June Recap

June was spent running in between Moapa and the Great Basin: we finished our Clark County surveys and buckled down to our riparian and pinyon-juniper surveys up north.

I started off the month in Moapa, then booked northward on the 2^nd.  I stopped off at McKinney tanks to let the pups run – and found this pronghorn buck munching at the old homesite.

The next morning, I surveyed a cottonwood gallery forest along the Walker River, and then – while waiting to meet up with a local rancher about permissions to survey on the ranch – let the pups out to run in a winterfat flat.  I got some great pics of winterfat for next year’s vegetation manual, but also got these great action photos of Min and Cash.

 

 

Then back south to confab with the crew – they were a bunch of great folks who enjoyed hanging out together.  This was taken in our field house parking lot!

 

Then back north – a Spotted Towhee male looks over his domain – toward a line of cottonwoods with a Bald Eagle nest!  You can’t see them in this photo of the pond at River Fork Ranch, but there were several Great Egrets and American White Pelicans hanging out here!

Then back again south.  My area search plots have a bunch of sunflowers – I took a break from bird watching to admire the flowers – this fall when I head back down there, the birds are going to be loving these stands – lots of sunflower seeds to munch!

SUPERMOON!  Sadly, I didn’t take any photos of the night before supermoon, when the skies were clear and the moon was still enormous in the sky.  But I enjoyed this evening too (6/23) – beautiful glimpses of moon through clouds.  And if you squint carefully at the lower photo, you can see the outlines of my crew in front of the field house, yakking and waiting for the clouds to clear.

Elisabeth came south on the 25^th, and we met up for a field visit with SNWA on the 26^th.  Here Dave caught a Woodhouse’s Toad on my area search plot!

Then on the 28^th, I headed north for good, and was driving northwest on the Extraterrestrial Highway when sunset descended – it was SPECTACULAR.  I pulled over to take this photo.  Sadly, it doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing!

On to July!