This week, bottles of breast milk were warmed and served to a mostly appreciative customer. Episodes of Oprah and Curb Your Enthusiasm were watched. So was the State of the Union address. A pot luck dinner reunited Missoula-area alumni of last summer’s Bird Camp.

A potentially momentous discussion began.

More will be revealed.

Actually, it’s just a cell phone picture.

I hold here the very latest text message from Amy — my assistant prints them up on onion-skin paper and runs into my office with them, shouting “this just in, sir!” — and it’s too good not to share.

Expecting foot of snow 2night

But that’s the way life goes when you throw off the trappings of civilization and follow the call of the songbird into the depths of the Coconino National Forest each summer — the life of a daring Bird Camper. (If none of this is making any sense, you might want to start here .)

After I left Arizona at the end of April, Amy and Jen continued with camp setup and greeted crew members as they began to straggle in. (Many of the crew members are students, or are finishing other seasonal jobs, so sometimes they are delayed in arriving at Bird Camp.)

One big obstacle was what turned out to be four trees down on fences around the exclosure plots; when I’d left, Amy only knew of one such tree.

The fences keep elk out, in the interest of Science.

Fortunately, the forest’s recreation ranger volunteered to cut up the dead trees with his chainsaw and fix the fences, which was a big help. This kind of assistance is frequently forthcoming down there, Amy tells me — between the fire crews and the rangers, there is an abundance of people who like to feel useful, it seems.

By now, just about every member of the crew has arrived, and Amy is beginning to assign research plots.

“We’ll be starting normal work days soon,” she says.

I visited for one “normal” work day last summer. Amy’s alarm went off at 3:45. I rolled over, but she struggled out into the chill morning air, brushed her teeth, dressed, and went to the cook tent to make herself breakfast (hot chocolate, instant oatmeal) before the 4:30 departure of vehicles to drop the campers at their work sites.

The first part of Amy’s work day was over shortly after noon, but after lunch and some administrative work, she was on her way back out again to make nestling measurements. I went along and held the ladder while she climbed up to grab the baby birds, her hat pulled low against possible attacks by the parents.

In the evening, Amy rushed through dinner and kept working so that we could leave for town as early as possible. I was departing on an early shuttle from downtown Flagstaff to the Phoenix airport in the morning, and we had a room booked at a Flagstaff motel. But no matter how quickly she wolfed her quesadilla — which had been sizzled to flaky, cheesy perfection in a lightweight camp cook pan above the flame of a Coleman propane stove — we still didn’t leave on the two-hour drive to town until after 7, and all I can say is thank god the pizza place near the motel that evening was able to deliver a six pack with the pies.

When Amy does get a chance to relax, one option is a movie, right there in the cook tent, projected on a wall with a projector that could also be used to, say, project scientific presentations from a laptop computer. A recent evening found the Bird Campers circled round for Cabin Fever, a 2002 film by Eli Roth that would not necessarily have made my list for the first movie I’d want to watch 50 feet from where I’ll be sleeping in a tent in the woods all summer.

But you can’t let these fears get to you. When I was down there in April, on the first night we slept in camp — and so before I’d relearned the rule that, when you are camping in the freezing cold, it’s a good idea to forego those last beers for the last hour or so before you turn in — I was out in the moonlight at around 2 a.m., attending to some business. The forest canopy blocked the stars from where I was standing and the night around me was downright inky.

For the same reason why I always have to lean out a little when I’m on top of a cliff, I started thinking about The Blair Witch Project, specifically about how that one guy ends up cut off from the group and they just hear him screaming in the distance for the rest of the movie. Hear it from in their tent.

I was also thinking about how the Blair Witch was supposed to be covered with hair, like a horse.

Also about what I would do if some witch covered with hair suddenly rushed up and poked me in the back and rushed off into the dark again.

Then I just made myself stop thinking, climbed back into my sleeping bag, and tried to find a comfortable position that wouldn’t cause me to slide off of my ThermaRest.

For background on Bird Camp — or if you find yourself confused by anything described below — see About Bird Camp.

A week ago Thursday, Amy and I got up and had breakfast like any other morning, then piled some bags into a GMC Suburban and a Ford F250 parked at the curb and set out for Arizona and Bird Camp.

