The UBS Team

UBS sponsored six fellowships on this trip. Three went to folks in Chicago: me, Keith, and Asha. Keith works in the IB, and Asha's a middle school teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.

We were joined by San Franciscans Steve, Bing, and Dave. Steve sells Asian equities in the IB, Bing evaluates properties for a REIT, and Dave teaches math at a Bay area magnet high school.

This was a fine group. Keith asked insightful questions, and Steve spurred us on to new athletic feats. Bing knew her birdcalls, Dave was a master of original limericks, and Asha could rock a handheld GPS. None of us were birding experts, but all of loved the outdoors. This group was up for anything. This group was willing.

The presence of the corporate fellows had a pretty profound effect on the dynamics of the overall team, according to one of the veteran Earthwatchers. David, a retired academic from Ann Arbor, MI, told me:

"You take people who work in corporations, they're younger, they have a different perspective, especially when we get talking about how to solve some of these [environmental] problems. This is about my 19th trip, and I like having them; I really notice the difference. Suddenly it's not all scientists talking with each other anymore."

At the same time, I know that the corporate fellows appreciated the experience of the other volunteers. Most worked in the sciences, many knew a lot about the biodiversity of the area. Without them, we would not have learned nearly as much.

Asha and a birdie:

Keith and Steve in the field:

Bing:

Dave:

The whole group:

Victory at Karns Meadow

The Earthwatch team monitored four sites throughout the week:
pristine Blacktail Pond, in Grand Teton National Park; a wooded site called Jackson; a mixed conifer and aspen site at Kelly; and Karns Meadow. Located in a marsh behind a gas station and next to a road, it's considered a distressed site, and is included to see how bird species respond to noise and habitat reduction.

Karns was also our least favorite site. We needed knee-high boots to get through it, and the mosquitoes were the size of prairie chickens. They can bite through several layers of clothing, so the only defense against them is to wear a raincoat. We groaned when Megan declared that it would be Friday's research site.

On Friday, when we arrived before dawn, the mosquitoes were still sleeping. So were the birds. But as they woke up, we suddenly had outstanding success identifying them. That morning, in the muck and mosquitoes, we identified 11 birds with banded legs--more than any previous group. I identified a song sparrow, who had the good grace to stand on a branch and show off his bands.

Here is a photo each from Blacktail Pond, Jackson, and Kelly:

The Big Hike

On our free day, five of the six UBS-sponsored volunteers talked each other into taking a monster hike on Crags Peak trail. It's a 2,700 foot vertical climb into a "hanging canyon" and beyond. To get to the trailhead, we borrowed a van, drove to Grand Teton National Park, and took a ferry across Jenny Lake. It's fed by springs rushing down from the Tetons, and is beautifully clear and very cold.

We picked our way to the top, first on a steep path, and then across a boulder field. Someone suggested that we go "mountain goat style", leaping from boulder to boulder, which did speed things up. The altitude slowed us down as we went higher and the air thinned out.

It snowed late into the season in the Tetons this year, and we hit the snow line a third of the way up, some of it turned pink by a form of bacteria.

Three and a half hours after we'd started out, we stopped for lunch at a green lake fed by melting snow. Two brave members of our party jumped in, and headed back to shore just as quickly.

After two sweaty hours downhill, we jumped into the emerald depths of Jenny Lake.

It was a near-perfect day.

The snuffling warbler

Yesterday morning, I stood behind a clump of cottonwoods hoping the birds wouldn't notice me or my partner, a lovely retired physician from Rhode Island named Lyman. Lyman moved off to the other side of the cottonwoods, and after a bit I heard him crunching around. And snorting gently.

Now, I'd only known the man for a day or so, but I didn't recall him snuffling. I wondered briefly if I could write shareholder reports with one arm.

Moose can be aggressive, especially with calf. I'd prefer to give bears a wide berth. Bison, too.

Lyman was nowhere. I hoped he wasn't heading for the beast in the bushes, but I didn't want to be breakfast, either. In the wilderness, it's every gal for herself, I figured. Ciao, Lyman.

