were a lot of bird hunters. In an effort to stop the annihilation of hundreds (or thousands) of birds every year just for sport, Frank Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History proposed an idea. Instead of the "side hunt," where people took sides and saw which side could shoot more birds at Christmas, people would count birds instead.

The idea took hold, and the Audubon Society took over the Christmas Bird Count. Today it is held in 22 countries in the Western Hemisphere.  The count is conducted within a 15-mile radius circle on one day between December 14 and January 5. 

We didn't have a big turnout for our Christmas Bird Count, so I had a large area to cover.  Some years we have quite a few people turn out, both experienced birders and those new to birding. Those that are new are paired with someone more experienced, so they end up learning a lot about birds. I know I was a bit cautious the first year I did my first Christmas Bird Count. My thoughts went somewhere along the lines of:

A whole day looking at birds? 

It's winter, I don't see birds. 

It's going to be really boring.

But I was pleasantly surprised. When you concentrate on birds, you end up seeing them in more places than you would expect. And the day has gone by surprisingly fast every year. 

Some of the birds can be obvious, like the raptor perched on the power pole above. The white speckled V on the scapulars (shoulder feathers) helps to identify this as a red-tailed hawk, the most common roadside buteo. Other raptors I saw included a second red-tailed hawk, a rough-legged hawk, a golden eagle, and a merlin.

Some of the birds are quite small, not much bigger than this sunflower seed head. The gold head along with the black and white wing feathers make this bird easy to distinguish as an American goldfinch. A flock darted along ahead of me as I went along the edge of a field. I enjoyed seeing the flash of their golden heads.

Here's the goldfinch eating the sunflower seed head. Other birds that were common in the fields and feed lots were ravens, blackbirds, white-crowned sparrows, and European starlings.

Later, as I stopped next to the road to look at a marshy area, I saw a flash of blue in a tree. The blue made me think of pinyon jays, because we have a lot of those. But when I got out the binoculars and looked closer, I saw it wasn't a pinyon jay.

Instead, the bird was a bit smaller. The male was brighter blue and the female (on the left) was greyer. This blue bird turned out to be a mountain bluebird.

Yesterday was a really cold day. In the morning it was only 14 deg F, and the highest it got was 31 deg F. As a result, most bodies of water were frozen over, including this big lake. That meant the lake, which is usually a great birding spot, was not too exciting. Nevertheless, I managed to find a loggerhead shrike and a black-billed magpie near it.

Not too far away I found this open water. Why isn't it frozen over? The water emerges from a deep spring, and the water is warm enough that it stays unfrozen for a long distance. Out on the water I could see little blobs, mostly brown, but in the center one white blob.

With more magnification, I found my most exciting find of the day: a bird that wasn't on our list--a tundra swan. It might not look very swanlike here because it has its head tucked into its back. Fourteen green-winged teals, about a dozen mallards, and a few northern pintails were also present. At another open-water area I spotted a belted kingfisher and a great blue heron. It amazes me how much variety exists even in the desert.

After I had searched the valley bottom, I headed up a couple of the canyons. In one I found a flock of wild turkeys. They ran across in front of me and up the canyon side. Dark-eyed juncos were all fluffed out and chirping quietly as they tried to stay warm in leafless bushes.

As I got up higher in the mountains, it started snowing. I didn't see many birds, but finally something flew across the road. I got out and started walking.

A flock of mountain chickadees was darting around the pinyon pines, with a couple red-breasted nuthatches hanging out with them. A little later I found a Townsend's solitaire. During the winter it often makes a piercing whistle call that is unmistakable.

Wintertime is when huge flocks of birds gather near the roadsides. They fly up in front of vehicles and it's difficult to see what they are. Here I captured them alongside the road, and it's possible to see the yellow chin and dark mask and chest band, although the "horns" that give the horned lark their name aren't really distinguishable.

Hopefully these photos and descriptions have whetted your appetite for birds! If you'd like to learn more, and possibly participate in a Christmas Bird Count near you house (remember, the counts are held until January 5), check out the Christmas Bird Count website! Happy birding!