My first season of bald eagle nestwatch placed me on the the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. Pulling into the unexpected camp at the edge of the illegal dump, my new nest partner and I stood in stunned disappointment as the Game and Fish truck pulls away. The site is desert scrub nestled along an anemic creek. A single track of dusty road weaves its way beyond Peridot, Arizona through the dumping grounds of the Apache residents, past overturned easy boy recliners, skeletons of horses, Elmo suspended in a straggly bush. It is bleak.
I look over at Anna and could feel the tears, both hers and mine, surfacing, ready to flood this parched landscape. Not wanting to open the floodgates, instead I ask “how do you feel about lamb?”
Anna’s face appears frozen for a nanosecond, eyes glistening with teardrops ready to flood this barren landscape, Her lips are frozen and slightly turned down as if a wounded child was ready to jump out and exclaim “the world is not fair”! That nanosecond passed and her face softens with a glint of confusion and surprise – shaken loose from the cold horror that surrounds us. And then, on cue we break free of the chains of fear and have our first big laugh together.
I was not joking when I said lamb. Miss pickle is stocked as if royalty was going on safari. We begin to set camp in a postage stamp sized, flat spot as far away from the main mass of the dump surrounding us. The talcum powder dirt road is just twenty feet away. We are here. Our first eagle nest watch and there is no turning back.
Anna is from Michigan. She is a biologist and is especially brilliant with birds. She stands 4′ 12″ with long brown hair. I only say this, as I am 6′ tall and we do stand out as an odd pair of foreigners in this country. She recently returned from working in Central America studying caterpillars but this is her first taste of the Arizona desert. Having just met at the eagle orientation, we picked each other as partners to live and work together for the next three months.
I managed to get this gig almost as a fluke. I am not a trained biologist. I am a left-brained trades person. I spent most of my adult life, building and managing construction projects, but in the fall of my 47th year I felt something missing in my life, a slight discomfort of where and what I was doing. What, if anything have I accomplished, was there something more I was to do, explore, be? The angst of mid-life, craving a reason, a purpose to explain this empty space inside me.
I was driving down Broadway when I spied a pretty beat 1971 VW Westy parked in front of a dealership with a for sale sign. Mind you I wasn’t looking to buy it as I already lived with a precious 1978 Westfalia named Miss Pickle. I just wondered why, whoever owned her, was willing to part with her? Miss Pickle immediately made a turn into the parking lot. Inside the dealership of new fancy versions of the bug, and Jettas I did not expect to find a reasonable answer, but at leSt I was bold enough tot risk the ask. This unexpected turn turned out to be the beginning of my journey to eagles.
A salesman. Yep – that is what I said – a car salesman was selling his old VW. I asked him if he ever really spent time in her, in the element of nature she was designed for. With that question, my life changed. His eyes lit up – it was like talking to a different person than the one before me dressed slick and ready to make a deal.
He told me of a season he had spent monitoring bald eagles for the state of Arizona. Camping in some semi-remote desertscape, he was paid to keep an eye on one breeding pair of adult eagles. I had never heard of such a thing before. Someone… much less a bureaucracy, was willing to pay me to go camping?
Within ten minutes, I had the skinny on how to get in on this gig. The flatness of my life was emboldened. Little foothills started to grow in my internal landscape. I had three days to obtain and complete a proposal for a bid opening as a subcontractor to the state of Arizona Game and Fish.
After obtaining a packet of legalese, by convincing an administrative assistant in Phoenix to email me the packet vs. snail mail, (This was a task unto itself – for I was breaking the rules according to her), I sat down and poured over pages upon pages of department contractual obligations, and subcontract responsibilities, licensing and insurance. All this paperwork to go camping? Then it came down to the meat of the contract – the application. I was worried after reading the preceding jumble that the application was going to require massive documentation and experience and perhaps I was just being naive about my even being considered.
To my surprise, unlike many applications for jobs, this one did not require me to fill out my employment history. If fact, the whole application consisted of four questions. What kind of vehicle I drove, what camping experience and gear I had, what kind of similar wildlife biology experience I had. The final question was a response to a scenario of an individual(s) harassing an eagle or trespassing in a closed breeding zone.
Three of the four information requests, I felt I had in in the bag, Even tho I never worked a field job. Volunteer bird counts with Audubon were the only field experience I could claim. No matter…you can’t win if you don’t play. So after agonizing over my penmanship and making three copies, and sealing it in an envelope, I had just enough time to drive to Phoenix and submit before the 3 p.m. deadline. Phoenix is only 90 minutes away – I could do it with my eyes closed. Off I sped in Miss Pickle. It was a perfect fall day, windows rolled down, music cranking.
It was a perfect… until I hit rush hour in Phoenix. It was only 2:15 and the game and fish office was only 11 miles away. Normally one would consider that enough time, but panic began to build as the traffic slowed to a crawl. Miss pickle and I never like being in rush hours in foreign cities but until this moment, I never knew how agile my van and I could be. The common mantra of all Westy owners is slow and steady. That day, though, I jumped back and forth in lanes making a little better headway and thinking I was a good, assertive driver. Perhaps I was not as good as I thought and perhaps people stayed out of my way since I was driving a big, green, steel machine.
I managed to get to the Game and Fish office with only minutes to spare. I ran through the front door and asked loudly to submit my application only to be told I was in the wrong office. I needed to go across the parking lot to the overflow buildings and submit there. I turned on my heels and ran. Ran across the lot…the clock was ticking, dodged a truck backing out…the clock was ticking louder and rushed thru the front door of the mobile office. Flinging my arm across the counter a woman got up from her desk as I said “Bald eagle nestwatch application.” She didn’t hesitate, grabbed it from my hand took several fast steps and time punched my submittal on a machine in the back corner of the office. She then looked at the time stamp and exclaimed to me that I had had only 30 seconds left! She went on to say that never in all the years of this project had anyone ever come in so close to the wire. Note to self…this happens to be a recurring theme in my life…being somewhere, being someone…and in heartbeat everything can change. I find myself on a different path, redefining or should I say refining my self.
Several weeks later, I was in. I was a Bald Eagle Nestwatcher.
The story begins with Anna and San Carlos and eagles and spirits in the night and …Miss Pickle.
keep the adventure alive 