Wild About Utah Archives - Page 58 of 222

March 21, 2022March 4, 2026

Tiny Owls

Northern Saw Whet Owl Courtesy US FWS Dave Miller, Photographer — Northern Pygmy Owl
Courtesy US FWS,
Bob Miles, Photographer

Northern Saw Whet Owl
Courtesy US FWS
Dave Miller, Photographer

Western Screech Owl
Courtesy & Copyright Lu Giddings

They just kept coming. Students, Auduboner’s, friends. They filled the parking lot at the mouth of Birch Canyon, an offshoot of Smithfield Canyon in N. Utah. About two dozen of us begin a march up the canyon as a full moon threatens to pop over the ridge high above us.

Tiny owls that don’t give a hoot were on the menu. Utah Division of Wildlife Resources bird survey coordinator Frank Howe leads the crew with his highly energetic dog bouncing around snow patches we crunch through. After a half-mile or so, Frank pauses by a stand of large cottonwood trees. He opens a Sibley bird app on his phone, explaining we will begin with a repertoire of songs and calls of small owls- northern saw whet, norther pygmies, and western screech owls, hoping not to awaken great horned owls, which might eat their lesser brethren.

We stand silent, awaiting an answer as he begins with the soft bouncing ping-pong ball song of the western screech owl. A few minutes pass and there it is! We are transfixed by its somewhat distant soothing call, then another deeper sound emitted by its male partner. The female slowly works her way in our direction. A few more minutes pass and she’s caught in Frank’s bright flashlight beam. Soft oohs and aahs are emitted by the viewers, most of whom have never heard, nor seen, this tiny owl being before. “This is a mated pair, beginning their courtship rituals and soon to be nesting activities.” Frank explains.

After a half hour of enjoying this fine little owl, we saunter on, hoping for a Northern saw whet or Northern pygmy. After another mile, and several toots without an answer, we begin marching back down bathed in moonlight and friendly chatter. Within a few hundred yards of the screech owl, Frank hails a halt and once again plays the saw whet recording. An immediate, barely audible answer follows. We catch a glimpse of bright owl eyes as they briefly land on a branch 30 yards away.

Frank explains both the saw whets and Northern pygmy’s will migrate to higher elevations for nesting in coniferous forests as the snow recedes. All three of these smallish owls are cavity nesters, preying mostly on small mammals, birds, and large insects. When they feel threatened, they will elongate their bodies to resemble a tree branch. The saw whet will even cover its front with a wing for added camouflage.

In a good prey year, the saw whet will kill several mice in quick succession and store them for later feeding. N. pygmy’s eat only the brains of birds they capture and the soft abdomen of large insects. They can carry prey twice their own weight. Bizarre behaviors for these little demons!

Thank you Frank for an unforgettable moonlight stroll!

Jack Greene for Bridgerland Audubon and I’m wild about the Utah Wilds and its tiny demonic owls!

Credits:
Pictures: Northern Pygmy Owl, Courtesy US FWS, Bob Miles, Photographer
Northern Saw Whet Owl: Courtesy US FWS, Dave Miller, Photographer
Western Screech Owl: Courtesy & © Copyright Lu Giddings, Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & Copyright Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections as well as J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin, https://upr.org/
Text: Jack Greene, Bridgerland Audubon, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Additional Reading: Lyle W Bingham, Webmaster, and Jack Greene, Author, Bridgerland Audubon, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading:

Jack Greene’s Postings on Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/author/jack/

Northern Pygmy Owl, Overview, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Pygmy-Owl/overview

Northern Saw Whet Owl, Overview, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Saw-whet_Owl/overview

Western Screech Owl, Overview, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Western_Screech-Owl/overview

Northern Pygmy Owl, Utah Birds, https://www.utahbirds.org/birdsofutah/ProfilesL-R/NorthernPygmyOwl.htm
Featured Article by Paul Higgins: https://www.utahbirds.org/featarts/2006/NorthernPygmyOwl.htm
Gallery Pictures: https://www.utahbirds.org/birdsofutah/BirdsL-R/NorthernPygmyOwl.htm

Northern Saw Whet Owl, Utah Birds, https://www.utahbirds.org/birdsofutah/ProfilesL-R/NorthernSawWhetOwl.htm
Gallery Pictures: https://www.utahbirds.org/birdsofutah/BirdsL-R/NorthernSawWhetOwl.htm

Western Screech Owl, Utah Birds, https://www.utahbirds.org/birdsofutah/ProfilesS-Z/WesternScreechOwl.htm
Featured Article by Eric Huish: https://www.utahbirds.org/featarts/2004/OwlBox/OwlBox1.htm
Gallery Pictures: https://www.utahbirds.org/birdsofutah/BirdsS-Z/WesternScreechOwl.htm

March 14, 2022October 29, 2024

Grandaddy Basin

Oft have we, my friends and I,
Left cares of home, and work day woes
To find a haven, there cast a fly;
And where we’ll camp–God only knows.

