Len Warren Birdman of the Desert in Shoshone, California
Working out on the Mojave Desert, I have been going through Shoshone, California since the late 60s. It is located at a small spring and green spot in the next valley east of Death Valley. Nothing much has changed over the decades – a stop for gas, sodas, or a quick meal. What else is there? It had been an active area from the 1880s through about 1920. A network of railroads served lead and borax mines. But the mines closed one by one, and the railroads were abandoned. One old railroad bed runs right through town. If it weren’t for highways for newfangled automobiles, the area would have been remote. Supplying drivers has kept the town alive.
It turns out that there is much more if you have the right people. It is called Ecotourism and it must work to some degree. We had to get to a motel an hour away for this trip because the motel in town was full of photographers.
Two of the right people are Len Warren and Bob Brown.
Together they make the place a little more interesting and, as with us, make it worth spending a little time. But they had completely different paths in life to get there. Warren only wanted to study birds. Brown and his wife moved to an abandoned ranch his father and aunt had bought and were trying to figure out what to do with it. Each one’s solution became part of the answer of how to make Shoshone interesting.
Warren grew up in Maine. By age 16 he knew he liked birds, but even the most menial job in ornithology, the study of birds, required a master’s degree. That meant a lot of time and money studying things like economics or art history which was not what he wanted, so instead he joined the Navy and then learned to sell cars. It turned out he was very successful at selling cars, teaching others to sell cars and managing car dealerships. “Then came 2008 when the economy took a real nosedive. I needed to find other work and so I decided I’d take a chance and try to get myself one of those field worker jobs studying birds. I ended up hearing about a job in Shoshone, California that was called a nest searcher for Point Reyes Bird Observatory. So that was in 2009 and here today I’ll start my 15th year of searching for birds’ nests and recording the activities of desert songbirds along the Amargosa River.,” he remembers. It has turned out that the first job only lasted a year, but he has used the lessons he learned about raising money in the car business and applied them to the nonprofit world to keep himself working on the Amargosa through the following years. It is as though life diverted him to car sales for him to develop the skills needed to be a better advocate for birds later in life.
What is it about the Amargosa that has kept his interest? He explains, “if we had a drone camera, you could zoom out from this place where you see all this vegetation and realize that for thousands of square miles from a bird’s perspective it’s nothing but rock except here along this river. The amazing thing is that there’s any birds here at all. They’re using this river system as a place to drink, bathe, feed and mate. There are birds that are permanent residents. There are birds that move down out of the high mountains for the winter. There are birds that migrate here specifically to breed and there are birds that just pass through on their way to Oregon or Canada or wherever.”
Warren learned all the coyote trails studying birds and used that knowledge when the idea came up of drawing people to Shoshone by teaching them about the birds. He has been able to do that amazingly cheaply. He widened the coyote trails just by using his body to push back the brush and tree branches to make a reasonable walking trail. Warren explains, “We were trying to figure out how to make some interpretive signs without having to get a big grant for them. We ended up using simple laminated pieces of paper with photographs of our different species of birds or butterflies or what have you. You can change them from season to season so ideally you if it’s butterfly season you can change the papers laminated to butterflies or if it’s bird season you can change them. It’s $3 for the wooden pole, a dollar a piece for clip boards placed on top of each of upside down and right side up to hold both ends of a color copied information sheet which cost a quarter or $0.50 to laminate. The trails have color names, and the poles are painted the trail color. This trail is the blue trail.” All of that is nice, but it is helpful to do things that bring customers. Shoshone has a natural flow of people to and from Death Valley which people from all over the planet come to visit. They search for a place to stay and find the little town of Shoshone. The idea was to get some to stay a little longer and learn something. Clicking shoshonevillage.com talks about the birding trails. Google Earth with the ‘Everything’ tab shows trails. Brochures around town walk people through the trail network
