Birders are a strange lot. They get up before dawn and go tramping about while it’s still cold and dark outside. Not the sort of thing we’d normally do. We’re not morning people. Except this morning. Up at 4am. Out of the house by 4:30. At the Gunnison Sage Grouse lek by 5. Park behind the half-wall. Engine off, lights out, don’t leave the car. Blackout and silence. Grouse lek protocol. Its thirty degrees outside. No-one gets to move or make a sound until the grouse leave the lek. They are most active in the hour before dawn. They are disturbed by artificial light and human presence. The males come out of the sagebrush and congregate on the lek, the dancing ground, the bare patch of earth, and do their puffing booming strutting dance. The most impressive males get the females. The display was a long way away, probably three hundred yards, but we have good birding binoculars and a scope we could rest against the partly open window. We got the whole show. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then suddenly at 5:45 a whole group of males broke out in the open in the dimmest light and began their strutting. Dancing shadows. The performance got clearer as it got lighter. Puffed up chests, flared tails, bulging air sacs, dancing fools. Suddenly, at 6:15 it was over. The birds just flew away to the sage highlands. Done for the day. They will be done for the season soon. Breeding season only lasts six weeks. They’ll be done by mid-May. A life bird. The Gunnison Sage Grouse. Very limited range; a tiny spot in Colorado. Not many people get to see them, maybe a few hundred a year. When we were sure Elvis had left the building, we started up, warmed up, and left. Back to the coach by seven. Gone from Gunnison by nine, at the Russell Stover Candy Factory Store in Montrose by eleven, and set-up in Ridgway State Park eating lunch by noon.
Crested butte
Oh I love a good commute. I used to drive twenty-five miles each way to Denver and back. I drove off-peak traffic times, so it was quiet time for reflection and music. Relaxing, really. Now it’s different. Sometimes we park the motorhome close enough to walk to work. Usually we’re within a few minutes in the car. But here, in Gunnison, we have a forty-five minute commute through the mountains to Crested Butte each day. It’s not spectacular mountain pass road, but wide-open traffic-free high country highway. Colorado Highway 135 north from US 50 follows river valleys, first the Gunnison, then the East, then the Slate, through pastoral forests farms and fields, right into the old 1800s mining town, elevation eighty-eight hundred feet, at the base of surrounding high peaks. There is still snow on the ground in Crested Butte.
Gunnison
The camp at gunnison.
Gunnison
Never easy to leave Ridgway, but we’ve done it. Now we’re in Gunnison. Tomorrow’s job is not in Gunnison, it’s in Crested Butte, an hour away, but there aren’t any RV Parks open for the season there yet. We’re in the Gunnison KOA. It’s not open either, but will be soon, so they let us stay. We were welcomed by the owner…. David Taylor. Conversation with him revealed he has a brother Tom Taylor. A brother Bill Taylor too. Want to guess the name of David Taylor’s first Kid? Right. Mike. It feels like home.
Slam dunk
We don’t have any rosy finches. Most birders don’t have any rosy finches; rosy finches have a very limited range. But the place you go to see rosy finches… Colorado. All you have to do to see rosy finches (there are three kinds), is drive to Georgetown in the winter and watch the feeders around town. The finches come down out of the high country (and down from the north) in the winter, down to maybe eight thousand feet, and bask in the snow and cold until it’s time to return to their more arctic conditions. All you have to do is drive to Georgetown. Every birding guidebook says so. We’re not in the Colorado high country in the winter any more, so it is a matter timing; get to Georgetown to see the birds without spending the winter in the mountains. At our latest opportunity last year, in November, we drove to Georgetown and located all the bird feeders that could be seen from the street. No rosy finches. We were too early. This year, back to work in Colorado, we tried again. Another drive to Georgetown, this time in April, and a creep around the streets in the car, checking out the feeders. Nothing. Just a little too late. The birds are gone for the year. On the way out of town, we stopped at the visitor center and they had a live person to chat with. Rosy finches? Haven’t seen one in years. They must be wintering somewhere else now. We weren’t just too early, then too late. We missed them entirely.