Parade of critters

We got a brand new fancy field camera and set it up a couple months ago.  It's on top a steep and rocky hill and it takes a good 15 minute hike and many breaks to get up to it.  I'm usually the one to go and it's my exercise for the day.  We set the camera up to take 3 shots once the motion detector goes off with a 1 second interval. At first, everything was great with a reasonable amount of shots to review each week.  We even put the old field camera up near it.  We've had a bunch of windy days and nights which resulted in at first hundreds of photos within a week, but the latest round has resulted in over 6,000 photos.  It's attached to a smaller tree that moves in the wind and there's an ample amount of branches and leaves into the field of view to set the camera off.  The top bear photo was enough to stop reviewing the photos in the field and quickly scramble back down the mountain. I just hope this big guy survived the imminent bear hunt.  The usually visitors are the squirrel, oppossum, and raccoon.  The coon and possum seem to play tag team and their photos are always close to each others.  The squirrel shot is what I called the sunbeam squirrel shot.  For now, we've taken the cameras down and will wait later winter for some new action.  In the meantime, I hope that we can solve the excessive photos because my eyes are not happy from reviewing them all.

 

We also had a mystery guest as shown on the photo below.  The camera is set pretty close to the ground.  By process of elimination, we said it was a red fox.  We think its' up on the camera going for a very very quick sniff because the photos before and after it, which are one second apart, show nothing.....unless someone else thinks otherwise.

 

My mini road trip

 

First off, I should mention that I sometimes forget that I have a blog. I mean I know I have a blog, I just seem to forget that I actually need to post things. So I am remiss and it's practically winter.

Originally back in October, I had usual Vermont trip planned with friends. We stay at my friend's parent's vacation home.  When Hurricane Irene struck and it struck Vermont very bad, I made the mistake of forwarding various links and videos to those same friends.  I was riveted by all this and religiously checked the Road Closure Vermont websites and various newspaper, town, and shop websites.  As it drew closer and closer to our supposed vacation, I learned that my friends didn't want to go.  They felt that too many things and roads would be closed and that they heard this information from a variety of sources. They were not open to any discussion. I felt the total opposite. I saw that Vermont was working like crazy to get roads back up and most of the shops/areas we usually frequent were open. We could even take our normal route to get up there.  I even have a friend who lives in the same town and he agreed with me.  I also felt that I wanted to support Vermont, the open businesses, and I am fascinated by seeing Mother Nature's destruction. So I decided to still go to Vermont and visit some areas we don't normally go. 

When I arrived, the leaves were just past peak in the lower elevations and entire direction and view was a postcard.  Unfortunately, the sun never fully cooperated so the pictures don't do it justice at all. I did a ton of driving and hit some of the Vermont Cheese Trails sites. It's December and I still have a large supply in the fridge.

 

The destruction was just as riveting as the leaf colors. Entire hillsides slumped into rivers.  Tree parts, debris, and sediment created new landscapes and terrain. Rivers and streams made new paths.  Buildings were knocked off their foundations and the roads almost always had a new patch near streams.  I will say that I never had to turn around because of a closed road even though there were some sketchy areas. 

One of my main reasons for the trip was to take an introductory falconry lesson at the British School of Falconry .  It's a bit pricey but I figured where else am I going to experience this. This also had a even pricier off road Land Rover driving class but I didn't do that.....yet. We got an overview of falconry and learned that Harris Hawks make the perfect candidate. They naturally hunt in families and are very social/tame.  We each got our own Harris Hawk. Mine was Monty and he was a youngster. I immediately wanted one and he made the cutest "I'm so excited noises" when we were walking outside.  It was like a muppet.  Here he is attacking a pheasant wing. It's like the best toy ever to them and they love love love it.  He got so obsessive he was even attacking just one feather from the wing. You have to throw them a piece of meat and quickly grab the wing out of their sight.  We got to send them off to the perch and have them come back.  Monty decided the close perch was too boring and fly up to the top of the barn. He then flew back to me unprompted because he knew that he would be rewarded with a piece of meat.  He was so light and you could barely feel his weight given his size. 

