summer 2001 : features

Birds of the Valley

(click here for : an identification guide to local birds)

by Ken Retallic

What’s that brown duck over there?”

“Where?”

“Coming right at you, at about 11 o’clock.”

Squinting to see against the glare of the late afternoon sun, I made out the distinctive reddish-brown body and blood-red eyes of the small duck swimming along the west bank of the stream. 

“It’s a cinnamon teal.”

That short conversation occurred several years ago with a fishing companion who would walk bare-footed through a prickly pear patch to get to a good fishing hole. When it came to the rest of nature, he wore blinders. In five years of fishing together, that was the only time he asked me—the office “birding nut”—to identify a bird. Most other anglers I know are rarely any more curious about critters that don’t wear fins.

It’s not a bad combination, though, bird watching and fishing. Both birders and anglers can learn much from each other. Similar “double dipping” opportunities exist for hikers, bikers and inline skaters.

“Waterside birds can make a large contribution to a day on a stream or a lake,” the late Canadian fishing author and naturalist Roderick Haig-Brown noted in one of his essays. “I think we should be able to recognize most of them without difficulty and am always astonished because so many fishermen cannot. Heron, water ouzel (dipper), merganser, spotted sandpiper, osprey, kingfisher, and many others are all part of going fishing and it is a great pity not to know them.

“A good part of the pleasure of going fishing is in understanding these things, watching them and recording them in the mind, being able to name them and hold them for yourselves as valued things. Identifying them and knowing something about them gives you a special claim in your own world of the water’s edge, helps to make you a part of it instead of a mere intruder.”

But whether or not fishing is your bag, the importance of water to enhanced bird-watching success in the Intermountain West cannot be exaggerated.

Nor is it hyperbole to state the Ketchum and Sun Valley area is at the heart of one of the premiere bird-watching environs in the Northern Rockies: The Big Wood River–one of the great rivers of the West–runs through Blaine County. The Big Wood and its tributaries traverse a rich variety of habitat zones that harbor both montane and high desert wildlife. The Wood River Valley is surrounded by three major mountain ranges home to distinctive alpine species.

Three additional birding hot spots exist along the southern base of the valley: Silver Creek Preserve, managed by the Nature Conservancy, near Picabo; Centennial Marsh, south of Fairfield; and Carey Lake, east of Carey, managed by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

Rivers, streams, lakes and marshes are crucial to all the arid West’s wild critters. Biologists note that 75 percent of its wildlife depends on riparian habitat. Water-side cottonwoods, willows, dogwoods and other riparian shrubs, grasses, sedges, cattails and reeds provide habitat for more species of birds in the region than all other vegetation types combined. Also, for denizens of the high desert sagebrush-steppe or alpine bowls and conifer forests, a reliable nearby source of water is essential.

Since many of the region’s streams pass through these sagebrush deserts, mountain valleys or alpine bowls— isolated marshes, ponds or lakes are surrounded by similar topography—the bonus to birders is the chance to explore these habitat edges. Biologists call them ecotones, where species common to different niches and habitats share the bounty at the peripheries of both zones.

A local birding guide, Poo Wright-Pulliam of Tour du Jour, notes that one of her favorite outings is virtually in downtown Ketchum. She often takes classes down to the Wood River Trails System, where she can point out birds commonly found in streams or nearby riparian shrubs and cottonwoods. Then she’ll turn them around and direct their attention to the birds found in the sagebrush and clump grasses of the south-facing slopes above the river.

A “trick of the trade” I like to use is to cruise high banks along river trails. These often put you at eye level to the tops of cottonwoods, where you can use binoculars to follow birds feeding or nesting in the tree tops. Open spaces in the trees and wide bends of the river let you explore the riparian zones.

Another choice is to walk the paths along stream banks pioneered by anglers.

Perhaps the best local map available is “Fishing the Wood River Valley.” Published by the Blaine County Recreation District, it details more than 50 public access sites where parking and hiking along the valley’s streams are permitted.

The 20-mile, paved Wood River Trails System, radiating down the valley from Ketchum/Sun Valley to Hailey and Bellevue, provides numerous opportunities to let the mindless stress of work drift away by watching nature in action.

