La Cucaracha

You know those mornings where all of your alarms go off and you still decide to lie in bed for “just 5 more minutes” but accidentally sleep for another 45? Today was going to be one of those mornings. Both of my alarms had gone off, and I had just rolled over and gotten comfy when I heard something flutter and land reasonably close to my head region. I lay there for another 30 seconds before deciding to finally get up, partly because of the mysterious critter, and partly because I didn’t want to have to run around in a panic a half hour later. I got up, turned the light on, briefly glanced around but didn’t see any flies or moths on my bed, and was heading to the bathroom when I glanced back one more time… and saw a freaking COCKROACH on the wall above my pillow. Before I could even move, it tried taking flight but fell ONTO MY PILLOW, where my FACE was a minute earlier. I used a cup and knocked it onto the floor between my nightstand and the wall, and then I put the cup over it, thinking I could just leave it there for the next 2 months until it was time to move out. (I wasn’t using that bit of floor, and the cup would be the last thing I packed.) While eating breakfast I finally woke up enough to be reasonable and just get rid of the thing. I wasn’t gone more than seven minutes, but in that time the roach managed to FREE HIMSELF from the confines of my carefully placed cup. What’s worse than a roach in your bedroom? A roach in your bedroom that could be hiding ANYWHERE. I started moving furniture, tipping out shoes, pulling the sheets off my bed, and crawling around on the floor until I spotted him walking along the wall away from the foot of my bed. I did the cup thing again, but this time immediately removed him with the help of some paper under the cup. He had been totally docile this entire time until I shoved the paper underneath, at which point he started SCREAMING and jamming his antennae between the paper and the cup in an attempt to free himself while I ran to get him outside. Who needs an alarm when you can have ROACHES?!

I do find it pretty interesting that I’ve lived in two different regions of Peru where cockroaches were common “household” critters, and I didn’t have a problem with them. In the rainforest I just knocked them off of my clothes line and made sure not to step on them when I got out of bed, and in the cloud forest I tried to keep them out of whatever I was cooking and off of my dinner plate. But in a legitimate residence, with walls and carpeting and air conditioning, roaches are like 20 times worse. They’re not something you would expect to see indoors, so they are awful. In Peru, we didn’t really have doors, so there was no “in”. To be fair, my bed was always the safe zone – I had a mosquito net in the rainforest and a tent in the cloud forest. Both were made of the thinnest material that could be torn by a paperclip, but they felt like fortresses against jungle critters.

As for work, our nest searching is winding down. We’re still always looking for nesting behavior, but apparently the latest that scrub-jays have ever laid the first egg of their clutch is June 6^th, so once that date rolls around we’ll pretty much be done with nest searching (other than keeping our eyes out for nests that we may have missed). This week we’re actually in our second surge of bandings because of all of the re-nesting attempts or double broods. We have something like 10 nests to band this week, so I have to get my fill of scrub-jay chicks now before we run out of nests to band! I got to do two more bandings on my own (with supervision), which is always exciting. Once the bandings are over we’ll still be checking on the fledglings through July, which is also pretty fun. The younger ones are cute (when you can find them) because they just hunker down and don’t move or make noise. The older ones are cute because they’re a bit more brave and pop up when their parents start squawking to see what’s going on, and then they join in! There is one area where there are 3-4 territories with fledglings all right next to each other, and if I drive slowly down that road I can see all the fledglings pop up and squawk as I pass by. Fledgling Alley!

I thought I was checking a nest halfway through the incubation period, but I found these guys instead! Mom laid her eggs way earlier than we thought.

Cute, fluffy little 11-day-old nestling

Banding nestlings while two adults watch from behind me

Papa in the top left looking out for his two little fledglings in the bottom right

I’ve learned that this is a great time of year because all the wild blueberries are getting ripe! I’ll occasionally pass by a little blueberry plant here or there and grab the ripe ones as a delicious treat (I have never liked store-bought blueberries, but these wild ones are delicious). Last week Michelle and I were nest searching in a territory with birds that were not being very cooperative (they were just foraging and preening instead of doing anything nesty). She started moseying around trying to get the birds to give us some indication of where they were nesting when she stumbled across this massive patch of blueberries. We both immediately quit on those birds and started picking blueberries for a good half hour or more. Hey, if the birds get to forage, so do we! We followed little patches of blueberry bushes all the way back to the truck. As long as it took to pick all of those berries, they were gone in about 5 minutes. We started collecting more throughout the week so Michelle could bake this super delicious blueberry cobbler thing. *Drool*

Speaking of baking things, on my day off I baked some of my mom’s No Bake Cookies to surprise Sheena on her birthday last week. They were also delicious, if I do say so myself! That night we went to Emily’s house for a Girl’s Night – we watched Amelie, ate Chinese food and cookies, played Scattergories, and just hung out. We had a great time!

Northern Bobwhite

Last weekend our whole office had a little potluck at Greg’s house. He lives next to a lake, so we ate lunch and then went swimming! The swimming was pretty brief, actually. There was this huge float thing tied down next to a dock, so we swam over to that and then just lay on that for ages, tried knocking each other off of it, and were just silly. It was so much fun, and WAY better than lying on the beach – it gets too hot too quickly on the beach, so you always have to jump back in the water, but on the float you’re basically lying in a little pool of water. It’s perfect! After that, some of us spontaneously decided to go to the new X-Men movie, so we hustled over to the movie theaters (still dripping wet) to catch the last cheap-o showing of the day. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to sit together, it being Saturday of opening weekend, but the guy selling tickets laughed and said the theater wasn’t even half full. This is Avon Park for you (actually, it was Sebring – Avon Park doesn’t even have a movie theater). But yes – the movie was great, in a WTF kind of way. Definitely recommend it.