Ms. Irene

So the hurricane was imminent. The stores were packed with frantic shoppers in search of milk, bread, and eggs. I guess everyone makes french toast when the weather gets rough. I don't know why folks buy milk and other perishables when there's a strong possibility of losing electricity.  It seems like wasted money.  Water, batteries, and flashlights were totally sold out.  My coworker saw someone buy a small raft and we joked that if you are buying a raft, perhaps you should just evacuate.  The weather reports got more and more ominous.  The hurricane symbol showed up on the weather report, which is something I've never seen.  They said that around 6 am Sunday was supposed to be the worst.  I barely slept Saturday night fretting about possible basement flooding and the loud wind and rain outside. By 4 am, the wind and rain kicked it up a notch and I thought "How much worse can it get by 6 am?" Turns out the storm had picked up speed and hit us early.  By late-morning all that was left was the wind filling the pressure void left by the hurricane.  I was lucky.  No basement flooding, no trees down, and I never lost power. My parents who live 5 minutes away lost power for a week and the next town over suffered major flooding and many downed trees isolating people for days.

I was back at work on Monday anxious to check on the hatchling turtles.  We headed out knowing that the travel would be tough and that the area we were going to was essentially closed. We faced many detours from flooded roads, downed powerlines across the road, and downed trees across the road that had been cut just enough to allow one vehicle through.  This was the part of the state that I felt would have it easiest and it was farthest from the hurricane. But I was wrong.  It looked like a dam had been released. Where there was normally about a foot of water in the stream there had been 10+ feet of water.  New streams attempted to form in lawn.  Rocks had been excavated from the ground and pushed out all over the place.  The footbridge across the stream had one of its concrete footings demolished.  It looked like someone had taken a jackhammer to the parking lot.  The bathrooms looked like the sewers had backed up with water rushing from it. The picture below is a normally a lawn picnic area. Now it has a rock installation.

Once I saw this destruction, I knew that the hatchling turtles were gone..pushed practically out to the bay or buried under rocks. Maybe just maybe the larger one who had earlier climbed the embankment survived by holding on for hours or perhaps by sheer luck it kept climbing higher and higher out of harms way.  Either way we couldn't pick up any radio signals from any of them anywhere.  Given the small size of those transmitters, they could have been easily damaged.  We tried for a few more days after that but we never found them.  Recently we set out to remove the radio transmitters from the adults.  We happened upon a very young turtle, who was probably about a year old. So maybe just maybe those hatchlings held on, but all the radios failed.

A not so silent lurker

At this point, we had tracked the hatchlings for almost a week and it was my turn.  I headed out with one of my bosses and a supposed expert on this tracking equipment.  Because the radios are so small and weak and we only could rely on how loud or quiet the infrequent beeps are, it was difficult tracking.  Once you thought you were very near, you would take the antenna off and then play stethoscope with just the wire and receiver.  We successfully found 1 of the hatchlings, but the next one was throwing us for a loop. We would get a very strong signal with the antenna, but once the antenna was removed, we just couldn't get a signal at all.  My boss was about to give up, but I wanted to try across the noisy and swift brook in this patch of weeds. I headed over there and picked up a weak signal sans antenna. We hand searched this patch of weeds but couldn't find it.  We ended up giving up and assuming that it was there but that we just couldn't find it.  We tracked the next one pretty quick and then my boss wanted to take another shot at the one we couldn't get a visual on. I then saw him checking this steep bank next to the river. I headed over there and sure enough the hatchling had successfully crossed the swift and somewhat deep brook and then scaled a 5 foot tall embankment. We saw it booking away from the brook. Very exciting! I called it bruiser because it had been the biggest of the bunch and clearly it was up for challenges. 

We were walking out and heard what at first we thought was a cicada in this very dense grass and tree saplings.  But towards the end of the sound it sounded like a classic baby rattle. It then made the noise again and we were both "That's NOT a cicada".  My boss took my walking stick and started to move the vegetation away.  Sure enough it was exactly what we thought it was and it was NOT a cicada.  The pictures came out horrible because it would move just when we had cleared the vegetation around it. I guess it heard us talking close by and was alarmed.  Otherwise we would have never had found it.

 It's now about half a week away from Hurricane Irene hitting us.