Oft have we hiked the trail uphill
To see it pass, and again return–
Walked mile on mile, to get the thrill
Of a meadow lake and a creel filled.

Oft round the lake we’ve cast and fussed
And wished it something we might shun;
But something deep inside of us
Just holds us fast till day is done.

Breathtaking Beauty by Alfred Ralph Robbins Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer — Breathtaking Beauty by Alfred Ralph Robbins
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

Utahn Alfred Ralph Robbins loved exploring the Grandaddy Basin in northeastern Utah’s High Uintas with a group he called The High Country Boys. He compiled his labeled-and-dated sketches of camp and lake adventures among a sprinkling of black-and-white photographs in a scrapbook spanning the 1920s through the 1960s. They were casting at Governor Lake in 1927 and resting at Pine Island Lake in 1952 with 125 trout strung between the trees. I know they fished Pinto Lake, Trial Lake, Betsy Lake, and just about every lake in the area for 40 years. I know they, outfitted by Defa’s Dude Ranch, even stopped “on top of the world” on their way to Hatchery Lake with Alvis Newton Simpson, Robbins’s son-in-law and my grandfather, because he captured and preserved it.

Alfred Ralph Robbins and Grandson Jerry Newton Simpson 1947 Utah Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer — Alfred Ralph Robbins and Grandson Jerry Newton Simpson 1947 Utah
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

As my father handed down copies of this family fishing scrapbook to his grandchildren, my sons and daughters, after what they called a Fishing-with-Grandpa Simpson Saturday, he included a cover photograph of his Grandaddy Robbins, in his fishing waders, holding five-year-old grandson’s hand. My father added, “I only made one horse pack trip to Grandaddy Basin with Grandpa Robbins, but it was a very eventful week. It stormed one day and we could hear the rocks tumbling down the mountain when the lightning would strike and dislodge them. Another day there was a mayfly hatch as we were fishing one of the lakes. When that happened, the fish would bite on anything that hit the water. The mosquitoes just about ate us alive, and repellant didn’t help much. We saw some fish about three feet long near the rocks on shore, but we couldn’t get them to bite. We caught plenty of other fish and ate fish for supper most days that week.”

Do you have similar memories in the wild with your grandparents recorded somehow? Turning to one of my favorite books, “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” I read again how Terry Tempest Williams described the memories with her grandmother among avocets, ibises, and western grebes during their outings in Utah’s Great Salt Lake wetlands. Grandmother Mimi shared her birding fascination with her granddaughter Terry along the burrowing owl mounds of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Williams wrote, “It was in 1960, the same year she gave me my Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds. I know this because I dated their picture. We have come back every year since to pay our respects.”

I’m not a grandmother yet, but I will one day make a trek over Hades Pass again, gaze at the Grandaddy Basin below, and capture nature’s poetry with pen, camera lens, and little hiker hands in mine. Bloggers have technologies today to share instantly with me and the rest of the world their adventures in this Grandaddy Wilderness region. Documenting autobiographical history has evolved from dusty diaries and scrapbooks with black-and-white photographs to today’s digital image- and video-filled blogs in exciting ways that can include the places in Utah you love with the generations you love. Consider it your contribution to history.

Grandaddy Ohs and Ahs by Alfred Ralph Robbins Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer — Grandaddy Ohs and Ahs
by Alfred Ralph Robbins
Courtesy & © Shannon Rhodes, Photographer

I would not miss the Oh’s! and Ah’s!
I’ve seen in Doug’s and Noel’s eyes,
When first they saw Grandaddy Lake
From the summit, in the skies.

They are thrilled I know, and so am I.
They show it in their face;
While I just swallow hard and try
To thank God for this place.

I am Grandaddy Basin poet Alfred Ralph Robbins’s great granddaughter Shannon Rhodes, and I’m wild about Utah.

