Two days ago, Alex and I completed an owl survey grid near Malad City, Idaho. Our survey grids consist of 4 points spaced 500 meters apart on national forest land. Sometimes there is a road that can get you close, but sometimes not. On our Malad City grid, we did have a road that got us within 500 meters of our points, but we had to pretty much slide down a steep rock scree to get to the points. We try to do the lowest elevation points first, so we don't have to do as much steep hiking at night. In general this plan worked out at this site, with a few steep scrambles every now and then that were unavoidable. The site was mostly juniper forests, interspersed with meadows and sage here and there. In the meadows, wildflowers were abundant, and we found our FOY Blue-gray Gnatcatchers flying around. Dusky Flycatchers were all over the place, too. On the way to each point, we've been running tracks on our GPS, so we have an "easy" path to follow on the way back. Following this has been pretty important because of streams that don't have many stream crossings due to snow melt.
At our second survey point of the night, we got a Flammulated Owl to respond to our calls! At first he was pretty far away and only gave us two hoots...but eventually he moved in and became pretty vocal. He was very chatty as we walked to our next point, but it seems like he stayed in his small canyon since we didn't hear him at our next point. The way out of this site was of course the steep rock scree, which was pretty challenging to climb in the dark...but the thought of a big jar of peanut butter kept me going (although very slowly). We then continued on to a road point down a muddy road, and flushed two Great-horned Owls on the way. Our final road point of the night was inaccessible due to lots of snow, but we found a nice place to camp. The ground was a little wet, so we put our tent in the bed of the truck. I am VERY grateful for my tent that sets up in under a minute, because at 2:00 am after a night of steep hiking, I am borderline delirious. As soon as we got in the tent, it started raining. If you were anywhere in south eastern Idaho two nights ago trying to sleep in a tent, you probably had the challenge of sleeping through wind gusts that were nearly blowing your tent away. Despite the tent wall smacking me in the face all night, I slept like a rock. The next day we checked out Oxford Slough, which was loaded with great birds like Snowy Egrets, White-faced Ibis, and Willets, and we watched an adult Peregrine Falcon hunting a flock of phalaropes (he missed).
We drove about 3 hours north towards Driggs Idaho, where we scoped out our road and grid points for the evening. The grid points were bisected by a major road, which meant we only had to walk a few hundred meters to get to each. This thought was a little reassuring because this site apparently put us in Grizzly Bear country. Unfortunately, there was an overflowing river in our way, and even though we could pretty much see the points from the road, we had to hike in on an 800 meter long detour. It turned out fine though, since there wasn't much underbrush and the elevation changes weren't very drastic, and the chances of running into a big angry bear are pretty slim. On one of the points, I heard a distance Great-horned Owl, but we didn't hear anything else. The road points also turned out to be uneventful, even though they seemed to be located in excellent Flammulated Owl habitat (mixed conifers with large patches of aspen).
Today we will head a little north towards Ashton, Idaho, and hope the predicted rain/snow/wind holds off.
Check out this link to see some info about our target species, the Flammulated Owl. Despite being a very small owl, these guys have a pretty low "hoot" that they repeat over and over every 2-3 seconds (they can sound pretty similar to a Long-eared Owl).
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