Good and bad news this morning. The bad news first: Jack didn’t want to go. He’s had a couple episodes the past few days (stick lodged in throat, finally swallowed, and a missed jump into the truck after a hike, causing a minor fall), and he’s been a little lethargic since, so we have a vet appointment on Monday—although yesterday he was fine on the trails. Still, I figured he could use a day off (first since October 2019).
So although I thought about him the whole way, I ended up doing a ridge hike—a long, slow walk uphill a good ways, then downhill again, all the while observing a whole heap of migrating birds.
There’s a high slope with a southern exposure along the trail I hike with Jack each day, a slope that’s dotted with Utah Juniper trees. Besides the junipers, it’s mostly a sagebrush barren—with a few scrub-oaks sprinkled here and there. But I’ve come to know the little junipers as good places to look for birds.
For one thing, there’re the little blue berries—hundreds, thousands of them. Certainly they attract thrushes (solitaires, robins), corvids (magpies, scrub-jays), finches, and a bunch of other birds. Their branches are perches for singers like Chipping Sparrows and Spotted Towhees and Lazuli Buntings. Nearly every time I’ve seen a Black-throated Gray Warbler, it’s at least stopped off briefly in a juniper’s thick, safe interior.
For another thing, they offer shade—and a barrier to hide behind while sneaking up on, say, a singing Warbling Vireo. Also they make for a nice green-dotted high-desert landscape.
As we used to do in Texas, some locals here call them “cedars.” But they’re junipers to me.
Grandeur Peak Area List Beginning at 7:45 a.m., I hiked several hundred feet up a mountain.
For the past two or three weeks, in one particular stretch of trail dog and I hike daily, I’ve heard and/or seen at least one Warbling Vireo. I’ve really begun to like these birds a lot.
Back in Maine, before I moved out west, I encountered only a few Warbling Vireos. Not that they’re uncommon—but they clearly like the landscape hereabouts. They seem to like to hang out in bigtooth maples. And usually I hear a pair of them (today there were three) singing their warbly, un-vireo-like tune to each other, declaring their territory.
That tune has grown on me. It’s a fairly rapid warble, a bit House Finch–like but not very long, typically ending on a rising note. It’s subtle, though. As is the bird itself. Stays deep in the leaves. Doesn’t flit about too much, so they’re easy to miss.
This morning it took me ten or fifteen minutes of waiting quietly in one place to get a photo.
Grandeur Peak Area List Beginning at 7:30 a.m., I hiked several hundred feet up a mountain.
