Accidentally Amagical: Field season week 1 recap

Today is the first day I could actually sit around without having to think of a million things to do or a million ways in which to do them. In fact, I am able to have coffee for the first time in a week! If I had to sum up this week in just one word it would be adventure. But, I can't just leave it at that. There is too much to tell!

Monday we started our first surveys. I had the bright idea that I could park on a road between two stands, we could do one stand each and still get to and from the truck with relative ease. Sometimes it helps to double check your maps. I decided to take the harder of the two stands and met a wall of hardwoods with still more than 300 meters (for those of us who do not do use the metric system, that's a little less than half a mile) to my beginning spot. And when I say wall, think about the wall from Game of Thrones, but with trees instead of ice and that's close enough. So, I turned back and went to the truck. After busting my butt down a crumbly dirt hill I decided I just needed to keep riding this horse and sent Brittany a text that I was going to do half her transect line. I got through the half only finding one third of the pitfall traps we were checking on and headed back to the truck again. That's when the worry set in. "Did she get my text? If she falls out there I will never know and never find her." I call her phone a few times, wait about 10 minutes, and then head back into the stand playing Marco Polo. Once we found each other we both wholeheartedly and breathlessly agreed never to split like that again. The service coverage is piss poor and there is no telling what could happen. This agreement was set in stone after we came across 2 adults and 10 baby feral hogs. Luckily we were in the truck, but we know they are out there. We celebrated our survival of our first full field day with a box of bacon ranch pasta salad each (don't judge). Of course we couldn't finish it all, but that was our own personal victory of the day.

Tuesday turned out better than Monday. We were hydrating well and taking breaks as needed so we didn't get over exhausted. The temps for the next few days were going to be in the low to mid 70s and we were making headway. We even filled our empty powerade bottles with water so we were hydrating correctly and spending less money. Or so we thought.

Wednesday morning I awoke to the like of Montezumas revenge. I felt so horrible that this was gonna to put us behind and we were going to have to push extra hard to get every thing done one time. I'm so so glad that Brittany was here and not a stranger!! How embarrassing it would have been!! Granted, it was still embarrassing, but with reassurance that everything would be ok and she wasn't going to hate me because we would have to do surveys on Saturdays to catch up, I went back to sleep until the local Dollar General store opened so I could get some medicine. We learned later that day that southwest Louisiana is like Mexico in the fact you shouldn't drink the water. If you are not used to the well water it will be bad. And I was proof of that. Despite being queasy and dehydrated we were able to get two stands fogged.

Thursday we started falling into our routine. Bird surveys in the morning, fog and dig pitfall traps after, lunch, wait for it to cool down a little, then fog and dig pitfalls on another stand. However, we were also enlightened to the fact of what your body does when you burn soo much more calories than you put in. I understand this is the way you loose weight and I have started to loose a little already, but apparently our bodies really needed more sustenance than ham sandwiches for lunch and small microwavae meals at dinner. So we drove the 30 minutes to Deridder for Checkers and oh my god was it the best decision ever!!! This binge has now been implemented into our weekly routine for Wednesday evenings.

Friday we slipped into our routine. Our first stand of the day was hella thick near the end and we thought we heard pigs at the end point. Luckily that point was only 90 meters from the road, so I wrote down a few more birds that I heard calling and we made a quick pace for the road. It's a hell of a lot easier running down a road towards your truck than trough a thick stand and relying on your GPS to get you back. Also, instead of fogging and laying pitfalls at a stand before lunch, we had to hunt or the pitfalls we put out the previous week and couldn't find. It was the first set we put out and I hadn't thought to tag the spots on the gps yet. Not to mention I was trying to get distance from each point with a range finder and not with the gps either. Live and learn I suppose since this really is a learning experience.

We also learned not to go to Walmart on a Friday during the first of the month. Everyone from Merryville, Deridder, and Ft. Polk was there. But, the Walmart here sells liquor! What?!? Photographic evidence:

Also, you know you are in BFE Louisiana when you see this:

I can't make this shit up.

Insect collection had been...interesting. We have caught soo many arthropods (grasshoppers, spiders, beetles, centipedes, millipedes...). We have caught creepy things like a spider that was as large as the palm of my hand and had some by catch (accidental captures) like a bloated field mouse and a couple salamanders. We even had over a half of a cup full of iridescent June bugs!!

Fogging isn't as productive. We are getting a few things like mosquito hawks, mosquitos, and ticks but that is about it. At least it is consecutive across the board in all stand types.

I know you're thinking, "Libby, I thought you were studying birds. Why all this talk about bugs and things?" Remember a few posts back when I wrote about birds going to their food source? This is why the bugs are important. It gives a leg to stand on when explaining why we are finding/hearing what birds we are finding in the stands.

We have been very surprised by some of the birds we are hearing. I had made a list of birds we might come across before field season began so that we could freshen up or even learn some of the songs (some of these birds we would never see in Alabama). I took prairie warblers off the list for reasons I can't remember, but they are all over the place! Apparently southwest Louisiana is a breeding Mecca for them. And immature orchard orioles (which look more like meadow larks and have a slightly different song than the adults) are all over the euc stands! I've got to see one painted bunting, but hear them often and have yet to see any roadrunners despite spending about 2 hours traveling 40 miles of mostly dirt roads trying to find them yesterday.

The euc stands thrive with blackberries (which are a welcome cool snack while hiking through) and wildflowers like the young pine stands and the older pines have a lot of needle litter and ferns. Each has their unique way of burning your leg muscles as well. Hiking in the euc stands is like doing lunges with almost every step as you stretch from bed to bed and over slash and debris. The tall pines have a lot of smilax (green briar aka prickly things) that you are constantly stepping over and smashing down. The young pines have lots of debris, smilax, and some slick muddy areas (not to mention the occasional free ranging cows).

Here are some pictures from the week. Enjoy and stay tuned for more recaps, hilarity, and awesome bird news.