This week I discovered just how far away our mailbox is.
I’m used to a 10-second barefoot walk to check the mail at home. I know that we
have a long driveway, but I guessed 10 or 15 minutes roundtrip. Turns out it’s
more like 15 minutes ONE WAY. I didn’t even think about the fact that it was 95
degrees outside, or that it’s all uphill on the way back. On the return journey
I took my shirt off (you can do that in Texas because there is no one around!) in
an attempt to fix my disgusting field tan. (The fact that I was getting a tan
while checking the mail is disturbing to me.) I felt like Chevy Chase in
Vacation when he was wandering around in the desert singing maniacally, but he
had no pants on. Oh, and the mailbox was empty. :-|
Sunday was a ridiculous day. Chelsea and I were trying to
map several different territories that all overlapped in one area. We went to
different sides of that mess to try and cover more area, but the males were all
over the place, there were fledglings in the wrong territories, and females
were shradding wherever we went. We just couldn’t figure out who belonged
where, so we busted out of the juniper to talk it out on the road. Dianne was
nearby and heard our confusion on the radio, so she came over to help us figure
things out. After 20 minutes Dianne came to the conclusion that one of the
males was a man-whore. We think he had a nest with a female in one territory, fledglings
with a female in a different territory, and possibly something else going on
with a female in a third territory. Thanks, birds, for being so freaking
complicated! While trying to figure all of that out I got bit on my upper,
inner thigh by some kind of huge fire ant. The thing wasn’t even inside my
pants – it was outside, but my crotch was on fire for a good couple hours.
Meant that I was hobbling around that entire time, which is not easy to do
while maneuvering around in thick vegetation. That afternoon I had time to do a
few veg measurements, but unfortunately the closest points were deep in some
canyons. That was terrible because of how long it took to climb up/down the
canyon, and how messy the veg was. I definitely fell on my face a couple times,
got tangled in green briar, scraped my neck, and after finally getting to the
bottom I realized I had no cell/radio reception, so I couldn’t let the others
know where I was when they were coming to get me. At least it was an interesting
day!
We had another brief storm on Tuesday morning, which was
very unfortunately timed to hit just as we were trying to go out. Chelsea and I
looked at the radar when we woke up (we saw lightning outside in the distance) and
saw that it was heading straight for us, but the others said it would probably
be fine. So instead of just delaying our start from the get-go, we got up, got
dressed, ate breakfast, packed our things… and then the storm hit. It was
*then* that the girls decided we would wait it out, so Chelsea and I kicked off
our pants and got back into bed. That’s the unfortunate thing about getting
work done – they obviously want to hope for the best and be ready to go no
matter what, but sometimes you just have to be real and know that there’s a
storm coming and it’s better to just stay in bed in the first place.
Wednesday I got to help Michaela band several birds. We
started by setting up a mist net in one territory to try and band a male (one
of those confusing males from that messy area that Chelsea I went to). The net
has several sections to it with little pockets of loose net in each section, so
when a bird flies into the net it will get stuck in the pocket. Unfortunately
this guy kept flying over the net (it was a really tricky area for
mist-netting), and the one time that he did fly into it he bounced out. In the
end we were unsuccessful, so we moved on to a nest to band nestlings (way
easier – just walk over and take the nestlings out of the nest!). That day my
mail finally showed up – I had four packages crammed into our (huge) mailbox,
so it looked like Christmas! It was WAY better when I realized that one of
those packages was ITCHY CREAM FOR MY CHIGGER BITES! Prescription itchy cream
is amazing. I basically slathered it all over my legs, which was kind of gross
because it’s a greasy… ointment, so I was just kind of slimy. Of course now it’s
on my pants, my comforter, my sheets, and a bunch of random other things, but I’m
not itchy so I don’t care! I was a little horrified to discover (after shaving
for like the first time in a month) that many of my bites are no longer bites,
but actually just scars. Thanks, chiggers.
