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!