Point Counts and Hang-Outs

Frog!

This week got off to a much better start than last week – I slathered anti-itch gel all over my legs and took a sleeping pill which helped me sleep in until 7:30 on Saturday (!), I FINALLY made a key lime pie (and it was crazy delicious), and Chelsea and I had another afternoon of mimosas in the backyard. The weather was even on our side because FORTUNATELY there was a brief thunderstorm on Sunday morning, so Chelsea and I got a (much needed) extra hour of sleep before going up to Hickory Ridge.

I had another encounter with a rattlesnake, but this one didn’t give me ANY warning. I was just moseying along in the field when I caught a glimpse of something a couple feet away that looked like snake skin, and really loose skin at that. My first thought was that it was dead (no rattle, hissing, or anything? Come on, guy), but when I followed the coiled body I found the head in the middle… and he was staring at me. So I took a giant step back, but the lack of aggression made me much less wary than my first rattlesnake encounter. Of course I took some pictures, but he was pretty obscured by the grass. After walking away I realized that I needed to walk back through that area to get to some other bird territories, but I didn’t think to mark the snake’s location on my GPS! Instead I took a good 50m wide detour around his general area. I almost didn’t see him the first time, didn’t want to press my luck a second time! Also, speaking of snakes, Chelsea identified the little mini snake (third one that I found last week) as a Texas Brown Snake. Seriously, for every regular version of a thing, there seems to also be a Texas version of that thing.

Wandering through rattlesnake territory was totally worth it because I found a new nest! Everything just seemed to line up perfectly for that find – I was really hot from wandering in the open sun so I waited around in the shade near the last point that someone heard these birds shrad. I stood there a good 10 minutes before I heard the male, and when I did I saw him with a female. I followed them in a big circle for 7 minutes until they both disappeared, and as I started turning around to start nest searching in the area, I found myself staring right at their nest which was hanging at the end of a bare juniper branch in the middle of an open area. Thanks for not trying to hide your nest at all! But it’s not helping you avoid the cowbirds… (cowbirds are brood parasites, meaning they lay their eggs in other birds' nests for them to feed and raise).

Four white BCVI eggs and one speckled cowbird egg

This week was our last round of point counts for the summer. Thursday I did them with Chelsea at the Rogers property, which is kind of a nice one because there are several roads running through it which meant that we could drive to most of the points, or at least relatively close. That was especially helpful because of how hot it was that day and how many mosquitoes were out that morning. No, there were a LOT of mosquitoes. We couldn’t stand still at the first few points that we went to, otherwise no fewer than 7 mosquitoes would immediately land somewhere on us. As a result we were either pacing back and forth or just swinging our arms around like some kind of drug-induced interpretive dance. We were also slapping mosquitoes everywhere they landed… and that’s when we realized that training to be a field biologist is surprisingly similar to training to be a porn star. How many professions can you think of that slapping butts and winding up pants-less (Chelsea had her own fire ant encounter earlier in the week) are considered normal aspects of the job? Not many, but field biologist and porn star both make the list.

The frustrating thing about that day was when we missed a prime opportunity to walk to one of the points and had to go back to it later by taking a much less ideal route. It was our last point of the day and we were pretty tired and hot, so climbing down and back up a canyon that was filled with juniper and green briar was one of the last things we wanted to do. It basically ended with us just barreling through the last 50 meters, getting smacked, jabbed, scraped, and tangled in a mess of branches and thorny vines while yelling at everything that got in our way. Yes, we were yelling at trees. And spider webs. It was not our most glamorous moment, and by the time we tripped our way out onto the road, we were thoroughly pissed off, sweating like crazy, and covered in tree bits. After that we just sat in the air conditioned car for a good 10 minutes before moving on to check a couple nests.

The AMAZING part of that day was after we picked Michaela up and were heading home – we were all still really hot and Michaela mentioned that there was a creek just down the road. I got SO excited because I’ve wanted to go swimming since I got to Texas.

WAY better than our pond, and my new favorite hang-out

Chelsea and I did point counts together the next day, too. This time we went to the Younquist property, which is a really nice one to walk around. There are decent paths between all of the points, and there was very little crawling through dense shrubs and juniper relative to the entire walk. We walked over 15km that day! Good thing was that there was either a slight breeze or at least cloud cover for most of the day, so it didn’t get super hot like the day before. That evening we invited three of the refuge interns over for dinner and drinks. We had homemade lasagna, a chocolate toffee pie, and the interns brought homemade garlic bread (SO GOOD), a salad, and a bunch of beer. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them – they get two-day weekends so it seems that they can do a bit more stuff than we can, but we’re hoping to hang out with them more for the rest of summer.

Today Chelsea and I are in Austin! She is getting renewing her CPR/First Aid certifications, and I’m just driving around doing chores and shopping until she’s done. Gotta find an inflatable raft to use in my new swimming hole! We’re definitely going to REI and Barnes & Noble this afternoon (really, just those two could fill a day), and then getting some crazy delicious Mexican food, I hope. For some reason I only ever crave Mexican food here in Texas. I mean it’s perfect because there’s plenty around, but I don’t even crave Italian here, and I LIVED off pasta as a kid. Now that the key lime pie has been conquered, suiza enchiladas are my next cooking challenge! *Drool*

By the way, there is something not quite right about waiting around for your alarm to go off so you can finally get out of bed… when your alarm is set for 7am… on your day off. We have to start with the sunrise, and since the sun keeps rising earlier, so do we. Our start times for this week have finally dropped into the 5 o'clock hour. Seems really early, but it's only 10 minutes earlier than we were starting last week... Also, waking up with the sun means we get to see awesome sunrises on our way to work!