The bulk of Bird Camp’s equipment stays in Arizona all year, but there is still a huge amount of it to transport down each summer, including three camp vehicles (the third one, which followed us later in the day, is another Suburban). We’d planned all along that I would join Amy for this trip and help set up camp before the rest of her staff arrived, but the initial plan had been that I would just ride in one of the vehicles. As departure time approached, though, it became clear that Amy was one driver short, and so I was sworn in as an official USGS volunteer (USGS funds the research), with rights under the Federal Employees Liability Reform and Tort Compensation Act, or so claimed the paperwork I signed.

In other words, a bona fide federal agent, just as I had always dreamed.

We left a little after nine, after divvying up a pair of walkie talkies we could use to plan bathroom stops and trade acerbic comments, such as how vomitous the suburbs of Salt Lake City appear, and how fortunate we were to have missed rush hour there, which last summer delayed the convoy with some two hours of stop-and-crawl traffic hell.

Our route followed I-90 southeast to Butte, where we picked up I-15, our last turn for the 600 or so miles remaining before Flagstaff. The drive took us through succeeding views of mountain ranges that might as well have been trying to outdo each other for most beautiful vista of the trip. On most of them the snow was starting to melt, and the swirls of white and brown and green and black, blurred a little at times through clouds, reminded me of oil paint smeared and blended on an artist’s palette.

We stopped for the first night in Nephi, Utah, about an hour south of Salt Lake (depending on where in the sprawl you start clocking it). The third driver, Jen, met us there a few hours later, and the next morning we all left together, the two Suburbans up front and my F250 bringing up the rear. As we moved further into southern Utah, we found ourself in the red rock and mesas of the classic American westerns, though not quite as grand as in Monument Valley. On Friday, just in time for dinner, after about 19 total hours on the road over two days, we pulled into Flagstaff.

Saturday morning, our convoy set out again, this time to the big box stores of Flagstaff. At Home Depot, Amy purchased six doors to replace the old ones used as tables in the camp’s cook tent, a step ladder one of the grad students needs for peering into nests, 25 two-foot sections of rebar for use as station markers (i.e., to be pounded into the ground and mapped to help campers orient themselves on-plot and give them fixed reference points for describing nest locations), and some other odds and ends. At Wal-Mart, we collected cleaning supplies, two table-top propane grills, and a whole pile of other small items. Finally, we visited a local grocery store so that Amy and Jen could stock up on personal food supplies.

We were ready to head to camp.

The route to camp begins as a winding two-lane blacktop that hugs the shores of two lakes before climbing into pine forests. As we drove, Amy and Jen remarked via their walkie talkies on the high water level in the two lakes, one of which was barely more than a puddle last year. Indeed, the area saw a lot more moisture than usual this summer, and we had been warned by Amy’s ranger contact to expect “four-foot drifts” of snow, although this warning turned out to be several weeks out of date.

After following the blacktop for about an hour, we turned onto the gravel Forest Service roads we would follow for about another hour before reaching camp. These roads wind through a Ponderosa pine forest, descending into and then climbing out of a steep canyon. While the overall road surface is in good shape — nice and wide for the most part, and few gaping holes or deep ruts — washboard ripples on the road made for a very rough ride, especially for me in the F250, with its extra-stiff, heavy-load suspension. Amy and Jen, in their considerably softer-ride Suburbans, were often far ahead of me, and I was forced to check in on the walkie talkies and follow the dust clouds hanging in the air. There seemed to be no way to close the F250’s vents to the outside air, and I could soon smell the dust and feel it in my throat and eyes.

But this was just part of the experience, as dust is one of the defining characteristics of life at Bird Camp.

We didn’t find any snow to speak of when we finally arrived at Bird Camp, although another of the ranger’s observations about weather turned out to have direct relevance. He had said that the area had seen some extremely high winds lately, which had been causing a lot of tree falls. And right there in the middle of camp lay a huge downed tree, one that Amy and Jen immediately remembered as having had a noticeable lean when it was standing.

We unloaded the truck and then drove back down to the ranger station, where Bird Camp maintains a storage shed (constructed by Amy and two other bird campers last summer), and began what would be a weekend-long process of shuttling supplies from there back up to camp. The ranger station (also home to a contingent of forest firefighters) is basically at the entrance to the forest, so driving there means about an hour on the gravel roads each way.

