Hot enough for you!

Say that in a smirky old man voice. Even before this mini heat wave we are in, field work was generally boring aside from the discovery of a baby woodpecker nest. Sorry kids. No good photos. I discovered that the flash on my new work camera doesn't work at all. I just have a pic of a dark hole in a tree. No peeping baby woodpecker pics.

To recap our local weather, it's been 90+ degrees fahrenheit each day since saturday. Tomorrow will be more of the same. I got home and the temperature outside was 95 degrees at 6 pm. Plus add in the humidity. Thankfully what makes my place so cold in the winter keeps my place reasonable during the summer even without the air conditioner on. But rest assured, it's going full blast now.

Even with this ridic weather, I attempted to go turtling early saturday morning to my local wetland. After parking in a questionable spot (I thought I was going to get the cops called on me and I'll leave it at that) and hiking over a quarter mile in, I arrived at the location. I was immediately disappointed. It was a sea of cattails and this invasive grass (which i am also quite allergic to). There was a lot of water and the smell that surfaced with each step was something beyond my experience....like no human has stepped here in 100 years. Then I found the floating bog section. That's the area where you don't step on solid ground but are rather walking on a floating mat of vegetation. I half circled around the perimeter and it was total frog nation. So that was a good sign. Then I heard something big fall into the water. I heard a gurgling noise and the vegetation was roughly moved around. Must have been a large snapping turtle. There was no way I could get to it quickly considering I was tentatively walking on the floating part. I gave up pretty quickly and decided that it will have to wait until next year for a real attack. I decided to try to visit Cashew and by 9:30 am most turtles were already in the mud since it was so hot.

So by this time tomorrow night, we should be fully engulfed in some t-storms that will hopefully bring us some relief.