Greetings from the Florida panhandle. I just rotated out of the flooded Choctawhatchee River forest after 7 nights in, and am getting a little R-and-R and running some errands in our cosmopolitan little town before I cycle back in tomorrow.
The past week has been surreal, and I don't quite know where to start. I'll be updating this periodically over the course of the day, so stay tuned. Hopefully I can get some photos posted.
In the meantime, I'll direct you to the links on the blog, and give you a few bullet-pointed highlights from my first week in.
-On my first day I heard suggestive "double-knocks" deep in the forest, which may well have come from an Ivory-billed Woodpecker (henceforth known by its banding code "IBWO." I'm still on the fence as to whether the bird exists at all, though slowly coming around to believing that it does. I'm quite familiar with all of the other woodpeckers in these forests, and have never heard anything quite like this.
-I really enjoy my teammates. It is a diverse bunch that includes a mid-50s veteran of the Cuban search for the bird in the '90s, a lovely veterinarian couple from North Carolina who are graciously volunteering three months of their time from their sabbatical, and some 20 somethings who are, with the exception of my students (:-), some of the sharpest, wittiest, most competent young folks I've ever met. I also have a fantastic field boss.
-In the middle of my stint deep in the wet woods, my team was interviewed by a documentary crew making a movie about the IBWO and those personalities involved in the search for it. How bizarre! One moment I'm kilometers from any other person, stuck in a back channel with soaking feet and face-to-face with a venomous water moccasin (aka cottonmouth). Three hours later I'm back in camp hobknobbing with George Butler, the director of the film "Pumping Iron," the vehicle that carried Governator Schwarzenegger to fame.
-I've spent hours kayaking.
-Discomforts and threats I'm coping with are: heavy, heavy rains (I left the Northwest for this?!), poison ivy that has left me Ichiro and Scrachiro all over, the aforementioned water moccasin (no gators yet), dangerous snags in the river, freezing mornings, and other sundry irritants one typically encounters while roughing it.
But I'm loving it out there.
More later!
The past week has been surreal, and I don't quite know where to start. I'll be updating this periodically over the course of the day, so stay tuned. Hopefully I can get some photos posted.
In the meantime, I'll direct you to the links on the blog, and give you a few bullet-pointed highlights from my first week in.
-On my first day I heard suggestive "double-knocks" deep in the forest, which may well have come from an Ivory-billed Woodpecker (henceforth known by its banding code "IBWO." I'm still on the fence as to whether the bird exists at all, though slowly coming around to believing that it does. I'm quite familiar with all of the other woodpeckers in these forests, and have never heard anything quite like this.
-I really enjoy my teammates. It is a diverse bunch that includes a mid-50s veteran of the Cuban search for the bird in the '90s, a lovely veterinarian couple from North Carolina who are graciously volunteering three months of their time from their sabbatical, and some 20 somethings who are, with the exception of my students (:-), some of the sharpest, wittiest, most competent young folks I've ever met. I also have a fantastic field boss.
-In the middle of my stint deep in the wet woods, my team was interviewed by a documentary crew making a movie about the IBWO and those personalities involved in the search for it. How bizarre! One moment I'm kilometers from any other person, stuck in a back channel with soaking feet and face-to-face with a venomous water moccasin (aka cottonmouth). Three hours later I'm back in camp hobknobbing with George Butler, the director of the film "Pumping Iron," the vehicle that carried Governator Schwarzenegger to fame.
-I've spent hours kayaking.
-Discomforts and threats I'm coping with are: heavy, heavy rains (I left the Northwest for this?!), poison ivy that has left me Ichiro and Scrachiro all over, the aforementioned water moccasin (no gators yet), dangerous snags in the river, freezing mornings, and other sundry irritants one typically encounters while roughing it.
But I'm loving it out there.
More later!