We also took some of the camp’s propane tanks to be filled at Clint’s Well, a sort of trading post or outpost of civilization not far down the highway from the ranger station. Clint’s Well offers not only a gas station and convenience store (with many varieties of jerky, and used guns for sale from a glass case on the wall), but also the local post office and a diner. It is a real stroke of luck that such a place lies so relatively close to Bird Camp, because the next similar establishment would be another half hour’s drive on the highway at least.

We arrived back at camp in time for me to make use of a little remaining daylight to begin assembling one of the propane grills, although by the time I was done and Amy had finished setting up her tent, I was working by the light of my and her headlamps, trying not to drop any of the several dozen screws and washers on the ground under the picnic table. Soon we were enjoying steaks and pork chops and cans of PBR, the night black around us and the stars brilliant overhead. We were all exhausted, and it wasn’t long before our full bellies had us thinking of bed.

The temperature would dip into the 30s that night and was probably close to that by the time we were getting ready for bed. Amy had laid out our sleeping bag on those cruddy little wanna-be air mattresses known by the brand name “Therma-Rest” (she wouldn’t get her mattress until we had fetched the professor’s camper trailer the next day). She advised me to change into clean clothes before going to bed, as any sweat or moisture in any of my clothes would make it difficult to stay warm in the bag. This is not exactly what you want to do after sitting shivering after dinner on a picnic-table bench, but I went along with it and was glad I did.

At about two in the morning, I wasn’t glad I’d had that last can of beer, however.

The rest of the weekend followed a similar pattern: trips to the storage shed, unloading in camp. The major tasks included setting up the large canvas tents that constitute the “downtown” of the camp, fetching the professor’s camper trailer from a local RV storage yard, and cleaning and filling the camp’s 500-gallon trailer-mounted water tank.

Setting up the tents was not difficult, but Amy was very worried about the prospect of driving the 25-foot camper trailer along the gravel roads to camp and then making the very sharp, uphill turn necessitated by a fence and several inconveniently placed trees — in the manual-shift F250, no less — in order to get the thing into the fenced center of camp. In the end, she made it look almost easy and became kind of a perfectionist when, having gotten it inside the fence, she was backing it into its customary spot. We were aiming for a hole dug for the thing’s black-water pipe, and when after several tries we were still six or so feet off, I suggested we just dig another hole. But Amy, who was getting better at backing the trailer by the minute, climbed out of the truck to survey the situation and then made another try, edging the trailer into position only a foot or so from the hole.

On Monday morning, we drove up to one of the camp’s fenced plots (fenced to keep elk out, to compare birds’ nesting success there with their success in areas where elk munch down some of the little trees they would otherwise use) to check for the inevitable downed trees. Every season, at least a tree or two falls and crushes part of one of these fences, and with the ranger’s warning that there had been a lot of tree falls this spring, we expected the worst. We split up to walk the fence line, with Jen going one way and Amy and I the other.

As it happened, there were only two trees down on the fence, both of a size that the campers could handle with their chainsaw. (Otherwise, it would be a job for the firefighters, who apparently need to practice their chainsawing skills anyway.) But it was just another thing to add to a long list of to-dos for getting the camp up and running, so of course Amy wasn’t thrilled — and this was only one of the fenced plots. There’s a good chance that the other plots will be in similar condition.

And so the first weekend of Bird Camp passed. On Monday afternoon, Amy and I returned to Flagstaff for another night in the motel, so that I’d already be in town when I needed to catch my 7:30 a.m. shuttle to the Phoenix airport the next morning. And the next morning we said goodbye for the summer, as we’ve done so many times now (three for this job, one for another similar job in California, not to mention my two partial summers on boats and Amy’s semester in Belize, back in 2001).

It was instructive that, on Monday night in the motel, we caught a little of the PBS series Carrier, which I assume will be released for rental and which I highly recommend.

Lots of couples have to spend lots of time apart these days; at least neither one of us is going off to a war.

I just returned from driving down to Bird Camp with Amy and helping with some of the initial setup. I’ll work up my notes and post an account of the trip in the next day or so.

