June 2015: Pete and Re-Peat. Animal watching at Camas Wildlife Management Area (Again)

This may be the lark I was talking about

I work in the theatre.  I do set design, lighting design and sometimes costume design,  Usually not all at once.  Currently I am designing lights for CATS so I don't have a lot of time for getting out and doing a lot of outdoorsy stuff.  But last Thursday I had a short break because it was a tech rehearsal for sound only and my stuff wasn't being looked at and I couldn't be in the theatre working whilst they were doing their stuff.  So I had about four hours to myself that I wasn't expecting.

I came home and announced to the Hot Chick that I was home for the evening but had to go back at about eleven pm for focusing and that I wanted to go out and do something with her.  She hadn't been expecting to see me for days (because that's the way technical theatre is) so she had already made plans.  I asked my boys if they wanted to do something, but they had already made plans too.  They know the drill when I'm working on a show.

So, on a lark, I decided to drive out to Camas Wildlife Management Area by myself and hang out with those friends.  I had already been to Camas WMA three times this season, but I believe that if a thing is worth doing it is worth overdoing.  I headed out to Hamer, Idaho which is where the Camas WMA is located.  It's about twenty minutes to the WMA from my home.  When I got to Camas, I turned the radio in my car off so as not to frighten the birds and I entered my own private Idaho.  From the time I entered Camas til the time I left, I didn't see another human being besides myself.

Camas WMA is a drive through wetlands.  I am not sure if they are natural wetlands or if they have been engineered.  If they are natural wetlands, there has been a little engineering done to them.  The road is on a dike between ponds and steppe.  At one time this was a ranch though.  That much I know.  It is possible that the ponds were put in a hundred years ago for watering livestock.  I have seen that at other WMA's.  Sand Creek WMA is a former ranch with ponds created for livestock a hundred years ago, for example.

If you follow the designated route at Camas, you get steppe on the right side of the car and wetlands on the left.  Basically that means you get waterfowl on the left and raptors on the right.  There's probably a political metaphor there, but I don't wish to explore that right now.

First animal I saw

Showy Milkweed lined the canal banks in the first section of the WMA

The first section of the drive was pretty uneventful.  It was pleasant but nothing really spectacular.  There were water birds on the ponds but they were far away and I don't have a big enough lens to get good shots of them.  Over the steppe there were lots of raptors flying.  Mostly hawks but I think I saw a peregrine falcon dart overhead.  Once again, I didn't have a big enough lens to get good shots of them.  I have a friend at the library who says when you see something you can't photograph you have to take a heart shot of it.  So I did that.

I did see three raptors fighting mid-air over a mouse, though.  That was cool.  I took some pics but the birds were too far away and my 250mm zoom was too small to capture them.  Don't get me wrong, I love my 250mm zoom lens.  It's awesome and I use it all the time.  Great lens.  To get some of the shots I wanted at Camas last Thursday, though I would have needed a 400mm or a 600mm lens.  At that point, though, I have to decide if I'm becoming a professional photographer or if I am content to stay an amateur photographer.  Professional photography sounds like a job to me.  Not sure if I want another one of those.  I like the one I've got.

Raptor in flight

The first big pond.  One of these days I'll learn the names of the ponds.  That would probably help

Coot

Don't remember what kind of duck or other waterbird this is

Raptors fighting over a kill.  This illustrates the limitations of my 250mm lens.  It's a cool shot, but I had to crop it a great deal to get this image

Third bird coming in for the prey

Pretty cool shot nevertheless

Then it started to get more interesting.  I rounded the bend and came across a couple of sandhill cranes.  I think cranes are elegant birds and I love to watch them.  Then I saw a porcupine right at the side of the road.  I hung out with him for awhile.  I put the zoom right at 250mm and got as close as I could without scaring him (or her as the case might have been, didn't get close enough to find out) and snapped a lot of pictures.  After awhile he became aware of me and I left.  I want to view the animals, I don't want to scare them.

Then came owl time.  I've always liked owls but hadn't seen very many of them in my life until I started hanging out at WMA's.  Turns out if you want to see owls you have to go to where they are.  They are mesmerizing.

At the last major pond, I saw black-necked stilts, which I had never seen before.  They were really interesting.  I think they fall under the category of wading birds.  They have black and white plumage with long, pink legs.  Great color combo for a designer.

On the way out of the WMA I saw a couple of whitetail deer and a great blue heron in the distance.  Still waiting for the iconic great blue heron picture.  I'll have to be satisfied with distance shots for awhile longer.

Sandhill cranes doing

what sandhill cranes do

The porcupine, trying to make a living

Minding his own business

At one point he shook himself out.  I wonder if he was getting his quills ready.  Dunno

Doing his thing

I think he became aware of me here

So I left and he left.  They can move quite fast

And he hid with his tail hanging out of the culvert.  I didn't stick around for any more shots of him.  I think I had worn out my welcome at this point.

