I’m back home from beautiful downtown Portal, Arizona. Portal is a lot like East Lansing but has a better club scene. Specifically we were in Cave Creek Canyon and I plan a more relaxed revisit to the place. I could easily spend a week or so exploring the area.
Downtown Portal, AZ
Part of Cave Creek Canyon.
Even though I got 42 bird species for the year, I was there to learn methods to detect bats. We used mist nets, thermal imaging and acoustic monitoring. I’ve been doing the acoustic monitoring for about a year now and it was really refreshing to see that I was doing it all wrong.
Mist netted bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Mist netted bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Mist netted bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Mist netted bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Mist netted bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Mist netted bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Nectar feeding bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Nectar feeding bat. Photo by workshop participant.
Light tagged bat.
The workshop was in the Chiricahua Mountains, near the New Mexico border. No cell reception and no Starbucks. I kind of missed the Starbucks. A tough place. Home of the Chiricahua Apache. Not a group you want mad at you.
Chiricahua Mountains.
Milky Way over the Chiricahua Mountains.
Milky Way over the Chiricahua Mountains.
The general daily routine was some version of egg casserole with a boiled grain for breakfast at 6:30, classroom instruction or data analysis starting about 8:00 AM, some version of food for lunch at noon, classroom instruction or data analysis from 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM, driving somewhere and deploying mist nets, a different version of food for dinner at 6:30, manning the nets from about 8:00 PM – 11:00 PM, followed by some data processing and alcohol consumption. Usually to about one or two o’clock AM. Repeated for six days. I usually woke up a bit after 5:00 and did some birding. Sometimes stayed up a bit later for star photography. Not having a handful of amphetamines handy, caffeine figured pretty heavily into the diet. Scrapple was not on the menu but at least they had a good selection of hot sauces to make everything palatable. First time I ever put hot sauce on oatmeal.
In the small world category, I saw a female Costa’s hummingbird on the research station. Somebody questioned if Costa’s were usually present in the canyon so I checked eBird. They are present, and one of the observers was a birder I know from Lansing.
We had a little evening time in Tucson before flying back to Michigan. A co-worker and I went out to the Tucson Mountain Park. Take home message, the Midwest doesn’t have vistas. Sorry, but cornfields to the horizon do not count as vistas and I just don’t see a future in the Midwest. I’m a big water person but I’m coming to the realization there may be some Arizona desert time in my future. My preference still leans heavily aquatic but there is something of a pull to the openness and the ruggedness of the desert I can’t quite shake. There’s a line in T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom that sticks with me. “The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave.” Maybe it’s the sense of infinity that comes with the open sky of the ocean or the desert, away from the bright lights of civilization. Except that the ocean has an overwhelming abundance of a couple hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom, maybe there isn’t so much difference between the two. I just need to find out for sure.
The big sky around Tuscon.
The big sky around Tuscon.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 