In the meantime, here is a little something I meant to cook up last year but never got around to, a sort of backgrounder I like to call About Bird Camp. It should answer all of your Bird Camp-related questions. (If you are ever looking for it in the future, it’s listed over there in the left sidebar of the page.)

But just a brief update, for those of who you interest yourselves in A.’s whereabouts. The season has finished out satisfactorily — “not perfect, but okay,” she says, which probably means that any normal human being would look at the same evidence and say it turned out great — and A. leaves camp tomorrow. I can’t believe it’s over already. Seems like only yesterday when I was writing about her leaving Montana for Arizona, and now she’ll soon be on her way back. She hopes to reach Missoula by Friday evening, when she will take possession of our new residence. (Hope she likes it.)

That’s all I’ve got right now.

If you’d like, you can check out past Bird Camp posts here.

“This is what you look like the day after your anniversary,” he says, adjusting his sunglasses.

When A. finally arrives, the man, who is “down from the rez” for a visit to town, is buying breakfasts for the fourth set of customers who have walked in since he did.

“I bought everything last night,” he says. At least he is only sipping the whisky. “I might as well keep going.”

I wish him a happy anniversary and we hit the road.

Bird Camp takes a three-night break every week and a half or so, with campers needing to be back and ready for work bright and early (in the field by 5 a.m., remember) the morning after the third night. In effect, this means that the last night of break can really only be spent in camp; most of the campers come back to camp in time for dinner, but some might have a reason to trail in very late that night. We are headed back early, trying to get to camp by early afternoon, because A. needs to make rounds on some nests that are due for monitoring visits that day. Riding with us is a Taiwanese UM grad student and a friend of hers from back home, also a biologist, who will be visiting the camp for a week or so. (She is a Virginia Tech student.)

Before leaving town we stop at a grocery store. (Each camper is responsible for his or her own food and other supplies, plus A. needs supplies for the BBQ she is throwing because her predecessor will be visiting the camp with her husband that evening.) The Taiwanese students are keenly aware that a container of ice cream they had purchased in town will not last the drive, much less survive at camp, so they eat it with a set of metal chopsticks as they shop.

As the Suburban makes its lumbering way out of town, the trappings of civilization fall away very quickly. Soon we are on a curving, two-lane blacktop through tree-covered hills. We pass a geographical feature known as Mormon Lake that currently has no actual water in it; it’s been a very dry season so far, though the area around Bird Camp got a lot of snow last winter.

After about an hour we reach Happy Jack: a gravel parking lot serving a gas station, general store and cafe. I fill up the Suburban while A. gets the camp’s mail. The two Taiwanese duck into the general store, surprised that I am not joining them.

“Are you sure?” asks one. “Last chance for ice cream.”

At this point, we are only halfway there, in terms of time on the road: we leave the highway at the ranger station (we stop and A. picks up the two eBay video cameras she’d ordered, which had to be sent to a street address instead of the P.O. boxes in Happy Jack) and commence the final leg, about an hour on narrow gravel roads up and down steep grades through the Coconino National Forest. The roads vary greatly in quality along the route. Often they are in good shape, but occasionally they have developed those latitudinal ridges that gravel roads sometimes get; when we encounter these on a downgrade, the Suburban has the disquieting tendency to swim back and forth across the road unless driven at barely noticeable speeds. In fact, other than its general sturdiness (I’m assuming) and high passenger/equipment capacity, there seems little to recommend this particular model of SUV for this purpose. (It’s not even four-wheel drive, although to be fair it’s not like they really need to drive off-road or deal with snow or much mud.)

Finally we pull into the camp. The first view is of the few personal vehicles that some of the campers keep at camp, parked next to the four chemical toilets that the visiting Taiwanese student refers to as “porta-pities,” which seems apt. Under a tree in this parking area lie a pile of ladders, poles, traps and other equipment. From the parking area, the tiny gravel track continues toward the center of the camp, still fifty yards distant. Off in the trees I can see some of the campers’ personal tents, which are scattered in all directions on the outskirts of camp, according to the idiosyncratic privacy desires and other considerations of each camper.

