Every birding festival is different. The Great Salt Lake Bird Festival, based in Davis County, Utah, provided field trips to some interesting sites—and a keynote speaker with great photos who, alas, overstayed his welcome.
First up was a walk in Dimple Dell Regional Park, in the foothills of the Wasatch Front, led by Tori Sohn and Rachel Lake. A focus of this walk was the flora of the region, so I got first looks at several common plants that I would see throughout the trip, from Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) (no pic?!) to Gambel Oak (Quercus gambelii) to Lewis Flax (Linum lewisii). Also picked up my first lifer, a bird that I would see often in Utah, Lazuli Bunting (Passerina amoena) (LAZB).
Rachel lumped all the sagebrush into Big Wyoming Sage; she said that there is an entire manual just for Artemisia ID.
There were reaches of the creek running through the canyon that were wet, but most of it was dry, as in the photo.
In the evening, Adam and Marzena Blundell led a short walk through Mountain Wilderness Park, ending at their home, fitted with a multitude of bird feeders. More LAZB, including a good look at a female.
Next day was a drive-stop-bird-repeat trip up Diamond Fork Canyon with leader Keeli Marvel. The canyon is in Utah County, southeast of Springville. I quickly caught on that everyone had a a different pronunciation of lazuli (Z or ZH, for instance), but less quickly that I have been pronouncing this word wrong for decades. Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis), another western speciality; Canyon Wren (Catherpes mexicanus) at the top of the Red Ledges outcrop, with a voice that sounds like a ball bouncing downstairs; and a nifty butterfly, Sagebrush Checkerspot (Chlosyne acastus). It was nice to get some decent photos and audio of an east-west bird, Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens).
Stephanie Greenwood took us through Springhill Geologic Park in North Salt Lake. This is a lemons-to-lemonade recovering natural space. One of the dirty little secrets I learned from this trip to Salt Lake is that the foothills are mined for Lake Bonneville gravel, with houses perched on the ridgeline above. The residents of this patch were not so lucky; a slow-moving landslide in the 90s ultimately dispatched about a dozen homes.
Song Sparrows here demonstrated some of their regional dialects; Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus) like suburbs as much as their congener White-taileds do; we saw lots of Arrowleaf Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata), which I would continue to see farther north; I found several very sluggish Obscure Darkling Beetles (Eleodes obscura), some of them showing unusual behavior: one was flopped over on its back as if dead, another showed a head-down posture.
Sunday was my destination trip, a school bus ride (leaders: Max Malmquist and Jaimi Butler) (I sat in Scatlett’s seat) down the washboard road to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The work is beached now, with the dusty pink water so special to Smithson a good half mile walk away. I packed for this trip prepared for bugs and sun, but on this day we got chilly wind and a bit of rain.
The area has been explored for petroleum, and there are scattered seeps of sticky tar that can catch wildlife unawares. Some opportunities for botanizing along the remains of the structures built to support the mineral exploration: a native wild rye, Squirreltail (Elymus elymoides).
We reached the water! Salt concentrations run very high here (as a taste test confirmed); winds whip up the salt into ephemeral whitecaps. Catch a bit in your hand and give your fellow birder a Salt Lake high five!
Oh yes, birds. We stopped at the Golden Spike National Historical Park, where a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) was tending near-fledglings—this is why you go with a guide. A fleeting look at Gray Partridge (Perdix perdix) from the vehicle—not many field marks visible in my grainy photos but what else could it be?
I got an even briefer look at another western specialty that I’m not going to count, and I missed MacGillivray’s Warbler (seen by others) on two trips.