Meet 9 point

There's a hot stud that's been hanging out by my place. He likes to come around in the afternoon and check on the fallen bird seed. He has four points on one antler and five points on the other. You can see the one bizarro antler point that points straight down. Today he was hanging out with a much smaller buck and they ran off together. I guess it's back to male bonding time after the rut.

Groundhog day

The state is out verifying the wetland boundary we delineated eons ago at that big farm estate. Since a lot of time has passed, a bunch of our wetland flags are missing. They either got clobbered when the farmer mowed the fields or removed by others. I have a short list of suspects who might have removed the flags since I could see a large truck had ridden along the wetland boundary and now all the flags are missing. Coincidence, I think not.

So I'm back out there to find the old flags and replace them with shiny new ones and assist the surveyors in re-establishing the flags I can't find. Rain was predicted for most of the day so I was surprised when I got the game on phone call early this morning. Sure enough it rained intermittently all morning and the surveyors hunkered down in their truck because their equipment can't get wet. I got to head out there first since the surveyors first had to find some stake in the ground and wait for the rain to let up. Boring. A herd of deer ran across the field and the red tailed hawks were startled to see a human about. It's always nice to be the only person in a spot surrounded by wildlife.

I slapped on full rain gear and went on a mission to find the old flags and replace them with new ones. That took most of the day and the rain mostly stopped around noon. Good thing, because my maps were getting soaked and falling apart.

The half dirt/half gravel road quickly began to flood and the more dirt areas became mud pits. It was the most off roading I got to do with the RAV-4. Overall, the new tires worked well. It was more controlled chaos than uncontrolled madness. I did drive into a too deep muddy rut slightly off the road and had to back out. After that muddy ride, I decided to hoof it in the muddy spots. I really don't know how I'm going to get all that mud off my car. It's inside the door jambs too.

After the rain stopped, there still were a lot of clouds. It's that heavenly sky time with sunbeams poking through. Iin the far distance, one sun beam made it to the ground and was moving with the wind. It looks like an alien spaceship was shining a beam of light to earth in search of it's next abduction victim.

Back in the saddle

I spent the entire day outside. Birdman and I were doing a plant survey at a giant site down in south Jersey. It's not really my area, so I'm not great at identifying plants down there. The guys had been there at least once before so I had the list of plants they already found. Most of the time I just noticed something "new" or "odd" and we identified the plant together. I added many common species to the list, which birdman kept saying were "gimmies." Well if they were such gimmies, they should have been on the list already! We did see a bunch of other cool things like this praying mantis above. We also found some rare plants like this yellow flowered one below.

Early on in the day, we chased via the car a doe and her fawn. It's not our fault that the fawn kept running along the road with the car. We stopped shortly after that and we were keying out a plant when I saw out of the corner of my eye a fawn running straight towards us. I whispered to birdman but the fawn kept coming towards us. It stared straight at us and made a bleet noise. I talked back to it letting it know that we were not its mommy. It persisted for a minute or two more and then ducked into the woods. Still thinking that we had potential to be mommy, it hung out in the treeline for like 5 minutes more staring at us. Not smart little one! All throughout the day whenever we saw a lone doe, I vocalized the doe's thoughts of "Where is my baby????" I'm sure birdman was totally annoyed after like the fifth doe we saw and I kept saying that.

Here's some caterpillars chowing down on some milkweed.
A small part of the day was radio tracking two rare snakes. They are still underground from the summer heat, but I got to brush up on my radio tracking skills. Y'know I hold the big radio antenna like on those nature shows and head in the direction of the strongest beeps. It's like a grown up game of hot and cold. It's not as fulfilling when the snakes are underground and you don't actually see your target.

The day ended with me finding this baby fence lizard. I managed to catch it and it was a perfect angel for the camera. I found it hard to release back onto the tree since it didn't want to leave my hand.


The big downer of the day was attempting to smush most likely baby deer ticks or chiggers off me at the end of the day. I guess it's all in a days work down in south Jersey.

Good things

Well Thursday turned out to be a rather mellow day. The dishwasher tech did show up. Woohoo! I had my mom meet him and I showed up later on (I was passing by between sites and thought I'd see how things were going). My mom had laid a series of throw rugs from the kitchen to the front door. She also was putting her feet on my yoga mat as she sat in a chair. She was worried that it might rain and they would make my floor dirty. Plus most of the rugs were from the home country so they were every color of the rainbow. So for at least 30 minutes it looked like gypsies lived at my house.

I went to three sites and they weren't very eventful. I got to walk on a small train tress which reconfirmed my general dislike of heights and the fear of misstepping and falling through. Longest 10 steps I've taken in awhile.

Got to see some deer complete with two fawns at my last site. Our client at this site turned out to be a pretty cool lady so we chatted up a storm. She had 2 cute doggies and an awesome old house on a large piece of land. Plus she had a pond complete with froggies.

Then I finally remembered to simpsonize myself online. It's at www.simpsonizeme.com Enjoy.