Sorry it has been awhile since my last post….lots of early mornings and long days. Well I’ll try to catch up on the last two weeks or so. We have still been getting lots of moisture and little amounts of sun. The last two weeks the sun rises earlier and earlier every morning and so we have to leave earlier. Our leks we are counting are no longer near our house either we have had to drive about 2 hours to most of them now every morning. So many mornings we are leaving by 3:30am. But we have been able to get to pretty much all of our leks now and have finished most of our counts there are only two more leks to hit next we and we have our full counts. We are going to get some fourth counts on some leks done next week too.
We went to find a possible new lek two weeks ago on a ranch that the Division of Wildlife is trying to get a conservation easement on. This particular lek happens to be in a very large basin pretty much owned by two different people. This basin is used by elk as a winter range and there are over 3000 that spend the winters there. We saw about 1000 scattered around the basin when we went in and I’m sure there were plenty more over the little hills in the bottom. We scared up about three or four hundred just when we drove in. It was a pretty cool sight to see. Oh and we did find the lek it had only three males on it but those three males will go a long way to getting the easement passed.
We tried to go in to a lek the Friday of that week that no one had ever been to. It was about 4:00am and so its dark, plus we had never been in this area before. We followed our map to this marked two-track road. The road hasn’t seen much traffic in the last few years, probably none at all. We drive for a few miles and come to a wash and we can’t really see into it, so we get out and check it and its really not that deep so we try to drive across and then we are stuck. We did not judge the width of the wash correctly. So we are hung up on the front on one side of the bank and the back on the other side of the bank. We have at least two tires off the ground and the other two giving us some movement. So we start to dig and dig and dig. Then it starts to snow and rain making mud where we are digging. So after about two hours of digging in the dark and wet we are able to get it out. And by that time the main road was getting pretty sloppy so we just headed out and really did not accomplish much in the way of lek counts that morning.
This last Monday and Tuesday we went electro-fishing with the fish crew out of Meeker. The first day we only caught seven fish that needed to be removed consisting of Northern Pike and Small Mouth Bass. We did also catch two Round-tail Chubbs and one Colorado Pikeminnow. The Pikeminnow is endangered and they are trying to increase its population in this river. I netted the Pikeminnow and also one of the Chubbs. Tuesday was a much better day for fish. We had an extra biologist show up that day though so I was banished to the processing boa, which I had fun on. We got to race up and down the river between the two boats and mostly just float down the river and have a good time. We just measured and weighed the fish that the two boats caught all day. We caught 73 of the fish to be removed and one White fish and one really nice Pikeminnow. The Pikeminnow was close to twenty inches and they were pretty happy to see it in that area since they had never caught one in that reach. And over the two days of electro-fishing we got stuck a few times but it seems that it is much easier to get a boat unstuck than an explorer!
Wednesday We went back to Blue Mountain and finished our final counts there and we even were able to get in to one lek we hadn’t been in to yet. We then drove back into the Sand Wash management area where we had been stuck previously on the last Friday so we could find the lek when it was light. We found it and found a much better route to get to it which was nice! I also got to see feral/wild horses for the first time and got some good pictures! So that was pretty cool. Then we started looking for prairie dogs. And well we found some just right as we entered the search area. What a great day! We did the next search area and saw some pretty cool landscape. As we were coming around just under the peak of this mountain on the way out of our search area we slid off the road. We had been driving pretty slow on this road that was just wet enough to cake sticky mud on our tires and once it’s on its like driving on ice. We decided to drive the rest of the way off the road so we could just run it back up on the road since the ground off the road wasn’t as wet. Well needless to say that did not work…. And the back tires slipped in to a little wash and we were stuck, again. But where we went off was the best place the others areas were really steep and would not have turned out so well. So we call our boss and he started in to pick us up. So we stared to walk out with all our gear. The GPS says its only 2 miles to the road we want to get to cross-country. Well what I forgot was it doesn’t take into account elevation change. So it turns out that 2 miles was really 6 miles. But we made it out and got home. We went back on Friday and got it out once things had dried up and so it’s back to it on Monday. We are doing a bunch of different things this week and I’ll try to update at the end the week!
