When Nature Calls: June 2014

A car already pulling over to wait out the impending doom.

We are now officially hitting summer weather here in Florida, which means daily afternoon thunderstorms. This isn’t California, where the first little spits of precipitation count as “rain”. This is a trailer-shaking, power-outage-inducing, rain-blowing-sideways, visibility-down-to-zero STORM (and still, Florida ain’t got nothin’ on Peru). The day after my last post was a particularly massive storm – the power went out, the wind picked up like crazy, and the sky turned black. I was in the office at the time because of the power outage (our office has generators), and that’s when I realized that that storm would probably last a while and I hadn’t eaten dinner (can’t eat much when the stove, oven, and microwave are inoperable). So, just as it started to rain and generally look like the world was ending, I decided it was a good time to run back to my trailer for some leftover Chinese food. Fortunately I only had to wait 2 hours for the power to come on so I could actually heat it up. That was probably the worst storm we’ve had so far – visibility down to about 5 feet and no power for 3 or so hours. But in general, that’s what the afternoons have become – big storms with lots of lightning and thunder that’ll shake our entire trailer to its core and flood everything. It’s only moderately terrifying coming from somewhere that features pictures of lightning on the front page of the newspaper. It’s also interesting that everywhere I’ve worked so far (Ecuador, Peru, Texas, Florida) has had massive thunderstorms, but they are still things that make me jump out of my skin. I feel like a need a Thunder Buddy, like in the movie Ted. Related: don’t be cooking with beets during a thunderstorm if you’re jumpy – that stuff stains.

Since my last post I managed to find my last two nests of the season – one was a pair’s third or fourth attempt (others were depredated), and the other was a double brood attempt (that pair already has fledglings and is trying to pull off a second nest). Today I finished verifying that no one else is nesting (just made sure the females were not incubating). We set a new record for the last date that the first egg was laid at a nest – old record was June 6 and I believe this year a pair started a double brood attempt on June 8. Woohoo! Now my days will be a couple of hours of fledgling checks in the morning, followed by lots of data entry and projects in the office. Not as exciting, but drier and cooler. OH! But fledge checks can still be exciting because last week on one of my checks, I found a fledgling completely trapped in some moss and hanging by a leg. The moss was wrapped around its foot and leg and he was not going anywhere (sometimes they just get briefly stuck and flap out of it after a couple seconds). I was able to grab him (he was so stuck he didn’t even try to avoid me) and rip the moss away from him. I thought the adults were defensive when we take their nestlings out of the nest to band them, but that is NOTHING compared to grabbing a stuck, 3-week old fledgling. But I got him out and released him, and I saw him again a week later. So YAY! I saved a fledgling!

At the beginning of the month I ventured down to Fort Myers to meet Kay Kay, my aunt and uncle’s newest family member. She’s super cute and SO soft, but still has her shark teeth so her bites are brutal. Say goodbye to your hands, toes, braids, etc. We took her to the beach for the first time and she seemed to like it! I taught her to dig :)

Kay Kay!

June 6^th was National Donut Day, so Sheena and I scrambled to get our free ones at Dunkin Donuts before going to see The Fault in our Stars on opening day. The movie was wonderful, and made us really demonstrate some self-control by not sobbing audibly in the theater… or punching any of the 100 teenagers who took selfies from the front row WITH FLASH, or squealed whenever the main characters kissed. But yes, I highly recommend the movie, and the book especially. It’s a really fast read. Other movies I’ve watched at home recently: Argo, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, The Hurt Locker, Behind Enemy Lines, Invictus, Transformers, Star Trek, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Inside Man, Enchanted, Gattaca, and Avatar. I’ve been going through a war movie kick lately. Afternoon thunderstorms really help this.

Common Gallinule

Last Thursday Michelle and I both had the day off and took advantage of a Groupon she had bought a while back – swimming with manatees and dolphins! It was over on the East coast, just south of Cape Canaveral, so we left super early to try and get some birding in at a nearby wildlife refuge. The swimming was great – the manatees came so close to us! I didn’t get to touch them, but the guide said that sometimes they just swim right up and nuzzle you, hoping to score a belly rub. How adorable! Some dolphins also passed right by me, but they are way harder to keep track of – manatees bumble along at like 5mph, and dolphins can get up to 50mph. The water was also kind of murky which made it difficult. But all in all it was pretty cool. Michelle is going on a week-long vacation in a few days, which means I’ll be in charge of the scheduling and doing a couple more bandings (assuming the nests haven’t been depredated, which is highly likely this late in the season). I’m down to my last two months! Not sure where the first four went, but I have a feeling these last two will involve a lot of movies, what with all of these storms keeping me inside. Let me know if you have any recommendations!

And now for some random pictures that I've taken throughout the summer: