turtle day

Yesterday, we found two turtle nests on pea island. That was also the day that it thunderstormed all day. We moved the nests further up the beach to a 'safe zone'. It was an incredible and awe-inspiring experience carefully handling, transporting and relocating hundreds of sea turtle eggs. It was a bad day for photography, with the constant storms overhead, the only pictures I managed to take were with my cell phone, but some of the other interns took pictures just this morning of a turtle laying a nest, and I hope I can put some of those up. And when I can convert the video files into something useful I want to put up a wonderful video of a bear up-close I took a few days ago out on a backroad on the refuge.

Still no luck towards getting my computer fixed. This pretty much seems bad to the point where I have to call the blog off, I'll probbaly just keep a journal about it and eventually, when either I can get it fixed somewhere I know of and/or get a new computer, put up the writings and pictures and video online. But it's not going to be easy to do any of that over here right now. I'll see about it. But here are some highlights from last week:

Last wednesday, led the bear necessities talk, a program where we talk about the bears at alligator river refuge. Talk went well, and at the end of the talk, just as I was wrapping it up, a bear walked across the road only a few hundred away from where we all were standing. Perfect ending. The driving tour afterwards also yielded good results, with us seeing a few bears here and there in the distance.

Later that night, the wolf howl finally ended well, with the wolves howling back, and, as a bonus, we heard barred owls hooting all around us, and one even landed up in a dead tree right above our whole group! It was a perfect night for wildlife.

Serious Downtime

...Well, as I may or may not have revealed already, we don't have internet access at our cabin as I had previously hoped. No biggie, I figured, I'll just take my laptop to wifi hotspots over in town to upload my blog. But alas, things couldn't be that simple. My computer has now screwed up badly, probably some malware or virus, and now I can't use it until I get it fixed. I am writing this from a pc over at the Pea Islan Intern's cabin. Havn't been able to keep up very well, I think I left off at the saturday before last, but basically to wrap things up we had a wolf howl that night, no wolves howled back. Through last week we did various programs for kids and adults alike and had another wolf howl on wednesday, no wolves howled back that time either. Kind of disappointing. Maybe someday I can get some good pictures up but things are not easy here. My own camera is crap and its files won't even work once uploaded on a computer, I'll have to hit up my roommates for pics, they both are very good photographers. Saw an otter today eating a crab. It was cool. Signing off for now...

a tour of our rich and varied plant life

Saturday is normally a weekend, but this Saturday we were busy the whole day. From early hours to the late afternoon we travelled all around with a plant expert named Bill to learn all about the area’s diverse plant life. I’m not sure how I can make this part sound more interesting, because we learned about plants. I like plants myself, but I’m no botanist. By the end of the tour I felt more stupid than I did at the beginning, just because all the various facts and information about plant life which we went over reminds me of how much there is I don’t remember from college biology courses. You can go through your head wether leaves have opposite or alternate attachement, wether leaf veination is pinnate or palmate, or wether they are simple or complex, smooth or notched, but when it all comes down to it everything you're looking at still looks like a big green plant. Everyone of us feels a bit daunted by these green, slow-moving beasts that eat sunlight and drop their crap all over the place until it covers the whole ground. Ask us what sort of frog or bird and we'll give you its name and number, but plants are plants. But I guess as long as we can point at something green and say a few latin words we’ll at least look like great biologists. That late afternoon we did the wolf howl. More on that later.