Off the Top of My Head: The Carden Challenge

I don't have time for a super long blog entry about my 24 hour birding/herping/mamal-ling/ode-ing/lep-ing adventure, but I absolutely wanted to share some highlights while I have 1/2 hour. Then my trashy tv + workout routine must begin! So, in 1/2 hour:

This year was my first competing in the Carden Challenge, an annual event to raise money for the Couchiching Conservancy which consists of counting all the wildlife you can find within a set count circle between 6 p.m. Friday - 6 p.m. Saturday. And there are trophies for different categories, adding major incentive to competitors!

Got up to Carden around 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon. VERY excited to get the challenge going. Rounded up coworkers Jen and Ali, and headed up to Team Captain Ginny's house to drop our bags and strap into our field gear for the evening ahead. We started at 6 on the dot and were rewarded the second we stepped outside of Ginny's door with a starling, a ruby-throated hummingbird and a blue jay, plus a chipmunk. Nice! Three birds down, who knows how many to go.. I was aware the records set for the area were in the 130s (yes, 130+ bird species in 24 hours) but had no idea where our little team would end up. A herper, a birder and two jacks of all trades (oh, though I had been assigned dragonfly/butterfly "expert" - HA!). And we were off!

There was lots of driving, which is a bit of a nice change from the LOTS of hiking that occurred on my last long birding adventure (Christmas bird count in December = 18 km on foot over 12 hours in 1C temps with rain - eek!). Can't say I minded the car time. A great chance to consult the guidebooks, discuss our next move, and cruise along with the windows open listening for birdies. For non birders, you can actually identify most birds by the songs they sing (oh and no bird sings just ONE song, they are so tricky like that!) and it counts if you can pick them out by ear. Thank goodness for Ginny's iTouch allowing us to corroborate what we were hearing with an amazing bird app that plays all the calls back to you! Within the first hour we'd picked up a ton of warblers, thrushes, a catbird, a spotted sandpiper. I'd realized my giant binoculars from the 1990s are like Zack Morris' cell phone and I'm definitely in need of an upgrade (why did I look through Ginny's $300 pair? why!? now I know what the good life is like..). We saw two northern watersnakes slithering across the road: our first herp species! We saw a deer on the side of the road - ya! It was a biodiversity flurry.

No butterflies and dragonflies were out in the cold, so I was technically off the hook that evening. As the sun set, the sky darkened and a giant full moon yawned over the flat alvar landscape, Carden changed into a completely different place. The nighttime birds emerged and it was like nothing I've ever heard before. A whip-poor-will sings "whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will" - repeating that call 20 times before taking a breath and starting again. Multiply that by hundreds of them. Over top of that was the common nighthawk, swooping from a great height in the sky, nearly hitting the ground and then rushing upwards again at the last minute causing the air to push through its wings, emitting a loud burping noise that was like nothing I've ever heard before. The air was lousy with Wilson's snipes - you could hardly hear the other birds over the wind rushing through their feathers in a haunted-sounding owl-like call as they soared sightlessly through the night air. We crept up Wylie Road (one of the most famous birding roads in North America, I've literally met people from China and the UK on it this spring alone!) and had to stop the car as a big red eye caught in our headlights - a whip-poor-will planted squatly in the middle of the road, daring us to come closer. Eventually I had to get out and sort of chase him away - silly fella. We broadcast a barred owl call and got not one but two owls answering us back. I felt so very lucky that night. The funniest was when we played a saw-whet owl call and a bird answered that left us all standing there open-mouthed - what WAS that? It wasn't any owl call I knew. But familiar. Turns out it was a black-billed cuckoo, for some reason awoken from slumber to have a chat with us at 11 p.m. (not a nocturnal bird at all) - I almost felt bad for waking him up and making him sleep talk (as we all know, I can relate to that for sure!