Clockwise from top left: Greg S., Greg T., Jacob, Michelle, Emily, Me, Sheena, Britta
(Dustin was taking the picture)

Last week I also watched Captain Phillips for the first time and that movie was amazing! You should definitely watch it if you haven’t (or re-watch it if you have). And as for books, I read The Fault in Our Stars (movie coming out in June) and it was so cute and heartbreakingly good. (Teenage cancer chick falls in love with teenage cancer dude. Nothing bad could happen there...) I also read Divergent and it was fantastic. Very reminiscent of The Hunger Games, if you liked those books. Waiting to borrow Insurgent (second in the trilogy) from the library, and reading The Dive from Clausen’s Pier in the meantime.

Gator wandering through the scrub!

Happy Mother's Day!

Lots of flooding from a solid day of rain

It was another week (or so) of the usual work stuff – nest searching (always 5-10 nests that we’ve got to find), bandings, finding fledglings, and data entry. We had a lot of stormy weather a week or so ago, so last Saturday I ended up spending most of my day doing data entry in the office. That was actually really great because I could blast music in the office without disturbing people, but not that great because, well, it was 6 hours of data entry. This Saturday was awesome because I got to band two nests of chicks on my own! I technically had supervision (Michelle couldn’t be there, so our office manager Greg was there), but I did everything on my own – banding, bleeding, and measurements. Yay experience!

More rain = more lakes/ponds = more gators!

The fledglings are super cute, but finding them is really annoying. As Michelle says, finding them is like finding a moving nest – the adults have the same behaviors when they are defending a fledgling, but the thing can move! Their first week out of the nest is the most difficult because they hardly move at all, so you could be staring into the shrub that they are sitting in but not be able to see them. You even have to be careful to not step on them. Granted, they are pretty huge fledglings, so I can usually spot them if the shrub is sparse enough (unlike the vireo fledglings in Texas last summer – they were tiny!). After the first week, they start moving around a bit more, so you can catch them flying from shrub to shrub, and after that they fly around a bunch and squawk at you with their parents.

17 days old, just before fledging

1 week old fledgling

2-3 week old fledgling

On Friday I went up to Bok Tower Gardens, which is one of the highest points in Florida at an elevation of 295 feet (no, I’m not missing a zero). I picked a great day to go, not only because of the weather, but because it happened to be National Garden Day or something, so I got free admission instead of having to pay $12 (Seriously?? $12 to go to a garden when the public isn’t even allowed to go up the tower?) Anyways, it was a great day! I got there early to go birding around the park, and then I just walked the trails, enjoyed the scenery, had a little picnic on the lawn, read on my blanket, and even took a nap. I wouldn’t normally nap in some park, but this was a gated park filled with people who might break a hip if they even tried to run away. Wasn’t too worried. But it was a great day! On some of my days off I’ve been reading on the little patch of beach by the lake in Avon Park, but it’s right next to the road, and on windy days sand just gets everywhere, so it was a nice change reading on the shaded lawn in a little secluded area with nature everywhere. I’ll definitely have to go back to those gardens sometime, despite the entrance fee and the hour drive. They were beautiful!

Wood Duck

Bald Eagle

View from 295 feet (not the tower)

"My hair blends in with the wall!"

This weekend I drove up to Tarpon Springs to visit my grandma for Mother’s Day! We laughed our butts off, watched a bunch of movies, and she really tested my ability to stay up late. (I was falling asleep earlier than my 88-year-old grandmother… how sad it that?) The movie part was great because I’ve been trying to branch out in my movie-watching since I always want to watch the same 10 rom-coms all the time. I saw Cabaret and Punch-Drunk Love (can’t say that was my favorite), and earlier last week I watched The Reader and Saving Private Ryan. I think SPR came out when I was too young to enjoy it, so if the same is true for you, you should definitely watch it!! Let me know if you’ve got good movie (or book) suggestions. I just finished reading First Family by David Baldacci – great thriller! (Also on Mother's Day: my brother finished 2nd out of 24 riders in his bike race! First time he's made it to the podium!)

The trips to Bok Tower and Tarpon Springs were not short trips (1 hour to Bok Tower, 2.5 to Tarpon Springs), which I usually wouldn’t have a problem with, but this is Florida. Do you remember those race car arcade games with the steering wheel on the front? They had all kinds of crazy obstacles, like a woman pushing her stroller across 4 lanes of traffic, some idiot kid skateboarding right in front of you, a confused old person driving in the wrong direction, and of course both super slow and crazy fast drivers spread out all over the place? The whole time you had to weave around all of these random things that you laughed at because they were so implausible all together… but were they? I am now convinced that the makers of those games grew up in Florida, because I felt like I was living in one of those games on my way to my grandma’s house. Guy driving 25 mph under the speed limit, guy driving 25 mph over the speed limit, someone backing up along the shoulder, someone else moseying (not even attempting to hurry) across 5 lanes of traffic, someone picking up trash in the left lane (okay, that was at least nice), person slowing down for the GREEN light, cardboard box in the middle of the freeway, person not understanding how 4-way stops work, someone insisting on passing a truck but then just driving next to it for 5 miles, etc. I was weaving left and right just trying to get the heck out of each of those situations, but it just brought me closer to another crazy driver! In fact, ANY time I go somewhere on my day off (read at the lake, wander the gardens, etc.) I feel so relaxed while I am doing those activities, but the minute I get in my car to go home, I can feel my blood pressure skyrocketing. I can handle a lot of things here – heat, humidity, insects, lack of attractive men (or anyone close to my age), rednecks – but the driving might be what sends me to an early grave (or at least ensures that I never live in Florida long-term).