The heart of the camp consists of a row of three military campaign-style utility tents, floorless, house-shaped, in white canvas. The largest is the cook tent and the other two are used to store cameras, records and other necessities. There is a late model, smallish camper trailer to one side, where the Bird Camp Professor stays when he visits and which is otherwise available as a spot for sheltered computer use and for its refrigerator. (These people eat a lot of cheese.) The wisdom of using the computers inside the camper — in addition to comfort — is clear after only a few minutes in camp. With the dry weather, a fine red dust rises from the soil and covers everything. The white canvas tents are dingy with it.

A. confers with Kara, who is also back at camp, about which nests need a visit, flipping through the pink cards on which each nest’s location is recorded and where visits are logged. Then they get their equipment together: various small instrument cases, backpacks, notebooks, a narrow ten-foot ladder.

I am already sneezing. I seem to be allergic to every place A. does field work.

On the even rougher gravel roads around Bird Camp, the Suburban is deafening to ride in. The windows are open for what little comfort the hot breeze brings, so we hear the tires crunching and popping over every rock. The vehicle jounces up and down over hard ridges and through washed-out gullies, suspension and seat springs squeaking, the dashboard rattling. The aluminum ladder, lying across the seat backs, is its own symphony of clatters.

We need to visit three nests: one to install an egg probe, one to change out the data logger at an already probed nest, and one to measure some nestlings that have recently hatched.

The first nest is accessible from a road, so we park and A. and Kara pile their instrument cases on the ground. This nest is in a snag, or the trunk of a snapped-off tree about eight feet tall. A. walks to the nest; the mother waits until the last second, then takes off, flying low to the ground, hoping we’ll follow her, whoever we are, whatever it is we want. A. stands on tiptoe to lift a tiny, rust-specked egg out of the nest, which is built into the exposed hollow at the center of the tree. The egg is about the size of an almond M&M; the number “3″ is written on the side in blue ink.

This egg is doomed; the process it’s about to undergo will kill it, but the plan is to hook up a probe to it that will allow the Bird Campers to monitor the temperature of the nest as the mother continues to incubate her other eggs. This is a difficult thing to pull off, since — while mother birds don’t mind their eggs being handled, it seems — they will reject eggs if they detect the probe, and they often do. But the often frustrating effort is worth it for the fascinating temperature data that are collected. For example, eggs must be kept above a certain temperature to develop; below that temperature, they just don’t grow and will eventually die. This temperature is easily maintained when the mother is sitting on the eggs, of course, but what about when she leaves for food? The probe data, which — when downloaded from the logging devices — is visible on a computer screen as a jagged line graph of steep peaks and valleys, show that the birds are somehow able — and somehow “know” — to increase the temperature of the eggs just before leaving, just to give themselves a little more time before they must return.

The first step is to collect a yolk sample; this isn’t necessary to the probing but might as well happen since the egg will die anyway. A. inserts a tiny, needle-shaped nozzle into the egg. The nozzle is connected to a tiny pieces of tubing on the end which is in turn attached to a syringe, where the syringe’s needle would usually be. Drawing up the syringe’s plunger, A. is pleased by the result.

“I got yolk on the first try!”

I can tell from Kara’s reaction that this is not usually so easy.

Now it’s time for the probe. A. takes out about three feet of skinny wire with black insulation. The wire terminates in two bare metal wires that come together in a little tear-drop tip, about the size of a glob of ink from a dying ballpoint. The two bare leads remind me of the filament in a light bulb. She inserts the little tear drop into the hole she made for the yolk sample, and then she and Kara work on sealing the hole as smoothly as possible with super glue and a spray accelerant that speeds the glue’s drying. A little clumpy, one of them says, but it will do. A. writes a code on the data logger, a small black plastic object the approximate size and shape of a pack of cigarettes cut in half. Holding the egg, the probe wire trailing, a roll of camouflaged duct tape around her bicep, A. walks over the nest, followed by Kara with the logger and a large ziploc bag. Now the other two eggs come out of the nest as well so that this one can be placed in the middle and the wire hidden as well as possible. After arranging the eggs and leading the wire out of the back of the nest, A. tapes the wire to the tree trunk and plugs it into the data logger, which she places in the ziploc and wedges into the space behind some peeling bark. More tape. She studies her handiwork. Nothing obvious, no strange human-related objects immediately in view. This should do the trick.