Owl in flight

again

stop being so cool!

I liked the sun glowing through the feathers

here too

Just landed

Wait, more pictures of owls flying?

Enough already

Getting ridiculous

At last, an owl doing something else

Owls blink.  Didn't know that before this year

This guy was very patient.  Let me take a whole bunch of pictures without flying off

He did keep track of me though.

Black-necked stilts

Black-necked stilts

Black-necked stilts

Deer

Another one

Elegant movement

Great blue heron

As I drove home, I thought, "I'm alone, there are some dirt roads out here in the desert I haven't been on yet..."  You get the drill.

I found some really cool roads out in the lava flows.  Some of them weren't bad...  I didn't take a lot of photos out there because I was too busy navigating and making sure I could get out.  It was starting to get dark.  They are roads I will go on again.  Lots of places I want to see.  I'll walk out into the brush sometime to explore, but I'll make sure to have a rattlesnake stick with me.  Just saying.

There was a road the Hot Chick and I saw at Deer Park when we went out there during monsoon season and I wanted to see where it went.  We drove a quarter of a mile down it and saw a mini-van stuck up to it's axles in the mud.  We turned around and left.  Last Thursday I thought, "I'll bet that mud puddle has dried up..."

So I took that road.  So you know, it is not a road I'll take the Hot Chick on.  I liked it a lot, but she would not.  It would have been a lot better if I had been driving a Baja Bug or a sand rail instead of a mini-van.  That road was up and down with deep, extinct rivulets from monsoon season that I had to navigate around.  Big lava rocks in the road I had to go around or get out and move.  High points, low points, banked turns.  Baja Bug territory.  It was getting late and starting to get dark and I probably drove faster on this road than I should have.  Doesn't mean I wasn't having a very good time though.  I was.

I got out to the river and couldn't find the bridge out.  As I looked, I drove over an area that was loose pea gravel and I started to sink down to the axles in the mini-van.  I romped on the gas and drove out, so no harm, no foul.  As I drove out of that area, I could tell where the highway was, so at every junction in the road, I veered left toward the main road.  That's kind of how the roads go out in the desert.  They all end up somewhere.  Just point yourself in that direction and go.  I also stayed on roads that were more established and better traveled.

As I was trying to navigate through the gravel and through the lava rock steppe, I realized I hadn't turned the radio back on after I left Camas.  I did so and the first song I heard was Alice Cooper's, "Hey Stoopid!"  Fitting  'nuff said.

Golden hour light on the lava rock formation

I'll hike in here with a rattlesnake stick someday

This is why I live in Idaho!

In case you were wondering

June 2014 Idaho: Hell's Half Acre Lava Flow

Sign for Hell's Half Acre Trail

Our sister, D'lynn has been visiting with us for a couple of weeks.  It's been nice to have her here.  We've been showing her all the cool things about Idaho.  Her husband is retiring from the military very soon, so we are recruiting!

When the Hot Chick and I were a young married couple, one of my aunts passed away and we attended the funeral and the graveside service.  It was in Moreland, Idaho which is close to Blackfoot.  My parents had a plot already purchased in that cemetery and I made a comment that I'd like to be buried there someday too. The Hot Chick said, "What if I want to be buried by my family?"  I hadn't thought of that.  We told that to her father and he said, "Oh, didn't you know?  Your grandpa is buried in that cemetery."  Turns out my grandma and the Hot Chick's grandma were besties.

Every year, on Memorial Day we make the pilgrimage to the Moreland Cemetery and dress the graves of not only my Dad but also her grandparents.  D'lynn had never been to her grandparents' grave and expressed a desire to do so while she was here.  We made a day of it.

Stop #1  Hell's Half Acre nature trail:  The North side
Idaho does a lot of things right.  One of those things is having nice rest areas along the highways.  There was a lava flow approximately 5200 years ago in southeast Idaho.  It's a pretty big formation comprised actually of two flows, each about six miles long by three miles wide.  If my math is correct it's about 360 square miles of lava flow.  Parts of the flow are recognized as Natural National Landmarks and are administered by the National Park Service and the BLM.

The park service has created an interpretive trail on both sides of I-15 with the trailheads in the parking lot of the rest area.  We visited the north side (which on the map really looks like it's west but Wikipedia called it the north side) first to walk the flow.  It's only about a mile of paved trail and most parts are accessible by wheelchair.  There is interpretive signage in several places along the trail.  I like to walk the flow at least once every year or two.  I've always loved this section of Idaho.  I thought it would make a great movie location. About a week ago I had the opportunity to fly over it and I took several pictures which I posted on the Beantown part 1 blog post.

