In Search of the Ghosts of the Alpine Tundra
- Jen Toews
- Jan 25, 2018
- 5 min read
The time was 4:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day and my cellphone alarm was ringing furiously. I rolled over, batting for my phone so I could silence the dreadful noise. In the process I knocked both the phone and charger off the nightstand, prompting the first word out of my mouth in 2018 to be an expletive. I had a headache, felt dizzy and a little nauseous, and not because of too much New Year’s Eve merriment the night before. I had gone to bed early, but due to the extreme anxiety I have of not waking up to my alarm, it was debatable whether I had slept at all. I stumbled around clumsily, somehow managing to pack into my car the clothing, snowshoes, binocs, and food I had prepared the evening before.
Thirty minutes later, my friends and I were cruising up I-70, well ahead of ski traffic, bound for Guanella Pass. Only a few miles into the trip, we rounded a corner and the moon, enormous and glowing on the horizon, slid into view. Both a wolf moon and a super moon, it somehow felt auspicious. My mood immediately changed for the better.
We arrived at the winter closure on Guanella Pass Road, 1.6 miles from the summit of the Pass, at first light. As soon as we opened the car doors, the icy chill of an upper montane January morning greeted us. Determined to be comfortable despite NOOA’s weather forecast of blustery conditions, I had brought a fleece, two down jackets, a hefty windbreaker, long johns, thick pants, snowpants, and 2 pairs of gloves and handwarmers. If this sounds excessive, last year’s adventure had been miserable. With the windchill, the temperature at the Pass had been well below 0°F, and the wind relentless. Each gust, like a punch to the stomach, took my breath away and also caused tears to form in my eyes even as the freezing temperatures froze them to my face. My feet and hands never warmed up and alternated between a numb feeling, a pins and needles feeling, and a sharp pain.
Photo: Sheridan Samano
Thankfully, this year’s weather turned out to be less harsh -- dare I say pleasant? As we hiked along the road that wound through a spruce-fir forest, we watched for red crossbills, gray jays, mountain chickadees, three-toed woodpeckers, and hoped for a rare sighting of a long-tailed weasel, pine marten, or snowshoe hare. The montane life zone transitioned into subalpine before giving way to an alpine mosaic of willow shrublands, barren windswept fellfields, frozen meadows, and the occasional krummholz. Mount Bierstadt, at 14,065 feet, towered in front of us completely obscuring its taller sister, Mt. Evans (14,271). We had entered the habitat of the ghost of the alpine tundra: the white-tailed ptarmigan (Lagopus leucura), a bird that has captivated me since the first time I saw it.
Photo: Sheridan Samano
A secretive bird, the ptarmigan belongs to the pheasant family or Phasianidae, which includes grouse, quail, and turkeys — birds that usually opt to walk rather than fly. Planet-wide, there are only three extant species of ptarmigan, all of which live in cold climates. The rock and willow ptarmigan live in northern latitudes around the world, while the smaller of the three species, the white-tailed ptarmigan, inhabits elevations under 4,000 feet in Alaska (Audubon, Guide to North American Birds), on down through western Canada, and the “islands in the sky” (areas above timberline) in the Southern Rockies, which extend into northern New Mexico (Gellhorn, 4).
Strictly an alpine bird and the only bird to live above treeline year round, the white-tailed ptarmigan has many adaptations that enable it to survive in the harsh conditions of its lifezone. The most noticeable is that it molts its plumage. In the summer ptarmigan have a mottled brown plumage, which camouflages them in their rocky habitats. "A Rock Blinks at Me," the title of the prologue of Joyce Gellhorn's book The Ghosts of the Alpine Tundra, captures this phenomenon perfectly. During autumn these birds begin to molt and by winter they have snow-white plumage, allowing them to seamlessly blend into a snowy environment. Ptarmigan also develop feathers on their feet, which enable them to “snowshoe” through soft snow as well as feathers on their eyelids and around their nostrils (Gellhorn, 22), which provide insulation from icy blasts.
Photos: Jen Toews September 2012
Because of its high mountains, Colorado supports more white-tailed ptarmigan than any other state with the exception of Alaska (Gellhorn, 6). Guanella Pass, where we were hiking on this cold January day, has the largest wintering population of ptarmigan in the Southern Rockies (18). Even so, after five New Year's days of searching for ptarmigan, I had only ever seen one bird before. I have certainly encountered their wing prints, like snow angels; their tracks, criss-crossing before disappearing into the willows; and their scat, which resembles Kellogg’s All-Bran cereal. Today the weather was mild, and I was optimistic that we would see a bird or two.
We hiked the snowy trail, stopping periodically to scan the willows with our binocs. Many times, the shape of a ptarmigan appeared in my field of vision, but after much scrutinization, I concluded what I was seeing was a small snowdrift. Would we get lucky today or would this just be another beautiful hike in the tundra? (which certainly isn't the worst thing in the world). Almost before I could finish my thought I heard one of my friends exclaim: "Ptarmigan tracks! They look fresh." My eyes darted here and there, trying to detect any kind of movement, soft clucking noises, or a "blinking snowdrift."
Photo: Sheridan Samano
We walked a couple of steps farther and all of a sudden one ptarmigan popped up into the air. It was followed by second and a third bird until there was a flurry of about ten ptarmigan in the air, their snow-white plumage made more striking against a deep blue sky. As quickly as they appeared, they descended and were swallowed up by the snowy, willowy landscape of the alpine once again. For a few moments we stood there, awestruck.
Determined to get a closer look, we tiptoed down the trail for another twenty feet where we found two perched underneath some willows.
Photo: Sheridan Samano
A third bird was partially buried in the snow.
Photo: Sheridan Samano
A fourth bird was looking rather cute.
Photo: Sheridan Samano
We admired the birds for a few minutes and basked in a relatively windless morning above timberline before retracing our footsteps through the willow stands and on down Guanella Pass Road where the car with its heated seats was waiting. The 2018 New Year's Day search for the ghosts of the alpine tundra had been a success. Now off to celebrate at a local microbrewery.
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If you would like to learn more about white-tailed ptarmigan, I highly recommend Joyce Gellhorn's engaging book White-tailed Ptarmigan: Ghosts of the Alpine Tundra, which is full of interesting facts and beautifully executed photos of these elusive birds.
References
Gellhorn, Joyce. (2007). White-tailed Ptarmigan: Ghosts of the Alpine Tundra. Boulder: Johnson Books.
"White-tailed Ptarmigan." Audubon Guide to North American Birds. Retrieved from: http://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/white-tailed-ptarmigan
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