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/
Text: Shannon Rhodes, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Additional Reading Links: Shannon Rhodes

Additional Reading:

Williams, Terry Tempest. 1992. Refuge: an unnatural history of family and place. New York: Vintage Books. https://www.amazon.com/Refuge-Unnatural-History-Family-Place/dp/0679740244

Andersen, Cordell M. The Grandaddies. 2015. https://cordellmandersen.blogspot.com/2015/06/photoessay-backpack-1-2015-grandaddy.html

Wasatch Will. Fern Lake: Chasing Friends in Grandaddy Basin. 2018. https://www.wasatchwill.com/2018/06/fern-lake.html

Delay, Megan and Ali Spackman. Hanging with Sean’s Elk Party in the Uinta’s Grandaddy Basin. 2015. https://whereintheworldaremeganandali.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/hanging-with-seans-elk-party-in-the-uintas-grandaddy-basin/

Rhodes, Shannon, Wild About Nature Journaling, Wild About Utah June 22, 2020, https://wildaboututah.org/wild-about-nature-journaling/

March 7, 2022March 12, 2022

Gratitude is Work

All y’all, I think winter may be over. Here it is, mid too-early yet again, and it’s thawed even the once. Or is it twice now? Do I have a thrice? Either way: woof. I can’t say I didn’t expect this, given the past 30 years, but I was at least hoping to be in error one of these times. Don’t get me wrong, the interludes are nice, but seasonal consistency would be at least in line with what I remember.

Now, I’m only a ripe old 31 and the last good winter, true winter, winter like winter should be, I remember is still lodged in that ever-expanding haze of childhood I once thought only existed with fogies. Once you get that haze behind you though, it seems you’re always nostalgic, at least now where winter is concerned, if you are concerned about winter.

But that last ‘normal’ winter I recall, I can’t even give you a year, or my age to be fair. I just feel like it was back there, way back. The kind of winter that used to make glaciers seed and grow, that was more than just some storms. If I remember correctly, I remember remembering. Now that I think of it, it may have actually been a story my parents or grandparents told me about how winters used to be. Cold and snow from stem to stern, pillowy white nivian firmament blanketing every ski hill, and quieting every night, all the way until the very edge of spring when a great melt would rise up and make the world descend into mud. To be honest, I would even expect that my last memory of a good winter was a tale I was told to placate me when we had even poor winters back then that made my folks nostalgic. But even those off winters which rubbed my folks into remembrance it appears take me, too. Even my poor childhood winters are perhaps truer than those I see today. That certainly lifts the spirits. Woof. It makes me miss even more that which I’ve never even had.

But then the better of me gets in, and I look out my window and see that it’s not gone yet, as rickety as it may be. I recall that it is disingenuous to pray for something imagined as gone and not to thank it when it’s actually here. That’s how I was raised at least. Gratitude is not rocket science. But it is work.

By that I mean that work is the greatest gratitude we can show. Work towards winter and water and snow means more than utterances and nostalgia and certainly desperation. And I’m not afraid of the work. I wasn’t raised to be. Work isn’t hard, it’s just difficult. I was taught that just because we do not inherit the blame does not mean that we do not inherit the responsibility. But if we do not take up this effort, then the blame shall be more ours than even those before. Do we want to be the people who could have done something, or those who did?

Now, I know at this point the next generation will likely too only know a world with whatever-we-call-this being considered a “good childhood winter” in their grand arc of life, but I refuse to let them see what could’ve been get in the way of what can be once more. All it will take is many years of nonstop intergenerational gracious work by all of us. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

I’m tired of praying for snow because I remember remembering what it once was. Even though I’d rather see than believe, I’ll be thankful for what is here. From grief there is a pathway to thankfulness, and from thankfulness there is a pathway to action. It may be that you cannot see the way, but that does not negate that it is there. So, even in the waning days of another rickety winter, let’s mold our dourness to be thankful for what we do have, and turn our gratitude into the work necessary to make our prayers increasingly more often in thanks rather than in desperation.

