Grand Canyon Connections

The sweet, descending notes of a Canyon Wren cascaded down the sandstone cliff and reached my ears above the rumble of a 30-horsepower motor on the back of our raft. In the days leading up to this rafting trip down the Colorado River, I’d been hoping to hear that sound. I’d come to love the song of the Canyon Wren when I was an intern in Southeast Utah almost 20 years ago.

A Canyon Wren sings above our raft. Photo by Emily Stone.

Little else felt familiar as the sandstone cliffs and dusty shale slopes of the Grand Canyon rose above the 19 of us on that raft. I knew just one person on the trip. Colleen Miniuk is a professional photographer I’d become friends with during Outdoor Writers Association of America conferences. This was one of the many photography workshops she hosts each year, and two years ago she’d convinced me to add this “Grand Canyon Rafting Photo Retreat” to my bucket list. But she was at the back of the raft with the guides, and I sat at the very front with strangers in a strange landscape.

As we slid down the muddy river from our launch at Lee’s Ferry, flocks of little yellow birds swirled among the willows. Who were they? I’d left my binoculars behind due to restrictions on the amount of gear we could bring, and my camera with the big zoom was packed away in a dry bag. A small flock of ducks spooked at our passage and cruised down the river in a tight, wedge-like formation. Who were they?

And then a familiar statuesque form along the shore spread their huge gray wings, crooked their long neck into an S, and vanished into the immensity of the canyon’s shadows. For that instant, I felt at home. I’ve been watching Great Blue Herons disappear around river bends all of my life. During my years as a seasonal naturalist, living and working in Utah, Maine, Minnesota, California, Vermont, and Alaska, I spotted herons stalking through all the possible iterations of shallow waters with fish. They are adaptable and increasing in number.

“GBH!” exclaimed the rafter next to me, as he referenced the movie The Big Year and birders’ shorthand name for the heron. Mike, I reminded myself of his name and decided he might be a friend.

Our first campsite nestled into the mouth of Tanner Wash on a pile of rocks and sand. I set up my cot a little away from the group. Another participant, Larry, intercepted me on my way back to the dining area. “There’s a beautiful patch of flowers with lots of moths right over there,” he told me, and offered to show me the way. Somehow, in just a few hours, he’d figured out that I’m interested in bugs and flowers.

Various species of evening primrose flowers grow beautifully in both the Grand Canyon and the Northwoods. Photo by Emily Stone.

I immediately recognized the four-petaled yellow flowers with prominent cross-shaped stigmas in their centers as one of the many species of evening primrose. Their cousins, Common Evening Primrose, had been blooming along roadsides in Wisconsin when I’d left for this trip. As dusk fell, I tried to photograph the White-lined Sphinx moths and big black carpenter bees who were buzzing among the flowers. The bees were a western species, but the moths are almost as widespread as the Great Blue Heron.

Bats also emerged in the twilight; their tiny forms silhouetted against the darkening blue of the sky. I hadn’t seen that many bats since before White-nose Syndrome devastated our bats back home. Bats fluttered by during morning hikes up shaded side canyons, too, and I even snapped a photo of one roosting on a sandstone wall. Using iNaturalist, I identified them as a Canyon Bat, the smallest bat species in the United States.

(I think you can see all of my iNaturalist observations from the trip by clicking this link.)

Over several nights of listening, I eventually realized that the tiny sounds I heard coming from the sky were bits of the bats’ echolocation calls that dipped into the range of human hearing. Regularly spaced chirps were their “search phase” calls helping them to navigate and locate prey, while the faster “feeding buzz” indicated when a bat was closing in on a moth and needed higher resolution information. We explained these calls years ago in the Museum’s Nature’s Superheroes exhibit, but I’d never heard them in the wild, without a device to shift the frequency.

Colleen Miniuk is a professional photographer, but here she takes goofy photos of the raft as we load back up after a side hike. Photo by Emily Stone.

Floating down the river, exploring the side canyons, relaxing around camp, I was always on the lookout for both the novel and the familiar. A giant insect I’d never seen before but knew immediately to be a Tarantula-hawk Wasp caught my attention just as easily as the glossy black feathers of a Common Raven. Josh and J.P., our river guides, did a great job of explaining the big picture geology, pausing the raft at Bighorn Sheep, and telling the human history of the canyon, too. Colleen, of course, helped us make great photos.

Thisbe's Tarantula-hawk Wasp. Photo by Emily Stone.

Common Ravens are common to both the Northwoods and the Grand Canyon. This one Is perched on a ledge of Tapeats Sandstone. Photo by Emily Stone.

After a few days of pointing out something I’d noticed, or explaining the basics of a geological feature, I found more questions coming my way from the other participants. With each teachable moment, I felt more connected to both the canyon and my fellow rafters. I wasn’t surprised at the way this unfolded, and probably, neither are you. Long ago, as I was soaring across the country from one naturalist adventure to the next with the Great Blue Herons, I decided that my vocation would always be to teach people about nature in a beautiful place. As it turns out…that’s my vacation, too!

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Fall Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.