Yellow larch needles litter the laundry room floor where I dropped my hunting clothes Sunday night. After devoting 10 days to the pursuit of elk meat for our freezer, I’m reluctant to sweep up the mess. It’s all I have to show for the effort.
I’m left to chew on little more than the memories of another rewarding but meatless nature observation season.
Lots of people watch wildlife. People are intrigued by birds at their feeders and excited for the chance to snap photos of moose in the neighborhood.
Fly fishers dip strainers into rivers to survey aquatic insects. Butterflies fascinate kids. Spotting a bear or a cougar would make anyone’s day.
I’ve been with veteran birders who’d pop the cork on a bottle of champagne after bagging a glimpse or sound of a coveted species for their life lists.
But no form of nature watching is more intense than still-hunting for big game.
Sensing wind direction and analyzing every sound, movement, track, scrape and scat is amplified while holding a lethal weapon. Life-and-death decisions may have to be made in a split second. This is serious sport.
When was the last time you totally devoted an hour at a time to monitoring the landscape for a critter?
I’ve heard and felt the creaking of neck vertebrae while slowly turning my head on an elk stand.
I could feel my heart thump as I tried to verify if the snap of a twig was a 600- to 800-pound animal coming my way.
Each day, my hunting partner, Jim Kujala, and I would leave our Blue Mountains camp in the dark more than an hour before sunrise and walk up to 2 miles through black forest in the dim light of our headlamps.
We’d split to spots where we would sit nearly motionless and observe through the sunrise.
I’d have been a bloody mess if ears hemorrhaged from listening too hard.
We picked spots where we might have a chance of spotting elk moving to dense daytime bedding areas from clearcuts and ridges where they’d been feeding during the night.
Then we would still-hunt through thick timber, trying to crawl over downfall, stepping back onto ground booby-trapped with sticks ready to snap.
It sounds crazy to go into the woods after animals that have senses of sight, hearing and smell exponentially better than ours. Really, it shouldn’t be surprising that less than 10 percent of Washington general season hunters fill their elk tags.
Jim likes to relive his daily hunts back to camp. He was especially proud to show a photo of the pygmy owl that held steady on a tree limb as he passed a few feet away.
He described seeing his first bobcat scat with the enthusiasm of a school boy getting his first kiss.
“Three segments with a long taper, and it scratched dirt to cover it up,” he said, detailing the lengths and diameters with his fingers.
On the last day of our hunt he brought back a sandwich bag of green leaves from a ceanothus bush.
“Break one and smell,” he said, demonstrating. “Mmm. No elk, but at least I’ll be able to give my daughter something to spice up her holiday potpourri.”
Sometimes the wind howled through the forest. Trees creaked and groaned. You’re trying to hear elk, but you begin to hear voices.
Once I heard them say, “You’re blowing a week elk hunting when you could stay home, watch the World Series, spend the day in dry clothes, sleep in the comfort of a bed – and buy beef for $4 a pound.”
Hunting the same area year after year gives us an appreciation for the stages of a working forest.
Deadfall, once almost impenetrable in one area of the forest, has been slowly settling as it breaks down under winter snow and decomposes.
“I can walk through there without making a sound and see for a hundred yards now,” Jim said. “That’s why the elk don’t bed there anymore.”
New logging seemed to attract elk that fed on lichen in downed tree branches.
I was sitting one morning overlooking a steep slope of timber and openings where I’d seen elk crossing in the past when the quiet was ruffled by the flapping of wings.
A couple of dozen birds suddenly swarmed around me. Chickadees were the most obvious and fun to watch, but a pack of Oregon juncos was in the mix.
A pair of pygmy nuthatches stood out as the most methodical and energy efficient of the species livening the open forest around me.
A chickadee flashed from a tree trunk to a branch, then down to dangling lichen and up again to snatch a bug or a seed out of a web in the fir needles. Meanwhile, a nuthatch took a more disciplined approach.
It swooped to the base of an old Douglas fir 10 feet in front of me as I sat undetected. Then it worked its way up the trunk, probing all the crevices in the bark in a foot-wide column as it ascended. After feeding up the tree about 25 feet, it finally strayed off on a limb and flew away.
I don’t know why it stopped at 25 feet when there was three times that much tree left to forage. Fear of heights? Exposure to hawks and owls?
Nature watching always leaves me with more questions than answers.
I’d been mesmerized and totally absorbed for several minutes by this riot of bird activity, which dispersed as suddenly as it had arrived.
That’s when I looked down to see the tan butt of an elk 60 yards away moving slowly through the opening in the timber I’d been monitoring all morning.
Meanwhile, anyone have a recipe for larch-needle soup?