We slept for a ridiculously small 5 hour shift, then hit the road again at 6 a.m. and went for 12 hours straight. We were rewarded with raptors (osprey, hawks), more mammals (snowshoe hare, groundhog on a rock), herps ("toad"poles, green frogs, garter snakes), another ton of warblers (there are so many species!) and finally when the temperature warmed up enough out came the dragonflies and butterflies! It was a challenge for sure, trying to learn on the fly and identify these fluttering things, but I am happy to say I caught and ID'd a total of 7 d-flies and 8 b-flies and held my own pretty respectably against the other teams. Ginny was a HUGE help with ID of course. And where would I be without field guides! I was determined to catch all three "Baskettail" species and was rewarded in the last 10 minutes of our day with snagging one out of the air, thinking "only Beaverpond Baskettails would be flying that high!" - and I was right. YEEEAA!!! At that point, Jen was just unearthing a brown snake and a red-bellied snake from under some warm rocks - what a successful end to an awesome day!

A highlight of the afternoon was a stop at Ginny's friends' place (the greatest property/house in all history, which left us all wide-mouthed with jealousy - 100 acres, forests, fields, gardens, huge barn, beautiful house, pond, covered deck, you name it!) which consisted of a place to eat lunch, overlooking a pond, while a Blanding's turtle (a rare species at risk) stared up at us from the pond and a red-breasted nuthatch which had been eluding us ALL DAY started to call out of nowhere ("ank.. ank.. ank"). I will never forget Jen's face when she heard it and spun around and stared at me wordlessly with her mouth hanging open - priceless! I had gone off to investigate some tiny blue butterflies (they were all silvery blues, as much as I wanted one to be a spring azure!) and on my way back saw a stocky green heron crash land into a pine tree. What the heck! Awesome!!

We laughed a LOT, which made it a lot of fun! We were BEAT at about 3 p.m. but a baby Blanding's turtle on the road absolutely perked us up. We dipped on a few species (where are you Ebony Jewelwings?! and we missed the loggerhead shrike by 1.5 hours!) but overall were pleased with our results: 101 birds (we were dying to make it to 100 - an osprey head poking out of a nest did it!), 11 herps, 15 odes and leps and 7 mammals (mammal highlight was definitely coyotes yipping and howling on Friday night as the moon rose). We came in 4th out of 4 in our category - darn! Competitive Kristyn was a bit sad! But the next team only had a few points on us and the winning team only beat us by 30 points (diff species worth diff points, so likely beat us by about 20-25 species). The bird numbers for the competitive category were between 100-120, and in the rec category in the 70s, so we gave ourselves a pat on the wing for that accomplishment. And the winners were announced as we ate pie, so really, you can't go wrong doing anything while eating homemade cherry pie!

We never did see that moose that we joked about for, oh, 24 hours straight. The blue-winged warbler's "rude noise" call made me laugh until my stomach hurt. I ate (drumroll) 5 slices of pizza, a chocolate croissant, a bagel, a cookie, two granola bars, two homemade scones with jam and cream and a piece of banana bread with butter (yes, our lunch stop/hosts seriously rocked), potato salad, roast beef, two more scones, pie and cake - then decided I'm never eating again... We saw a fox on the road leaving Carden at 8:30 p.m. (blast! where was he 2 hours earlier!). We watched fields of pink Prairie Smoke (a spring alvar flower) roll by as we cruised down country roads. It was really a lovely 24 hours, and team Flickers, Skippers and Peepers (and yes, we got a Northern Flicker and a Spring Peeper - no skippers though, but did get a Twelve-spotted Skimmer - dragonfly) will for sure be considering an entry again in 2014. And this time, we WILL be contenders for that trophy!!! :)

Post script that my midnight bath when I finally made it home and sliding my hot tired feet against the cool sheets when I crawled in to bed may be contenders for the best moments ever, in history.

Ack! It's 7:57 and I still haven't added any pictures - here they come!!!

HA of course my photo uploader isn't working - are you kidding me blogger?! Alright, alright I'm PVRing my show, let's see what I can do here!