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| Michaela getting the mist net ready. |
Wednesday night a new field tech (Jeremy) showed up. This
wasn’t planned at all, but the project that he was working on finished early,
and the project that he was moving to got cancelled, so the higher-ups sent him
to us so that he would still have some work (funny considering they didn’t care
about dropping a month and a half of work from the start of our project, but
whatever). He seems really nice and it sounds like he will mostly be doing veg,
so that will be a big help. Not sure what that means for the rest of us – Dianne
is pushing for more days off, but maybe we’ll just having marginally shorter
days, or maybe nothing will change until the end of the season. We’ll see! The
girl he was working with, Tatiana, will be coming here sometime this week, but
it sounds like she’ll only be staying for a week or so.
This week I also found another reason to love the drive
into Marble Falls – people warn each other about cops! In California most of
the roads have multiple lanes in each direction and are usually packed, but
here in small-town Texas it’s one lane in each direction with very few people
out an about. I was driving into Marble Falls when a guy coming in the opposite
direction flashed his lights at me. I immediately thought he was warning me
about something, but didn’t see anything around, so I kept driving (but a bit
slower). I drove for almost another minute (during which time I thought maybe
that was his way of waving and I should’ve flashed back), but then I rounded a
corner and saw a cop on the side of the road. YAY! Thank you, stranger! I told
Michaela about that when I got home later, and she said that was nice of him,
considering that it’s illegal and he could get into a lot of trouble. O_O It
definitely makes sense for that to be illegal, but I didn’t even think about
that at the time. Still, I keep loving that drive more and more.
Friday (yesterday) I went to Hickory Ridge by myself,
which is always nice getting a break from constant radio communication with
other people on the same property. This time was interesting, though, because
the bull that roams around with the cows started snorting and huffing at me in
one of my territories, so I kind of hurried out of there, but then he found me
again in my next one! I spent a couple hours trying to map birds while also
staying away from the bull, which is not very easy considering that he just
crashes through vegetation. I finally got away from him, only to encounter a
group of wild hogs later in the morning. Fortunately the mom wasn’t around,
because there were two medium-sized hogs and a little piglet, who she would’ve
flipped out over if I was around it.
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| Wild hogs in action! |
Last night Chelsea and I went to the Cedar Park Rodeo!
That was cool because I got to see a larger small-town rodeo. It was large
enough that there was an actual stadium and giant TV screens in the middle for
replays and such, but small enough that you could still see the action on both
sides of the arena floor. They had all the same events that we saw in the last
rodeo, as well as steer wrestling (side note: what I called “steer wrestling”
in my last post was actually “tie-down roping”), bareback riding, breakaway
roping, barrel racing, and pre-teens riding miniature
bulls. Steer wrestling is when a steer is let out of the chute with a guy
on a horse following. The guy rides right up next to the steer, jumps off onto him while grabbing him by
the horns, and then wrestles him to the ground so that all four legs are up.
Wild! Breakaway roping is when riders try and rope a steer as fast as possible.
The fastest was something like 2 or 3 seconds out of the chute – ridiculous!
Barrel racing is a women’s sport where riders have to loop around three barrels
set up at three points of a triangle and race back to the finish line. The kids
riding miniature bulls were insane – they were all around 8-12 years old (AN 8-YEAR-OLD
ON A MINATURE BULL??), and they definitely knew their stuff! This wasn’t like
mutton bustin’ where any yahoo can just hop on and hold on tight – these kids
had kid-sized chaps and all the riding gear! The bulls were also
ridiculous-looking. They were actually bulls, but they must be specially bred
because they all had short, squatty legs. They were the wiener dogs of bulls. Chelsea
has been to a number of rodeos, but even she hadn’t seen this before. It was
definitely one of the highlights. Texas never stops surprising me!
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| Who needs a zamboni when you have a tractor? |
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| Miniature bull! |
(I'll try to post a couple videos next week, but right now I'm heading off to swim in a lake!)
