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.

Friday Friday gotta find crawls on Friday everybody's lookin forward to the turtles turtles

On Friday we had sea turtle training. We didn’t meet any real sea turtles, we just went over the procedures of turtle patrols, finding “crawls”, (spots in the sand where tracks are left by a sea turtle crawling onto shore) and properly marking the spots, counting and/or collecting eggs to move the nests to safer areas if need be, and once the eggs hatch, “escorting” the baby turtles into the water, accompanying them on their journey across the beach and protecting the tiny endangered babies from predators like ghost crabs and raccoons. Two other very nice folks were with us (the interns) as well, Tim and Tommy, two retired people volunteering for the sea turtles. They live right there on the refuge in RVs and work there on the sea turtle conservation project full-time as part of a special volunteer arrangement with the refuge. That is definitely the sort of thing I'd love to be doing once I retire someday, assuming that by the time I retire there are still sea turtles, and I'm not some road warrior riding his bike gang across the wasteland. All I know is that if I were Mel Gibson, I'd totally be doing better than beaver puppets at this point in my career. Or would I? Speaking of beavers, there were beavers the size of bears during the early pleistocene era. Isn't that crazy? About as crazy as Mel Gibson. Not as racist, though.

This week has been a busy and diverse one, one that has had me going to some slow moments of orientational overviews, instructions and introductions, but has also had its share of excitement, from canoe tourguiding on Wednesday to sea turtle training on Friday. The whole week has been orientation activity, a lot of diverse training for various jobs we’ll be doing over the summer. Monday was just introductions, paperwork, tours and videos, Tuesday was some more touring and assignment of uniforms, but Wednesday was the day we (helped) lead a canoe tour. A park employee led the expedition and made most of the talking points, just to show us how to go about it. Later on me and Mike will lead it ourselves. I anticipate some interesting topics I might bring up on the tour, but I’m mainly sticking to the “script” they gave us. I’ll be sure and talk about frogs some, though. I know my frogs, and you’ll hear a lot of them on alligator river. It doesn’t matter if it’s a green treefrog, a grey treefrog or a squirrel treefrog, I’ll point it out for you. Other frogs though, you’re on your own. But that’s really about all you hear around here, so we’re covered. I remembered to apply sunblock for my arms, face and neck, but forgot it on the next most important area when you’re in a canoe… the inside of the legs and the top of the feet. End of the tour I looked like I had just won an Indian leg wrestling match with the entire Lakota-Sioux nation. Which was perfect, because Thursday was all-day ATV training. I’ll admit I really don’t care too much for those four-fendered mud-raping crotch rockets, but we will be using them a lot this summer on sea turtle patrols, so we had to get trained and certified. Well, after what felt like twelve hours of cutting muddy circles in a grass field, squashing orange cones willy-nilly and trying not to laugh at the frantic gesticular commands given out by our instructor, who was trying to tell us over the roar of our engines when to stop and turn some way or another, we earned an official ATV safety commission riding certification. Yay! It should arrive in the mail by the time our asses stop vibrating.

Smoke over Roanoke

One of the first things I noticed driving into Alligator River NWR was the smoke. Apparently there's a huge wildfire here. Wildfires are not uncommon in the Alligator River area, during the summer when the thick peat layers dry out, a very long-burning fuel is created. "Fires" can rage on and spread thousands of acres and burn for over a year, without any visible flames. The one we are having right now is probably like this, it might not be out for a long time, and the first reports I heard of it yesterday it was at 22,000 acres and there were no visible flames. Yesterday smoke filled the sky while driving over the causeway onto Roanoke. Today it's blowing right into Roanoke, covering the island in a thick campfire-smelling haze. I'll bet they don't like that. Its acreage reached 30,000 acres today and the firefighting crews' containment of it has gone down from 85% yesterday to 65% today. One firecrew member we talked with today reports flames reaching 100 feet above the treeline. Still, nothing to worry about for us, it's to the southeast of the refuge, not close to our cabin. Staff and volunteer crews are very busy working on it. Today for second day of orientation we met at that center and saw much of the center of the efforts; volunteer staff waiting at tents to be called on, gigantic double-rotored helicoptors carrying "bambi buckets" flying overhead.
Still, we are not really worried, even if the fire were to actually spread too close to our cabin and were asked to evacuate, we might just have to move from our Alligator River Cabin over to the pea island one for a little while. But as I said that's not likely to happen, it is well away from our area. So don't worry about us! Everything's fine... Just want to make that clear... Very interesting though... It's possible we might get some opportunity this summer to work ourselves a little bit in the firefighting efforts... I don't know much detail yet about that but we'll see... More on that later...

As I said, these are just things I'm hearing straight from the best source, those involved directly in the firefighting efforts. There is some smoke in the air here and there, but as I have to keep stressing, don't get the wrong ideas! We're not walking around in an ashen-filled post-apocalyptic wasteland right now... everything is quite fine around here and things are everyday and fairly normal. There is no chaos, fear or worry about fiery doom raining down on us at any moment. I just want to stress this so no one gets too worried.

Saw no bears today or yesterday, but havn't made direct effort to, will have to make the wildlife drive again this evening.

I should really talk more about what else is going on, well, we checked out pea island, and the lovely isle has an enourmously diverse population of various shorebirds! I'm no birder myself, but my fellow interns are majorly into it, memorizing and pointing out bookos different bird species they spy here and there and checking them off in a bird list. Although I do feel it may be useful to know alot about birds I just can't get interested in birds that much. I don't know why. I'm all over mammals, but those lightweight feathery dinosaurs for some reason fail to pique any extended interest in me, even if I try to make myself interested in them. They flap about, make alot of noises, and there's 20,000,000,000 different kinds of them, all with goofy names, and they are everywhere. You often have to look awhile to find a mammal in the wild, but no matter where you are you can probably see a bird. And personally I can live without knowing wether that quacking boat-shaped animal over there is a American Widgeon or a Eurasian Widgeon. I'll bet you totally thought they were just ducks, didn't you? Well apparently you'd be wrong too.

Although, I have to admit the truly unique ones with defining traits that really obviously set them apart can be pretty interesting. Black skimmers are cool. What kind of a way to catch fish is that? An awesome way, that's what.