Expectant surrogate mommies

Last spring we conducted a nesting survey for these rare turtles. We were able to successfully cover one nest with mesh and rocks to prevent predation. It appears that the predators were able to get to most of the other nests. A little over a month ago we modified the mesh and rocks into basically an upside down brownie pan formation.  That way the hatchlings could dig out of the ground and have a secure area to walk around in.  When it came close to hatching time, we stopped by every other day to see if they had hatched.  One of our visits on a weekend at this park/recreation area my coworker saw someone holding our mesh in their hands and using it to collect crawfish.  He was horrified and reclaimed the mesh and attempted to put it back together.  The person claimed he just found the mesh lying around. Hello liar! Keeo in mind it does take time and effort to remove all the rocks holding it down. Then a large rainstorm came by and the water was dangerous close to drowning the nest. We went back and added some large nails to really secure the mesh to the ground so it was like a fortress.

We got word one morning that there were six hatchlings within the enclosure. So we all scurried up there and numerous phone calls and coordination was all happening at once. We were going to attached radio transmitters to a few of the hatchlings to see where they go. We had 6 hatchlings, one unfertilized egg, and I discovered after we were done excavating the nest that we also had one dead hatchling.  All 6 seemed strong, cute, and perfect.  We fitted a few with radio transmitters and then let them free.

 

One of them sat stunned in the middle for a bit and then crawled into the nearby vegetation. One made a beeline for the water and proceeded to take a ride downstream to an unknown destination. The others (including all the radio tracked ones) headed into the nearby dense vegetation. Now comes time for the daily or every other day radio tracking.  Mind you Hurricane Irene was just forming in the Caribbean......to be continued.

Run for the border

We headed out to Pennsylvania a couple weekends ago to take the Yuengling brewery tour.  It's the oldest American brewery and they still bottle beer there during the week.  It was also nice to see a functioning brewery rather than the remains of one like others I've visited.  Although I want to go back when beer is being bottled.  I didn't take any pictures since it's hard to capture something in the dark (in the dank caves below the brewery) and when there's like 50 people on your tour. So I enjoyed the tour and took the above pic in the tasting room where you get your one free beer.

On the drive there, we saw signs for Cabela's and I was excited that it was the same exit as Yuengling. I arm-twisted my driver and we took a quick trip there.   Sidebar - I had planned on a hot, sunny, and humid day and I had dressed according to this including suede ballet flats. Turns out it was rainy and cold so I spent most of the day miserable.  Cabela's was freezing inside to add insult to injury.  It was packed with people and I want to go back and spend more time there.  But it was as I expected....full of stuffed critters.  The river otter stood out as it was giving the death glare. Not the cute and happy live otters I've seen.

This was a hodgepodge of familiar critters. Everything from leucistic deer and droptine deer....all with huge racks of course.

Then there was a jam-packed African safari scene.  Note that the elephant was shot by Mr. Cabela himself in 2001 in Zimbabwe. I guess trophy hunting is unfortunately still happening.  They had a sign saying that lions, leopard, elephants and rhinos are the deadly four in Africa, but I'm pretty sure that hippos trump at least lions on that list.  They are territorial and one bite from them....well it would be game over.

I'm pretty sure the below scene really takes place in water, not on dry land, but I give them credits for trying to include as many animals in one scene as possible. Nevermind that zebras, wildebeasts, and friends all apparently line up to drink.

Some like it hot

    This summer we've been extra busy with field work. We have a few high profile jobs that require us to be environmental monitors for construction for a variety of reasons. It's making sure that trees that are threatening power lines are safely removed without disturbing rare turtles or their habitat or making sure that a major construction operation doesn't injure any rare turtles.   Both of these operations continue no matter how hot it gets even when it's record breaking.  Above is a pic I took of my mobile weather instrument taken in the shade one day.  It did get hotter but I didn't feel like doing much of anything aside from snapping pics.  I was surprised to see a couple painted turtles fully basking on the hottest time of the hottest day. I guess they don't mind short spans of the heat as much as I thought.

Most of the time it's pretty boring work out there.  You have to find a way to pass the time until you are needed.  Plus you have to keep out the way of the massive construction equipment that are swinging around large trees into massive dump trucks. Last time I was out there I was checking between the two silt fences to see if any critters needed rescuing.  Low and behold I spotted this guy.  I suspect that he came from the very close river and somehow climbed the fence.  I ended up babysitting him for a couple hours in the hot sun.  I tried to block him from direct sun, gave him some baths in the river, and came home burnt even after applying sunblock. Long story short is that he's now free albeit with a radio transmitter and seems to fancy the area he was originally found.