We were sitting in the shade of a rock outcrop. My dad had given me the comfortable rock alcove that perfectly cups your back when you relax into it. My dad was next to me leaning into his own alcove. As soon as we both sat down, joy came over us, that surge of happy endorphins after a hard hike. It was about a ¾ mile hike to the rock outcrop across rolling hills. We had angled slightly across the land parcel to stay out of sight of any pronghorn. We didn’t know whether any were back here. There is no way to tell from the road. And that is precisely why for the last three days we found this group hidden back here. Now we were perfectly positioned to watch 9 pronghorn grouped together on the private land side of the fence from our perch on public. This area of our hunt area has more forage than the other parcels we have been hunting. It also has more topography. On the adjacent private land, there is a wind-mill-powered well with water trickling over the edge to create a small stream that flows toward an intermittent waterway. There are willows between us and the pronghorn who graze mildly on the hillside. There are horses above them on the slopes and a farmhouse in the distance. I hunted this parcel Monday morning alone. I had been driving just before dawn along the main highway and spotted a group of 6 pronghorn grazing. I kept driving until I was out of sight of the pronghorn, did a U-turn and made my way back toward them to park at the pull-through on the side of the road. I silently crept out of my vehicle and grabbed back backpack, gun, and shooting sticks. I then crept along the fence line in the thick brush until I was at the base of a draw. The antelope were on the flat near the draw and all I had to do was creep out of sight toward them. I was crouched as low as I could go without crawling and moved slowly on my feet through the prickly pear cactus and yucca toward my target. The buck of the herd knew I was there and kept looking toward me. I figured he was getting those prickly feeling that one gets when engaged in a game of hide and seek. If you are the hider and you pay close attention to your body, you know when someone has spotted your hiding spot just by how your body reacts to the environment. Well, that is how I imagine the buck felt because as I crept closer and closer, he would stop to look in my direction and then graze for a while. He also started moving his herd to the north slowly, and I just stalked along behind until I found a yucca to hide behind on the crest of the draw. I got the antelope in the scope of my gun and started determining the sex and age of each animal. They were close enough for a shot, but I was alone and uncertain. On the rock outcrop, we watched the pronghorn from afar and my dad commented on their behavior. Young ones went to the water to drink and then chased one another along the slopes. The buck stayed as close as possible to the doe and chased her around a lot. When a truck drove by they all clumped together for protection. When there were no threats, they spread out, grazing and laying down in the hot 80-degree afternoon sun. As the buck and doe chased around, they started to get more and more aggressive with their game. The doe was running fast, cutting sharp turns, churning up the dust. Eventually their chase took them out of sight in the rolling hills below us, and I focused on watching the other animals graze and laze for a while. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the doe and buck moving toward our hunt area. I wasn’t sure if they were on our side of the fence or not, but my dad and I crept around the hills for a better view. As we crested a small rise, we spotted them in our unit, pushing inward toward the southwest. The doe leading the buck, him not letting her out of his sight or more than 20 yards away. As they went out of sight again, my dad lead us toward them, first crouching and then crawling on all fours toward a perch at the top of a hill. I knew he had them in sight when my dad went fully on his stomach and scooted as close as he could get. The buck and doe were in a small gully between two large hills. I positioned the doe in the scope of my mom’s .270 rifle and watched as she slowly walked along the gully. I waited a long time until she was broad side and stopped moving, told myself “Ok”, and squeezed the trigger. Both doe and buck ran away from us and up the hillside. They went out of sight for a moment as they hit the bottom of another gully and only the buck emerged on the other side. He trotted around, looking in her direction. As he continued to wonder what had happened, making large half-circles around her body, my dad and I stood up and made our way toward where the doe had disappeared. At first, I thought I had missed, but when she disappeared and the buck started dancing all around her, I knew that she must be laying there. We covered the 250 yards to where her body was laying on the ground, head pointing downslope and my dad congratulated me. The buck was still in sight as we took photos and made a plan for field dressing. I loved the stalking. I loved hearing my dad’s stories and thoughts. I loved watching all the pronghorn from afar. Taking the shot was extremely invigorating, but I was so confused afterward. Until I touched her with my hands, I did not believe that we had done it. In fact, I don’t think it felt truly real until I had her legs on my shoulder and was walking back to the car, feeling her weight on me and wondering what her young kids were thinking back at the watering hole when their mom was, mammary glands still heavy with milk, after three hours away from them. I feel happy to have pronghorn meat in the freezer and happy to have this experience with my folks. But I also feel extremely vulnerable by the experience. Hands holding warm flesh - cutting it up for my own consumption. She was so much bigger than the dissections in biology lab, heart filled my entire hand. I remember the blood bubbling out of the bullet hole in her side. Gases (farts) leaking out as we moved her guts out of her. Her long eye lashes. The blood clotted at her nose, the yellow of her front ripping teeth. The squirt of milk from her mammary tissue. The feel of her cartilaginous ears, the color of her beautiful white patched neck. The nicks and rips in her hoofs. The way the buck had pursued her, ready to create next year’s young. Many eyes are better than just your own. There were some instances during this year’s hunt where the pronghorn spotted us from so far away. I’d see them, lift my binoculars, and the pronghorn were already scoping us out and planning their escape. They run so smoothly through the landscape and they thrive on such limited resources. They are beautiful and strong, and I feel so lucky to have spent this fall with them.
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I've now been in the EBIO department for over a year. I guess this blog got lost in the weeds of graduate school. Fall classes last year included a departmental introductory course, a seminar on Land Degradation and Restoration, and a seminar on the ecology of ecosystem services. Spring classes included Spatial Ecology and a writing seminar. Most of my courses at SUNY-ESF required a hefty term-paper on topics from the course. Most of my courses at CU Boulder ask for manuscript-style papers which are often collaboratively written. I find these papers much harder to write because collaborative papers seem to fail when no one is the lead author and when no one has a strong vision for what the paper should be. I have not been a part of one that I am proud of.
This summer was spent in the laboratory. My lab assistant, Sallie is now a Master's student in the lab working on arid fungi. We went through hundreds of soil samples to pick out litter, weigh samples, and generally prepare for different analyses. Now it is the fall of 2020 and I am taking one course, Metagenomics with Noah Fierer and Hannah Holland-Moritz. I am not teaching, but instead I spend the majority of time in the lab working on chlorophyll a extractions, soil sugar extractions, and other soil analyses. I continue to co-organize the BioFrontiers QED Supergroup with Kate Bubar, and I have been deciding which departmental groups to stay involved with. The flow of school is so different now. Everything has moved to Zoom, we wear masks all day long on campus, we stay 6' away from all other people. It is such a relief to come home, take off the mask, and move without worry throughout the home. COVID is challenging, but it seems new challenges pop up constantly. The latest being several wildfires in the area, evacuations, and concern about air quality. Meanwhile, we are watching the presidential debates, Supreme Court justice hearings, and wondering what is going to happen in 10 days when the votes are cast. The bromeliad in our house bloomed this fall. I've read that they bloom once in their lifetime. The bloom has lasted months, waiting for the pollinators to come, but they have not. Instead, there is now an infestation of white scale decorating the flower's stem. It is hard to tell if they are salt crystals, snow, fungi, or insect until you poke and prod and feel their sticky feet and mouths rip from the stem. Sometimes I feel like the a scale, sucking resources from the EBIO department, unable to give much back. |
AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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