On my retreat, I hissed at him to follow me. He did, and we backed up far enough to see two large bison munching.

Morning Research

4:30 am: Alarm. Shower and grab the pack loaded the night before: binoculars, two liters of water, bird chart. As a bonus, the stars are still out.

5:00 am: Shuffle to breakfast, pack lunch for the field of hummus pita wrap, carrots, and cookies.

5:30 am: Meet up with Megan, the expedition leader, who is conducting her own avian research this summer. Drive to the day's research site in Earthwatch van. Savvy novices take this chance to grab an experienced birding partner. I find a gem in Glen, a retired math teacher from Darien, IL. This man knows birds.

6:15 am: Using a handheld GPS, we find our plot. Begin moving through the woods near sunrise. It's cool out, and early for the birds, too. Pause by trees emitting promising 'cheeps!"

7:15 am: Glen follows the sound of a song sparrow. I shuffle ten feet behind him. Maddeningly, the sparrow flits around. This makes it hard to hone in on the prize data: the presence and color of any bands on his legs.

7:30 am: The song sparrow flits up to the highest branch of a cottonwood. Victory! He's banded. Red over orange on the right leg, blue over silver on the left. I record the data in our log.

7:30-9:30am: We stalk yellow warblers, (unbanded) see an osprey, and follow a few robins. But they're too common to be interesting.

9:30 am: It's getting warmer, and the birds are quieting down. We chart all our data and head to check another research station, to meet biologists conduction season-long research there.

Everywhere..except right next to you

That sums up this morning's pre-dawn bird efforts. Topo maps in hand, we went searching for nests. Looking for birds, I stumbled across a bison! Full story tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's the closest I got to a bird today, which was in our late morning lesson on collecting birds and banding them.

Skills Day

This work is not for the timid.

You laugh, but by the end of this week, I'll have mad birding skills.

We started out early, when it was in the high forties and the wet sage smelled wonderful. By the time we rested in the late afternoon, it was 86 degrees and we had:

-packed lunches
-practiced using handheld GPS and satellite maps to find points "in the field", as biologists love to call all the outdoors
-learned how to chart the locations of bird nests when we find them
-more importantly, listened to birdcalls to identify our chosen ones (we will be studying the yellow warbler and grosbeak populations). For this, we have CDs of birdcalls.
-battled mosquitos
-outfitted ourselves, with some difficulty, with knee-high rubber boots for more work in the field tomorrow

That fieldwork begins at 5 am. We'll be looking for nests in an area of Grand Teton National Park. So far, I've found the best part of birding is that it requires that you walk carefully through the woods, listening, and there's no better place to do that than this rarefied area.

Today I had some connectivity trouble, so I hope to post pictures of our work tomorrow.

P.S. Birds see far more colors than we do. Some even see in infrared!

The arrival

Today was our 3 pm meetup at Jackson Hole airport, which is actually within Grand Teton National Park. So far, I can say it's going to be a good group. Five are volunteers sponsored by UBS, and five are ordinary folks from all over the country. One man mentioned that it was his 19th Earthwatch expedition! Another is an amateur birder who keeps a "life list" of all the birds he's ever identified. More on the team as we go along, I promise.

We bumped our way down an unpaved road in the Teton Science school van to our lodging, set in a small valley between two hills covered in sage. Four words to describe it: high class. Low maintainence.

Built 5 years ago, each building is passive-solar and environmentally friendly. Our rooms are shared, with a bathroom and shower. Everything is clean, bright and neat as a pin--not like the spidery, mildewy camps of my youth. My roommate, Laura, is an amiable research scientist from Baltimore on her holidays.

After we arrived, we were admonished to drink more water. Apparently, getting dehydrated is a common tourist mistake here at 6000 feet. I gulped it down. We moved on to a tour, found the dining hall, and had an informal skills assessment (who can use GPS? Two-way-radio? Excel?) I'm proud to say the UBS volunteers had the Excel skills covered.

Then, we were each issued binoculars and assigned daily tasks. Guess who has slop hound duty at dinner tomorrow?