I’m Patrick Kelly, and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Images: Courtesy Pixabay, , Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections
Text: Patrick Kelly, Director of Education, Stokes Nature Center, https://www.logannature.org
Included Links: Patrick Kelly & Lyle Bingham, Webmaster, WildAboutUtah.org

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Posts by Patrick Kelly

Stokes Nature Center in Logan Canyon, https://www.logannature.org/

February 28, 2022March 4, 2026

Cisco Fishing and Then Some

Ice Fishing at Bear Lake, Cisco Beach Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers — Ice Fishing at Bear Lake, Cisco Beach
Courtesy & &copy: Mary Heers Ice Fishing at Bear Lake, Cisco Beach
Courtesy & &copy: Mary Heers Ice Fishing at Bear Lake, Cisco Beach
Courtesy & © Mary Heers Bonneville Cisco: Male and Female
The more colorful male is larger below the tape.
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer.

For two weeks every January at Bear Lake, the Bonneville Cisco, averaging 6 to 8 inches in length, swim out of the deep waters to spawn in the shallow, cobbled shoreline on the eastside. They come in the thousands, broadcast their eggs and sperm into the shallow water, and leave. In the recorded history of Bear Lake, there is a picture of a Swedish immigrant who, in the early 1900’s, took his gill nets to the Eastern shore and caught Cisco. Over the years, after gill nets were outlawed, people started using small nets on long poles to pull the Cisco out of the shallow water. Bear Lake, at close to 6,000 ft elevation, is cold in January. Anyone fishing would tend to hop from foot to foot trying to stay warm. From a distance it looked like dancing. And so the Cisco spawning run got its name: Cisco Disco. In 1980 it became part of the Bear Lake Winter Festival, including a free fish fry breakfast at Cisco Beach. So on Jan 22 I showed up at daybreak and found a fire blazing in a firepit, and hot oil starting to boil over propane cookstoves. Out in the water, up to their waists in hip waders, people were swinging their nets through the frigid water. No one was catching fish. The Cisco were running late. So we ate whitefish instead, and homemade scones with raspberry jam, and agreed the Cisco would probably show up the next week. I borrowed some hip waders and boots from a friend. As I drove back to Bear Lake, I noticed the outside temp showing up on my dashboard said -6 degrees. I wondered if I was tough enough to fish for Cisco. But when I pulled up at Cisco Beach I was surprised to find that for the first time in six years, the water had frozen. People were hammering holes in the ice with shovels and pick axes. The Cisco were already there. Soon the air rang with happy cries of “I got some!” Everyone was counting. When they got to 30, the Cisco limit, they gathered up their takings and left. Most were going home to put the fish in the freezer. Come warmer weather, they would use the Cisco as bait when fishing for the bigger fish in the lake, the Whitefish, the Cutthroat, the Lake Trout. After all, Cisco are the main diet of these larger fish, and a very tempting bait. I thought I was done with winter fishing until I started to notice more and more pop up tents on Bear Lake and the local reservoirs. “Ice fishing?” I asked friends. “We love it!” they said. I asked if I could go along. I had always thought ice fishing meant standing over a hole in the ice, shivering and hoping against hope a fish might come along. Boy, was I wrong. The propane heater quickly made it cozy inside the pop up tent. The auger, powered by an electric motor, drilled down through 2 feet of ice in less than 2 minutes. Then the sonar fish finder took over. “Fish at 12 feet,” my friend said. I let out some line. Its so much easier to catch fish when you can drop of tasty bit of bait close to them. The 3 of us caught 38 fish in three hours. And I got hooked on ice fishing. This is Mary Heers and I am Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer
Audio: Shalayne Smith-Needham and technical engineers J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin Text: Mary Heers

Additional Reading
Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings Bingham, Lyle with Ron Goede, Voice by Linda Kervin, Bonneville Cisco, Wild About Utah, February 11, 2009, https://wildaboututah.org/bonneville-cisco/
Fishes of Utah: A Natural History (Hardcover) by William F. Sigler (Author), John W. Sigler (Author), Joseph R. Tomelleri (Illustrator), https://www.amazon.ca/Fishes-Utah-William-F-Sigler/dp/0874804698, pp 23, 24, 194-196 Are Bear Lake’s Ciscos a Joy or Curse?, Angler Guide, https://www.anglerguide.com/articles/112.html Winter Fishing Comes Naturally at Bear Lake, Utah Outdoors, https://www.utahoutdoors.com/pages/bear_lake_winter.htm Bonneville Cisco (Prosopium gemmifer) [Version 2020-04-20], Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, https://fieldguide.wildlife.utah.gov/?species=prosopium%20gemmifer Bonneville Cisco, USGS, https://nas.er.usgs.gov/queries/FactSheet.aspx?SpeciesID=922