A catastrophic fire, an expert guide, and a dauntless scabland bird

Before an outing at dawn a few days ago I had only seen my friend Lindell Haggin twice in the past year. Both of those times were on remote video sessions devoted to habitat restoration. Suffice to say, in-person adventures are superior to Zoom meetings. With Covid vaccinations and Spokane’s sunrise dog walkers behind us, the first landmark ahead–just past Airway Heights on U.S. Highway 2–was a field of blooming canola so bright I reached for my sunglasses.

We were headed even further west, passing through shafts of sunlight piercing billowing clouds, the largest of which were throwing down veils of snow and rain. The purplish downbursts had wave-like curls to them, a symptom of a strong jet stream whistling above.

The plan for the morning was to try to find a sage thrasher, a bird somewhat smaller than a robin and far less common. Unlike robins and mallards and magpies, sage thrashers don’t fly into town. That said, I’m embarrassed to report that although I was born in the sagelands and have spent countless hours wandering through them, I had not—until last week—seen or heard a sage thrasher, or at least had never gotten close enough to one that I’d recognize it. It was past time to rectify this and Lindell—one of the inland northwest’s premier bird experts and a widely admired conservationist—agreed to be my guide. (Lindell is also a superb photographer and you can see and read more about her work in this 2015 profile.)

Between Spokane and the Cascades, Highway 2 generally runs just to the south of what, on some geologic maps, is a dotted line. The line illustrates the extent to which the Cordilleran ice sheet advanced southward from Canada during the last phase of the Wisconsinan glaciation, ending roughly 12,000 years ago. West of Coulee City, for example, the highway comes within sight of the “Withrow Moraine,” a deposit of glacial till bulldozed and parked by the Okanogan Lobe of the ice sheet.

At times the Okanogan Lobe—a huge thumb of ice about forty miles wide at its blunt tip—blocked the Columbia River very close to where Grand Coulee Dam sits today. The resulting ice dam created a huge lake—glacial Lake Columbia—extending all the way eastward to Spokane and even into what is now the Idaho panhandle. (The easternmost portion of this long ago lake is often referred to as glacial Lake Spokane.)

In nearly every respect ancient Lake Columbia was a placid and beautiful body of water. This would change very quickly each time an even larger and more famous ice age lake— glacial Lake Missoula—burst through its ice dam in the Purcell Trench, near what is now Sandpoint, Idaho. The geologic evidence indicates glacial Lake Missoula drained westward into Lake Columbia dozens of times over thousands of years. During these events a maelstrom of water and ice would overwhelm the Spokane/Columbia valleys all the way to Grand Coulee, sending an inland tsunami south and west.

The plan for the morning was to try to find a sage thrasher, a bird somewhat smaller than a robin and far less common. Unlike robins and mallards and magpies, sage thrashers don’t fly into town. You have to wander into the sagelands to find them and, in Lindell, I had the best possible guide.

I realize this begs a question about what any of this has to do with a day trip to search for a sage thrasher.

The short answer is that sage thrashers need sagelands. And were it not for the ice age floods Washington would be missing its largest and most prolific tracts of sage. Survey maps compiled by the state’s Department of Fish & Wildlife illustrate the point. The research confirms sage thrashers thrive in the tracts excavated by the ice age floods.

It’s not what the floods brought in that created the sagelands. It’s what they washed away. The cataclysmic outbursts of water and ice overwhelmed the landscape, sweeping away countless dune-like hills in their paths. The hills that were swept away were the same as the loessial hills that now enable bumper crops of wheat, lentils and canola in the Palouse region of eastern Washington and the Idaho panhandle. Absent the ice age floods, the lower Columbia basin would be more of the same—a continuous, bucolic quilt of rolling farmland.

As a result of the floods the quilt has both broad and jagged rips in it—coulees and canyons and even miles-wide tracts where the basalt bedrock wears only a thin layer of soil. Though commonly referred to as “scablands” a deeper truth is the interconnected tracts form a web of life that would otherwise be scarce or non-existent in the lower Columbia basin. It’s not just the sage and grasses. It’s the vital wetlands—like those at the Turnbull and Columbia National Wildlife Refuges—that scarcely exist in the adjacent Palouse because the loessial soil is a hyper-efficient sponge when it comes to absorbing rain and snow melt.

Just west of Spokane Highway 2 passes through majestic, wheat-covered hills. It dips a bit southward just past the Lincoln County seat of Davenport and then—in the space of a couple blinks—the landscape changes clothes. The road enters what geologists refer to as the Telford tract—the northern section of the channeled scablands’ central braid. Instead of wheat there is cattle and waterfowl; instead of rolling, loessial hills there are suddenly wetlands, and sage, and exposed knobs and buttes of basalt.

As soon as Lindell and I reached the Telford tract we could see scorched pines and charred remains of sage and bunchgrass clusters. Still, in the seven months following the fires, there were promising signs of new growth, most natural but with an inspired human assist as well.

The outing with Lindell was the first time I’d been to the Telford in well over a year. The last time I’d seen it was on a local TV news segment. That was late last summer, when a duo of newsroom anchors were introducing live feeds from Lincoln County, much of which was on fire. My heart sank when I heard the name Seven Springs Dairy Road, one of the gnarly routes in the Telford I’d taken a few years back to photograph wildflowers. And then I saw the young field reporters, on camera, visibly shaken by what they were seeing and how swiftly they were having to move to avoid being casualties instead of just journalists.