This flow is primarily a pahoehoe flow, meaning the molten rock was viscous and held together very well as opposed to an a'a flow which is less viscous and more jagged.  Pahoehoe, begins to cool on the surface and while it's still elastic the molten rock underneath pushes the hardening lava into ropelike formations.  A'a, on the other hand breaks up into small boulders with jagged, sharp edges.  Both are Hawaiian words to describe the lava.  I had a science teacher once who suggested that a'a was so named because it was the sound the native Hawaiians made as they walked across it in bare feet.  Who knows if that is true or not?

All over the flow there are lava tubes and chambers that have collapsed so the surface of the earth here is extreme.  Lava flows are one of the defining geological features of the Snake River Plain.  The signage has to do with the geology of the site as well as the ecology of the site.  Signs talk about the types of lava, the animals and plants that have found a home here and the forces of geology that have both created this alien landscape and are destroying it, making it sink back into the desert.  I find this kind of stuff very interesting. Whether you are interested in reading the signs or not, the views are spectacular.  I recommend this hike.

I won't bore you with the play by play on this one, I think I'll just get to the pictures.  This is the first time I've been to the site this early in the year.  I was amazed at the variety of wildflowers I witnessed here.  I usually don't see wildflowers because I visit here in August when most of them have gone to seed.

To the pictures.

Sisters

Life and Death

I believe this to be Morning Glory

Crack in the flow where a lava tube collapsed

Prickly pear cactus and bud

A'a flow

Prickly pear blooms

If Arnold was a bumblebee, he would be the pollinator

Side view of the prickly pear

Beardtongue

Prodigious amount of prickly pear.  You can eat this and drink the nectar in a survival situation, by the way 

Juniper berries

Pahoehoe, the most common type of lava on this flow

Little caves and caverns are everywhere out here

Where a lava tube collapsed

Mariposa lily and friend

Unsure what this flower is

Beautiful larkspur

Two of the Three Sisters.  Three mountains, each formed in a different way but all related to the volcano

What the sky looked like

 Hole in the ground

What a four hundred year old juniper looks like

Crack in the ground

Another cave made by a collapsed lava tube

I had never seen this cottonball looking thing on sagebrush before

Big, twisted juniper

Unsure what this white flower is

Stop #2  Moreland Cemetery
We didn't spend a lot of time photographing this cemetery.  We had just been there the other day and had dressed the graves and photographed them.  We also spent hours there one day last year photographing every tombstone in the place for my son's Eagle Project for the Boy Scouts of America.  I will post a photo of the grave we came to visit but it was taken at an earlier time.

The Robertson grave we came to see.  Photo was taken on Memorial Day, 2014

Stop #3  Hell's Half Acre nature trail:  The south side (which is really the east side if you believe the map)
On the way back home we stopped for part II of the lava flow trail.  This trail has a shorter trail that is wheelchair accessible and a longer trail that is not because it involves a couple of flights of stairs.  The nature trail and interpretive materials are at the same time similar and different.  The landscape is somewhat different on this side of the freeway as well.  It seemed to me there was more foliage and more loess (windblown sediment) had collected, creating a place for plants to grow.  Enough talk, let's look at pictures.

Sign for the South (East) trailhead

Apparently we have a white thistle called "Hooker's Thistle"  Who knew?  Throw in a pollinator for good luck.

The dead wood here doesn't rot with any frequency.  This stuff is almost mummified

This has been dead here for a very long time

More pahoehoe

Could this be a den of some animal?

Cracked basalt

Lichen covering this bush

Sisters

Lichen, where life begins in the steppes

Fall colors but it isn't fall

A pika.  Short eared rabbit that is native to the steppes of Idaho

Lava tube collapsed

Small desert fern

Sage

Everybody thinks they can make a living here

The old man.  This may be the oldest juniper tree on the flow.  Huge.  Maybe a
thousand years old.

I still don't know what this is but I like it.

Dense pack

Hell's Half Acre is one of my favorite places in southeast Idaho.  I love to drive through it, hike through it and fly over it.  I imagine what it must have looked like when it was molten.  I have a bit of time in Craters of the Moon National Monument lately because business trips have taken me through there.  That flow is about 3000 years younger than this one.  When I visit Craters I try to imagine what it would look like in the future. I have a pretty good idea because of Hell's Half Acre.  Very similar landscapes, formed in very similar fashion.  Craters is more of an a'a flow whereas Hell's Half Acre is more of a pahoehoe flow.  However, when the loess begins to fill it in and the plants take root, ultimately it will look very similar.  I love this place and I love Idaho.  The wonders of nature are all around us here.  Come and see us sometime.