Badlands National Park

 Badlands National Park is one of those environments that calls forth so many different adjectives:  stark, barren, beautiful, amazing...I agree with all of those except for barren. There is so much life in the Badlands. The life we, of course, are interested in seeing are the feathered kind. And we realized that you had to look and look hard to find them among the crevices, the sagebrush, the grasses, the wildflowers, often so very far away and sometimes up close.

The first bird we saw was of the familiar eastern variety: Eastern Bluebird at the eastern visitor center.

We asked at the visitor center where we could find the birds, and were directed to a side road called Conata that exited the Badlands NP, turned gravel, and bordered the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands and private property surrounded by a wire fence. It was a remote and quiet place away from the more popular loop road.

This remote place did not disappoint. We saw Western Meadowlark singing on the fence.

Clay-colored Sparrows flying up from the roadside to perch on any fence or wire, the tallest things close by.

The best bird we saw was a Burrowing Owl at a prairie dog town just inside the fence of the private property. It was a bird we had hoped to find on this journey and were delighted that we did. The bird flew back and forth between burrowing mounds, catching insects. It gave us a distant but great show! 

Back on the popular loop road, we stopped at an overlook and peered down the canyon of striated mounds dotted with sage and other small plants. We were delighted to see Rock Wren.

 

We took away memories of great birds we had never seen before and a couple of familiar favorites, and a dozen or so burrs on our shoes and pant legs.