On Jawbone Canyon Road, we stopped to try our luck for Le
Conte’s Thrasher in an off-road vehicle area strewn with giant pipes funneling water to Los Angeles.
Joel and I hiked cross country for nearly an hour without luck. Suddenly, Joel spotted one. We followed it, then there was another,
and we followed both until we had some documentary photographs (they were so
finicky, we couldn’t hope for much more).
Back on the road, we had another flush from the sparse roadside foliage. So much for the hour-long hike…
Le Conte's Thrasher - by Joel Such
Birding Jawbone Canyon - by Renée Haip
By Renée Haip
By Joel Such
Though the mid-day heat was rapidly approaching, we managed
a brief stop at the famous Butterbredt Spring Wildlife Area. An isolated oasis in the middle of the
desert, this series of riparian pockets becomes an irresistible stop-over
location for migrants flying across the Mojave. Many off-route eastern migrants can sometimes be found here,
and in other similar locations. Though it was the middle of summer, and the car
thermometer was already reading close to 90°F (at 9:00 in the morning), we also
found the draw irresistible.
During our short visit, we had our first Ladder-backed Woodpeckers and
Costa’s Hummingbirds.
Additionally, a roosting Great Horned Owl was our only owl of the entire
trip (besides the heard-only Great Gray in Yosemite), despite hours of
night-time birding.
This is Butterbredt Springs.
By Renée Haip
Butterbredt Springs - by Renée Haip
Western Wood-Pewee - by Joel Such
At 3 that afternoon, we found ourselves in Death
Valley. With the car reading an
outside temperature of 120°, we didn’t see any birds at all, except for a
handful of Eurasian Collared-Doves and Common Ravens on the Furnace Creek Golf
Course. Obviously, birds were not
our main reason to be here.
Besides being a very scenic, world-famous National Park, we were
acclimating for our return home to a baking and burning Colorado. We figured that 110° heat would not
feel so bad after 120°. It turns
out that Colorado started cooling off, clouding up, and raining almost as soon
as we got home. Even so, 120° was
a new personal high temperature record for us by about 9 degrees, and was
definitely worth the experience.
Desert rock creatures somewhere
to the west of Death Valley National Park.
By Joel Such
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