For the next nest we drive again and then pile out of the vehicle for a quarter-mile walk through the woods. If A. and Kara haven’t been to a particular nest before, they must get out an orienteering compass and follow someone else’s written directions on the pink card for that nest: start at station A, walk 30 yards at 070 degrees to a jagged stump, walk 90 yards at 180 degrees to two aspens growing in a V, etc. It’s like looking for pirate’s treasure. At this nest, which is built in a low tree at about thigh height, A. only needs to change out the logger hooked up to an already probed egg. After doing so, A. walks to two or three other low trees in the immediate area and makes the same motions, pretending to examine non-existent nests. This is to confuse any of the smarter nest predators — namely jays — who might be watching; incredibly, they are known to use human scientists to lead them to their lunches.

As we walk back up to the car, from the wetter region at the bottom of the little valley or drainage to the drier ridge, we pass from deciduous forest back into pines, the air dappled with late afternoon sunlight and shimmering with dust and pollen. As we drive, the wind kicks up little dust devils from the red dirt in front of us. I’m blowing my nose about every minute or so, and my lips are already severely chapped from the dry air.

The last nest of the day is also a quarter mile or so from the road. Unlike the other two, this one is built high in a tree, about fifteen feet off the ground. Also unlike the other two nests, this one is guarded by a kind of a bird — a Steller’s Jay — that is known to be a little less passive when humans come knocking. Kara warns that it might fly at our faces, which has me wishing for ski goggles, but A. isn’t concerned. Kara and I prop the forestry ladder against the tree and hold it while A. worms up through the branches to lift out two of the three nestlings (never leave an empty nest, in case the mother returns and decides to abandon the nest because, she “thinks,” all of the eggs/nestlings have been eaten) before climbing down again. We retreat to the instrument cases piled about twenty yards away from the tree. Against prediction, the Steller’s Jay never once attacks.

Eggs are easy: you just weigh them. With nestlings, you must measure various parts of their wings, which means holding them firmly and grabbing the wings and unfolding them. The little creatures are startlingly ugly and pathetic; no feathers yet, although you can see where ridges of something featherlike are growing in; their skin so thin it is almost transparent. They seem too vulnerable to be exposed to the outside air, like little gallbladders with wings. After the measurements are taken, they are stuffed head first into a film canister for weighing; the film canister holds them still and keeps them on the scale. Periodically, some reflex triggers their feeding instinct and their massive mouths pop open.

A. returns the first two, retrieves the third, and completes the round of measurements. We return to camp, where more campers are trickling back from break. There is paperwork to complete, the next day’s routes and procedures to plan, and then it is time for the BBQ.

The next morning, I do not join A. when the alarm goes off at 3:45. She dresses with her headlamp on and brushes her teeth at the tent door before kissing me goodbye. I drift in and out of sleep while the camp wakes up around me. Pots and pans clank in the cook tent, vehicle doors slam, equipment clanks. When campers walk past the tent, their headlamps project the grasses and trees against the side of the tent like a shadow-puppet show. The birds’ dawn symphony is warming up, not exactly loud, but dozens of different patterns melding together from all sides. Something howls: is it a coyote or just the dog visiting camp with A.’s predecessor?

I pass the morning wandering the meadow next to the camp, my only company the flies and whatever left the large piles of poop I must keep half an eye out for. But it’s beautiful: grassland along a meandering creek, bordered by pines. Other than Bird Camp, the closest permanent human structures are seventeen miles away, at the ranger station. Back at the camp, I read and chat with two of the grad students who are working in camp today. One is transferring notes from one notebook to another; the other is making “dummy eggs” for some purpose from plaster of paris. Eventually they head out and at 10 a.m. the camp is empty, the only sounds occasional bird chirps and the wind, starting as a light whistling in the treetops before gusting louder and louder, kicking up the red dust as it whooshes through. The dust coats the haphazardly arranged plastic patio chairs, the picnic table, the six red gas cans in the shade of a tree, the seven trash cans clustered around another tree. The dishwashing station, well off from the cook tent, six blue jerry cans for water, bottles of soap, buckets. The utility tents’ doors flap with a sound like sails in the wind. And far off in the tall grass, a soccer ball sits forgotten.

