photos. The eagle obliges by granting us a profile shot of his magnificent head, which is spotlighted by the late afternoon sun. Behind the eagle, the lake shimmers, a remarkable shade of ice blue that, I’m pleased to discover, elicits Reka’s admiration. As we’re making our way back to the road, a man driving a black pickup with Wisconsin plates, a trailer with ATV in tow, comes to a halt behind my car. The passenger, a big burly guy in his thirties, waves a road atlas at me. “Excuse me,” he says. “Do you know where we are?” I’m not surprised the Wisconsinites are a little disoriented. I experience that same “what-planetam-I-on?” feeling every time I come here from Missoula via I-15, turning off at Exit 0 and steering past the abandoned town of Monida. From Monida, it’s another 24 miles on a partially graveled road through the arid, isolated Centennial Valley, past a few cattle ranches and then the marshes of Lower Red Rock Lake, until you reach the tiny settlement of Lakeview, home to refuge headquarters and a smattering of homes and outbuildings. The guys say they’re trying to find a friend’s hunting cabin. They look relieved when I inform them that we’re just east of Lakeview, which I point out on the map. Then Reka and I wave goodbye and continue on to the small and nearly deserted campground at the upper lake. (The lower lake has camping as well, but it’s completely exposed, a poor choice for tonight given the chilly forecast.) Reka and I let Liza out of her crate and walk down to the water’s edge, the dog bounding giddily
in front of us, her plumed tail held high. At first, it doesn’t appear that many birds are here at all, which is a disappointment, not to mention a bit of a concern: After all, Reka and I could have made s’mores at home and eaten them in front of the computer.
But when we gaze through our binoculars, we can see that there are in fact hundreds of birds scattered on the lake, intermittently dipping their heads and rushing each other to defend their territories. Instead of the insistent noisy riot I’d been greeted with on my previous trips here, it’s more like the low buzz of conversation you hear across a restaurant, full of meaning you can’t quite discern.
According to the literature I’ve picked up at refuge headquarters, a whopping 232 species of birds have been recorded here, the majority of them migratory. I wouldn’t necessarily recognize them all, but I love reading the names: grebes and loons, mallards and mergansers, widgeons and goldeneye, coots and teals, snipes and curlews, sandpipers and white-faced ibis. And swans, of course, both the trumpeters, some of whom remain in the region year-round, and their smaller cousins, the tundra. Along with swans, some of the refuge’s biggest draws are sandhill cranes. Tall and long-legged, with a distinctive red head and an unmistakable clacking call, they’re easy for even the most amateur bird-watcher to identify. If you’re lucky and are here at the right time of year—May is good, assuming it’s not snowing— you can catch their exuberant mating dance. The refuge is also home to the occasional grizzly and wolf, and more than 100 moose; once, at sunset, I was mesmerized by the silhouette of a massive bull strolling peacefully along the shoreline, not 50 feet from my campsite. He probably wasn’t in my line of vision for more than five minutes, but I’ve replayed the memory many times in my head, and each time it leaves me awed and grateful. But this time of year, the sandhills have already left the refuge in search of warmer climes, and there’s no sign of moose, either. Or swans, for that matter. That leaves us with a lot of birds that are too far away to identify, even with our binoculars and a guidebook. Still, there’s something reassuring about the