That trek was for the birds
“The birds are kind of flying right in your face,” Jess Garby of Flathead Audubon said, referring to Jewel Basin Hawk Watch.
Garby packed the room at the Bigfork library last month. Then people pulled up chairs to sit outside the door. From there they still saw Garby’s slides and the video clip of a hawk zipping across the sky, nearly coming to a dead stop in air as an owl decoy caught its eye before wheeling to take a sharp turn toward it.
You could imagine it thinking, “What’s that owl doing in broad daylight? I better check that.”
Jewel Basin is one of about 10 survey sites in Montana. This is the 18th year that watchers will set up the fake great horned owl — now missing an eye from a dive-bomb — and record thousands of migrating birds between August and November.
“Why do we hawk watch?” Garber mused. “Other than a great way to spend your day, it’s a really inexpensive way to monitor raptor populations.”
Garby’s enthusiasm shined throughout. Some birds were “flappy,” flew “like a plank” or “look surprised.” Others, like the comparatively small sharp-shinned hawk, look like you could hold them in your hand “like an ice cream cone.” After the lesson in raptor identification (“Get the genus first”), I couldn’t wait to see the birds.
On the chosen Sunday my friend and I made an early start for the Camp Misery Trailhead. I reviewed my notes so I could tell an Accipiter from a Buteo, or Falco from Aquila.
I expected the expedition would take half a day and my friend would have plenty of time to pick up her brother at the airport in late afternoon.
Naturally, we got lost.
It is humbling all the ways we failed, such as:
• No navigation tool that didn’t depend on reception. This put us in the sad state of staring at a phone while traipsing around beautiful country — exactly the setting one seeks to get away from staring at a phone. I could have borrowed a hiking map from the Kalispell library.
• Not enough gear. The weather forecast predicted precipitation but not until later. Surely we'd be done hiking by then, if we hadn’t taken that wrong turn. The rain came right on schedule.
• Not enough time. When we realized how we might right our expedition, we didn’t have the time to backtrack. As my friend said, “I’m not scared of bears. I’m scared of my brother.”
The upside? Hiking about the jewels of Northwest Montana, including the mountain ash flaming up the slopes, huckleberries hanging on and lakes glinting between peaks.
We also had time to parse world problems. For instance, it seems well established that the people who hate the hardest are those with the guns, blackest hearts, and bleakest view of the future.
Now let’s see who can love the hardest.
The next day I told a colleague what happened. A hawk watcher himself, he knew where we went wrong: “They call it ‘malfunction junction’ for a reason.” At the five-way, we should have taken Trail 717 instead of 7.
We'll do better next time.
Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at mdavis@dailyinterlake.com.