*****

Saturday evening we will return to a motel in Flagstaff for the last night of my visit, since my shuttle to Phoenix leaves at 7:30 Sunday morning. But first I accompany A. out on afternoon rounds, similar to those we made on Friday. We visit the first nest again, the one she probed, to change out the data logger. But the probed egg is gone, its innards smeared across the other two eggs. At first, A. can’t even find the logger but eventually locates it in the tall grass about six feet from the tree snag. It has been ripped from the tree and the black probe wire chewed neatly through, as if clipped by wire cutters. Back at camp, on the computer, the logger is shown to have been collecting normal nestlike temperatures until six a.m., which is when the probe seems to have been detected and destroyed. The mother might have been trying to rotate and rearrange the eggs, one of the grad students says. I ask if he’s ever seen a wire chewed straight through like that.

“They get pretty upset sometimes,” he says.

It’s not a suite, though, just a small room with a bed, dresser and sink, and the shower and toilet in a little closet-like space. Adequate to our purposes. There is no bedside table, which will be significant a few nights into our stay. By then, I’ll be in the habit of hanging my metal-framed glasses from the floor lamp next to the bed, by hooking one temple over the lampshade. This works just fine when turning in for the night, but on one occasion I do this while resting my eyes during the an “Office” marathon we’re watching on TV. (Probably I did this during the many previews of the apparently execrable movie “Evan Almighty,” also starring Steve Carrell, that they are playing at the commercial breaks.) The light is on. Fifteen minutes later, I scoop the glasses up and pop them onto my face too quickly to notice that the metal temple has been superheated by its proximity to the light bulb. All at the same time, I hear the sound of my sizzling flesh, feel the pain and find that I am yelling with pain and surprise.

Our room could have a cooler namesake, but it could also have a worse one. On our way out for dinner at Karma Sushi Tapas, on Route 66, I notice a Bon Jovi room next to the elevator.

2.
The next morning we walk across the tracks to the laundromat and start a load of A.’s clothes before ordering breakfast next door in Macy’s, one of these places where you order food at the counter and some hairy young person eventually walks out into the middle of the dining room with your meal and yells your name. Mismatched, scarred wood furniture, a general atmosphere of virtuous reducing, reusing and making do. Ahead of us in line, a Frenchman apologizes for his English. “Don’t apologize,” the clerk instructs him. All of the Bird Campers are in town and we run into various of them everywhere we go; at breakfast, A.’s colleague Kara joins us. They eat granola, I eat a “steamed egg” sandwich (which is much better than it sounds). While A. and Kara talk birds and camp, I flip through a copy of Us magazine I’ve stolen from the laundromat. I had thought I wanted to see the “scandalous pictures” of Lindsay Lohan holding a knife to Vanessa Williams’s neck, pictures which the headline claims are “testing [Williams's husband's] love”], but I find myself transfixed by an ad for the Canon Powershot digital camera featuring Maria Sharapova, and not for the reasons you might expect: the camera ad features about a dozen photographs, but they are all pictures of Sharapova taking pictures, with no suggestion that the photos are supposed to represent what the camera is actually capable of. You should want this camera, in other words, so that you will look like Maria Sharapova when you are using it?

While we eat, a heavyset woman stirs coffee beans in the massive roaster that dominates the dining room. Her iPod and the coffee roaster are the same shade of red. On the way back to our side of the tracks, we are stopped by a train, an immensely long row of doubledecker cargo containers full of all the stuff China makes for us.

3.
Flagstaff is such a small town that, when I visited last year, I drove through it thinking it was its own suburbs. There is a tiny downtown “grid” before the town peters out into suburban sprawl and strip malls. But the downtown has an appealing, defiant feel to it, remnants of the old west, no building taller than four or five stories. There are interesting restaurants and small boutiques where one can pay a lot of money for clothes to go for a hike in, and other stores with signs advertising “Crystal Sale” and “Sustainable Fashions.” The side streets feel sleepy and of another time, the local motels advertised by billboards on steel Eiffel Tower-like structures towering fifty feet above the sidewalk, a clear sign of the absence of zoning laws, like they were thrown up during a plutonium rush in the 1960s. One block over from the tracks is a street of old-fashioned motor-court-style motels, overgrown with unplanned foliage and obviously offering weekly and monthly rates.