Day 15 - Lake Abert

As we drove along Hwy 395, it began climbing into some mountains and soon we could see a vast expanse of white land, a dry alkali lake. This was the Lake Abert of the previous map. The road was high above the area and we drove and drove and drove with the whiteness always below us and to the right. At one point I said that I thought there was some actual water in the lake, but there was only a thin shoulder to this road and Ivan, who was driving, didn't want to do a 'Nora' and pull half-way onto the shoulder and remain half-way on the road! He did find a pull-out area and we were astonished to see hundreds of waterfowl on this possibly caustic lake. We set up the scope and started counting the species: Avocet, Shoveler, Black-necked stilt, Killdeer, and then we started hearing a rapid series of single-note calls. The calls were clearly coming from closer than the level of the lake, but we couldn't figure out who was doing it. Then we saw the caller - a Loggerhead shrike! It was pretty far below us, too far for a good photo, but as we watched, it treated us to a fly-catching demonstration, launching itself into the air with a flourish of black, grey and white. It caught some unfortunate creature and landed on another shrub, again too far to photograph.

For the non-birders in the group, a Loggerhead shrike is a robin-sized bird that looks a bit like a robber with a black 'mask' across its eyes. It's a predator of arthropods, and medium-sized insects like grasshoppers. If you look closely at the photo, which I took from the web, you'll see that it has a hooked beak. It catches its prey, then holds the prey in its mouth as it flies somewhere where it can impale the creature on some sort of spike (often accomplishing this by using barbed wire fence spikes), and then it can eat the critter. This is a beautiful bird and we were thrilled to see it.