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<\/p>\nPlus some interesting and\u00a0often tragic history of Utah’s west desert.<\/p>\n
Yesterday the weather\u00a0radar and forecast\u00a0indicated we might finally have a minor\u00a0break from our recent inversion\u00a0so I\u00a0spent most of the day in the west desert in search of blue sky and birds. I found some of both (more blue sky than birds though)\u00a0and since I’m a history nut I thought I’d include a bit of a historic\u00a0travelogue in today’s post.<\/p>\n
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We\u00a0started out in Skull Valley where temps as low as 12\u00b0 F. covered absolutely everything with a thick layer of hoar frost. We visited the old\u00a0ghost town of Iosepa<\/a> but that early in the morning everything there was backlit so I didn’t take any photos.<\/p>\n Many\u00a0readers from other parts of the country likely are only aware of remote Skull Valley because of the\u00a0notorious 1968\u00a0Skull Valley Sheep Incident<\/a>\u00a0where the army at Dugway\u00a0conducted an open air VX nerve agent test, killing 8000 sheep in the process, and then lied about it. It was\u00a0major national news back then and scared the hell out of all us along the\u00a0Wasatch Front because a wind shift could easily have carried\u00a0nerve agent our way.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Some history buffs will be well aware of the notorious Hastings Cutoff<\/a>, an alternative route for California bound pioneers in the mid-1800’s. Because the ill-fated Donner Party<\/a> took\u00a0this route in 1846\u00a0all of them suffered and many died\u00a0when they reached the High Sierras, famously eating their own stock animals and each other in their attempt to survive.<\/p>\n Here we see part of the Hastings Cutoff in front of my pickup as it approaches one of the many “island mountain ranges” in the west desert (photo taken in Skull Valley). This is truly desolate (but beautiful) country.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n We ended up at Simpson Springs the site of an old Pony Express station. There’s lots of history here too including the more recent\u00a0tragic story of Susan Cox Powell. From Wikipedia:<\/p>\n Josh Powell claimed to have been camping with his young sons at Simpson Springs on the night Susan disappeared and many suspect she is buried in the area of the springs but her body has never been found. That possibility always spooks me a little when I visit Simpson Springs.<\/p>\n But yesterday\u00a0we were focused on a search for birds and eventually we found a few feeding on juniper “berries” in some of the trees.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n They were Juniper Titmice. Until ten years ago the Juniper Titmouse and the Oak Titmouse were classified as a single species – the Plain Titmouse. Virtually all of the studies that have been done on\u00a0North American\u00a0titmice were done on\u00a0the easier to study “Oak” variety but it turns out\u00a0that many of the morphologic, colorimetric, genetic, vocal, and ecologic traits of the two species are dramatically different.<\/p>\n So the Juniper Titmouse of today is a surprisingly poorly known species and\u00a0there is “little published information on their\u00a0foraging ecology, territoriality, juvenile dispersal, breeding biology, and demography”\u00a0and little is known of the diet of this species. About all I could find is that it includes both invertebrates and seeds. They’re known to be an important consumer of pinyon pine seeds but I found no mention of their namesake seed in their diet\u00a0– the Utah Juniper (Juniperus osteosperma). <\/em><\/p>\n But that’s exactly what I found this one feeding on. These hard and tough “berries” (they’re really female cones and the juniper species name osteosperma <\/em>means “bony seed”\u00a0)\u00a0contain only a single seed and they’re difficult to get at so the technique used by this bird was to secure the berry between its feet and hammer away at it with its bill. The hammering sound strongly resembled that of a woodpecker which helped us to locate the birds in the dense vegetation.<\/p>\n This bird had already been hammering a while before this shot was taken but now we can see a thin crack in that tough little berry.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The titmouse hammered some more and then used its bill to wedge the crack open wider…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n and finally was able to retrieve that precious single\u00a0seed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I assumed it would gobble the seed down on the spot but it didn’t.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n With the seed still in its bill it glanced backwards and then…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n vacated the premises. This species is known to cache food so I suspect that was on its agenda.<\/p>\n As I mentioned previously very little is known about this species. In most areas of study Cornell’s Birds of North America Online simply listed what is known about the Oak Titmouse and sort of hoped that it would also apply to the Juniper Titmouse or they said they had\u00a0“no information”.<\/p>\n So if you know of any budding ornithologists looking for a study project perhaps the Juniper Titmouse would be a worthy subject.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Plus some interesting and often tragic history of Utah’s west desert.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/hastings-cutoff-9826-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"hastings-cutoff-9826-ron-dudley\\"")
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