Today was the technical end of the conference. There were some field trips set up for people who stayed that long. Most of the field trips, however, require a fee so we only went on the Birding With Frank trip because it was free! We met up at 7am, and it seems all the birds were smarter than us and decided to sleep in because we didn’t see very many. Plenty of Stellar’s Jays, but we see those every day! The kids from New York were very excited to see the jays, though. It was cute. Some of us had also hoped to see Moose by the pond where we had heard they had been spotted in the early morning, but we had no such luck. All we saw was moose scat. But we did finally see some Mountain Goats when we were heading back to the resort! They still just looked like moving white blobs even with binoculars, but Phil had a spotting scope and we all got a good look at them later with that.
After loading up all the vans, we headed up the mountain road a bit so that anyone who didn’t see pika that first day would have a chance now. We didn’t find any, but we saw a lot of birds like a Mountain Bluebird and Mountain Chickadees. Next we headed down to the Salt Lake to look for more wildlife! I don’t remember what this area we explored was called, but we saw a lot of ducks. Actually, we saw a lot of other birds, too. We also found some coyote tracks, a Ruddy Duck and some shorebird corpse, as well as some fox bones with some fur still intact. People caught all kinds of garter snakes, and even a tiny carp (props to Jenna for catching that with her bare hands)! Phil decided to eat the itty bitty carp because it’s an invasive species. We could hear frogs, but no one managed to catch any. We continued to explore this area until it started getting dark, and then we headed to the hotel to check in.
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