Tonight, my duties are to read through the protocol information we were given today, covering the finer points of searching for nests and recording the data when we find them. (Tip: Use all your senses!)

Tomorrow is Skills Day. Basics of birding, species identification, and using satellite photos to identify terrain.
I can't remember the last time I went to bed this early on a Saturday night, but I'm not complaining.

The Earthwatch Fellowship

As part of UBS' environmental initiatives, the company generously sponsors the fellowship, making it possible for selected employees--and a teacher from a local partner school--to volunteer to take part in actual field research. The fellowship includes sharing the lessons with a local partner school in a community service project as well as with colleagues upon return.

The mission is arranged through the Earthwatch Institute, a nonprofit that supports scientific research by pairing projects with volunteers. They offer projects all over the world in the hopes of not just furthering environmental research, but also communicating the importance of this work to interested people, who will, in turn, share their knowledge with friends and family (and you, dear colleagues.)

The wildlife experts my team of volunteers will be working with are all from the Teton Science Schools, an educational orginazion based in Jackson Hole, WY.

Read the details of the mission here, and check out the lodging where volunteers on the trip will stay. Check back here to follow the mission with daily updates (connectivity willing) from July 26 through August 2nd.

Why songbirds matter

If you walk into the backyard of your grandmother's house, and listen carefully, you probably wouldn't hear the same birdsongs that she did as a girl. And nobody knows exactly why.

I've just finished some of the required reading for the Earthwatch trip. In Where Have All the Birds Gone? John Terborgh makes the case for the dire situation of tropical songbirds, which are disappearing rapidly from North America. Like socialites, they flee to warmer climates during the winter months, and return north only when the weather is more friendly. This makes them doubly susceptible: their habitat may be destroyed on either end.

And it has been, devastatingly so. Forest clearcutting in Peru, lowland vegetation cleared for sugarcane in St. Kitts and the Antilles, marshes drained for parking lots in New Jersey: combined, these all change the birdsongs you hear when spring arrives.

(Scientists think that there are probably fewer amphibians, snakes and so on, but nobody misses them. A forest without pleasing bird chirps is another matter, and we are talking about birds, aren't we?)

So why study birds? It's a shame we have fewer, sure. But people have needs, you say, and you can't stop building, or using resources, just to keep habitat pristine. What does taking birdie roll call accomplish?

It tallys the costs.

Human-driven change is inevitable, but as a society we have to acknowledge both its benefits and costs. Terborgh points out that it's the business of science to make predictions. As any scientist knows, you must have the right data before you can convince anyone with your predictions.

To make decisions about the future, we must have trustworthy data to understand what our continued actions will mean. Only once we have an informed view of the facts of climate change can we, as a society, make an informed value judgement on the best use of our resources.

As well-sheltered folks who have everything we need to sustain ourselves, we know the benefits of our actions. When we study songbirds, and look for reasons for their dwindling numbers, we are tallying the cost to the climate and its species, including ourselves.

This trip, and this blog, is part of that tally.

What's so grand about the Tetons?

Just about everything. Wyoming's jagged Tetons are fault-block mountains, pushed up as the earth split along a north-south fault line. They're topped by some of the oldest rock in North America--up to three billion years old. Brash upstarts, the Tetons themselves are only 12 million years old, compared to the rest of the Rockies, which have been around for about 60 million years. The valley floor is at an elevation of about 6,000 feet, with the mountains soaring to over 13,000 feet.

If you speak French, you may be wondering about the name Grand Tetons. (If you don't, just close your eyes and think of Dolly Parton.) Lonesome males on Donald McKenzie’s 1811 expedition to the area--apparently inspired by the soaring peaks--are thought to be responsible for this controversial naming.

Our fieldwork will be in mixed cottonwood and conifer sites
throughout the valley, on both public and private lands, because birds don't respect park boundaries very well. Two sites are within Grand Teton National Park; the others are in forested areas near Jackson, Teton Village, and Wilson, WY.


The area is hemmed in on three sides by mountain ranges: the Teton Range to the west, the Snake River Range to the south, and the Gros Ventre Range to the east. Yellowstone National Park is considered the area's northern border.