The Labor Day fire in the Telford—ignited from a downed power line north of Highway 2—was one of several that ripped through eastern Washington that day as a strong cold front spun up high winds. After jumping Highway 2, the blaze raced another 15 miles to the southwest toward the town of Odessa, consuming more than 200 square miles and several homes and farm structures before firefighters could get it under control. The fires delivered a gut punch not just to the farm families in and near its path but to conservationists and state and federal wildlife specialists who’ve been working for years to revive threatened species, most notably sage and sharp-tailed grouse. Although small populations of sage grouse remain in Douglas and Yakima counties, the Telford fire—in the word of one state ecologist—“extirpated” the Lincoln County sage grouse population. The sharp-tailed grouse in the area fared no better.

As soon as Lindell and I reached the Telford we could see scorched pines and charred remains of sage and bunchgrass clusters. Still, in the seven months following the fires, there were promising signs of new growth, most natural but with an inspired human assist as well. As one of the volunteer conservationists involved in recovery efforts, Lindell has literally had a hand in the re-greening of the Telford, working through the ashes to plant seedlings of sage and native grasses. Before that, she had volunteered for five years on an Audubon/Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife “sagebrush songbird” survey.

In short, she knows her way around the Telford which is good because neither of us had brought a map. We turned off the highway near Creston and headed south toward the Swanson Lakes Wildlife Management Area. She’d heard there’d been a recent sighting of a sage thrasher not far from the Fish & Wildlife office complex just east of Swanson Lake. The new office structure had survived the fire, but a corral and several support structures were burned to the ground.

With no sign or sound of a thrasher we headed further south, toward the heart of Lake Creek Coulee and its network of lakes and streams that eventually feed into Crab Creek just west of Odessa. We were both struck by how mercurial the fire had been, burning some homes to the ground but leaving others untouched even while engulfing adjacent barns and sheds. And the same was true in some of the places where the fire had worked through basalt outcroppings and sage, with fingers of scorched earth reaching into stands of mature sage that were otherwise spared.

We zig-zagged southward, toward the remote Twin Lakes area in the heart of the coulee where, Lindell said, there’d also been a recent report of a sage thrasher. The gravel roads to the lakes climb the western ledge of the coulee before descending in S curves toward the water. We were a third of the way down, coming into a bench of sagebrush that had largely been spared by the fire, when she slowed to a near stop.

“Now if you were a sage thrasher,” she asked with a whimsical chuckle, “wouldn’t you love to live here?”

Just a couple minutes later she pressed down on the brake pedal and gently leaned her head out the window. When I saw her smile I knew she’d found a sage thrasher, and an instant later we both saw it perched atop the brush about thirty yards away.

The signature song of the sagelands—at least to my ear—is the western meadowlark’s, which is so piercing that it can give me a jolt from fifty yards away. The song of the sage thrasher is not nearly so loud. But it is much longer—so long you wonder how it catches its breath—a joyfully rolling, high-pitched warble that Lindell compared to a jazz musician’s solo. From the passenger seat of the car, out of the wind, I was able to get a decent recording to share here.

“Now if you were a sage thrasher,” she asked with a whimsical chuckle, “wouldn’t you love to live here?”

The zoom lens for my camera is petite by the standards of most wildlife photographers, so I’m forced to rely on good luck and some measure of stealth. The latter demands patience and a sense of humor. Each species has its own quirks and flight instincts when it senses a human in its environment. With the thrasher I was starting from scratch. Moments after getting out of the car, the bird noticed my head poking above the brush and flew off along with its song. Fortunately, I would get a second chance. An hour later, as we were returning from a short hike at Twin Lakes, we noticed the thrasher had returned to its perch. This time I kept my head down, found cover behind a low wall of basalt and then crawled another ten yards through the underbrush. That got me close enough and I was able to take the photographs through a small gap in the sage.

Lindell’s passion for nature and birds has led her to central and South America. Among her striking photographs is that of a rare golden-headed quetzal gathered during a trek in a tropical cloud forest. So I made a mental note, a few years ago, when she twice brought up her affection for the comparatively modest sage thrasher. I couldn’t help but reason that if Lindell admired the sage thrasher then it was a bird I should get to know. Still, it wasn’t until we were headed out toward the Telford last week that I finally asked just what it was about the thrasher that drew her affection.

It was the bird’s positive attitude, she replied. “It just seems to be filled with the joy of life.”

As we’d navigated our way south from Highway 2 it occurred to me that the runaway flames and terror of the Telford fire were a metaphor for the year itself, with its deadly Covid pandemic and the gathering, maddening political storm leading to the violent march upon the capitol in January. A lot of things seemed to have gone up in smoke and chaos, and even those of us not stretched to a breaking point were still wondering if and how we would make it through.

Her simple, eloquent answer to my question about the thrasher made a deeper impression than she may have intended. I heard it as a wise reminder that a positive spirit is the most important element of community service and perseverance, and that hope is inexorably rooted in a passion for life. If that’s the song of the sage thrasher then I’m all the more grateful she led me to it.

—Tim Connor