North of Ketchum, the Harriman Trail also flirts with the Big Wood River for more than 18 miles, all the way up to Galena Lodge. Other excellent trails are found along Warm Springs Creek, extending west from Ketchum, and Trail Creek and Corral Creek, near Sun Valley.

These incredible systems of pedestrian pathways lead both avid bird-watchers and newcomers to the sport to a rich variety of songbirds, raptors and waterfowl close to home. Again, if fishing’s not your thing, just lace up a pair of tennis shoes, strap on a pair of Roller Blades, or hop on a bicycle and head on down the pathways with your eyes peeled for wildlife.

Then, for alpine adventurers, there is the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. An information guide and map and a bird checklist are available at the SNRA headquarters, eight miles north of Ketchum, and its visitor center, nearly 60 miles north of Ketchum and just south of Stanley.

A pair of binoculars and a pocket-sized bird identification field guide aid documentation of your bird sightings. A small notebook and pen also should be in your pocket or backpack, especially if you plan to start a journal or keep a Life List of Birds.

Learning to identify bird calls can be as useful as carrying a pair of bino-culars. The bonus is being able to follow the activity or presence of some birds in an area while keying on the movements for others. 

Also–if you’ll allow one more tip from a fly-fisher–many birds, like the trout and whitefish, eagerly feed on the aquatic insect “hatches” of the Big Wood, Silver Creek and other Western streams. These so-called hatches occur within predictable time frames, so, grill one of your neighborhood fly-fishing fanatics on dates and locations.

In all, more than 200 species of birds have been recorded in the region. Fewer than half reside here year-round, although most of them are unique to the West. The majority are summer visitors raising new broods or migrants that just pass through in spring or fall.

First-time visitors from the East Coast, for example, will find numerous opportunities to record birds found only in the West.

For starters, there’s the cinnamon teal mentioned above and, of course, Idaho’s state bird, the mountain bluebird.

All four species of hummingbirds recorded here–rufous, calliope, black-chinned and broad-tailed– do not occur east of the Rocky Mountains.

The broad-tailed hummingbird was first recorded for science by the Lewis and Clark Expedition in Idaho. Other birds the Corps of Discovery revealed in the Gem State were the spruce grouse (Franklin’s form), western tanager, Steller’s jay and Clark’s nutcracker (named for William Clark).

The Lewis’s woodpecker (named for Meriwether Lewis) and the Williamson’s sapsucker also are found only in the West.

First-time visitors to our sagebrush grasslands will discover the sage grouse, sage thrasher, western meadowlark, common poorwill and rock wren, among other species.

Of the more colorful birds native to the West and typically found in riparian areas, there are the western tanager, violet-green swallow, MacGillivray’s warbler, green-tailed towhee, spotted towhee, black-headed grosbeak, lazuli bunting and lesser goldfinch.

Nondescript birds often overlooked, but personal favorites of mine, are the mountain chickadee, black-billed magpie, dipper (formerly known as the water ouzel), eared grebe, western grebe, Clark’s grebe and long-billed curlew.

River environs never rest; their residents are ever busy. For me, birds amplify a stream’s idyllic moods as flows of avian chatter wash through reeds and brush. But, just as often, the whims of nature catapult such prosaic pastimes into dynamic melodramas.

At other times, a strident chattering typically announces the flight of a kingfisher from one snag overhanging a river to another. It’s a brief and welcoming background noise on a stream as the tiny indigo dive bomber flies to a perch over a new fishing site.

One day, an incessant clamor echoing off the walls of a river canyon caused me to take a longer look around. I spotted the screeching kingfisher darting and wheeling along the far bank, barely skimming the surface of the river. Splashes marked its flight as it weaved and bobbed in frantic maneuvers to escape a goshawk.

Silence descended on the canyon when the kingfisher darted into a tangle of willows. The tumult erupted again when the patrolling raptor flushed his prey. Their whirling aerial combat coursed up and down the river for another five minutes until the ghostly gray marauder gave up the chase.

It was just another electrifying day in paradise.