bones and poo

One week down in SNP!
I arrived on Sunday night to headquarters housing, which is off the mountain about four miles, so we are a perfect distance between the convenience of town and the wilderness of the park. It's a pretty quiet circle of houses right now, but in a few weeks, the rest of the students will fill it up. The is not bad considering it's provided by the severely under-funded NPS.

The first day of work was the typical...go around and meet everyone and see how everything works. This included a drive all over the park and a couple hikes to stream restorations and peregrine nests. My supervisor, Rolf (the name reminds me of a muppet), is a quiet kind of guy that seems to stay calm and is not in a hurry. This is difficult for me since I am pretty much the opposite of all of those things. But I love that he will randomly stop to point out a bird, tree or plant of interest. It is like hanging out with the quintessential ranger rick all day.

Tuesday was plant day; the morning spent destroying plants (nasty exotic invasives) and the afternoon spent helping to protect plants (surveying rare species) with a very cool park employee named Rosa (more about Rosa and other neat folks at a later date). We only found 11 of the rare plants all afternoon; they weren't kidding.

Then the fun with birds began on Wednesday when our peregrine chicks from Richmond arrived. For some reason, peregrines love to build nests in bridges; it turns out that this man-made structure is strikingly similar to their natural nest sites. The only problem is they can't swim and most young have a hard time learning how to fly without falling in the drink. So we work with these guys at College of William and Mary that grab them and bring them to SNP. I guess it is a sight to see - they get VDOT to stop traffic while this guy repels off the bridge to retrieve them. We will take care of them for two more weeks with minimum human contact (so they remain wild) until they can fly. We have a box set up with an opening in the front overlooking the cliffs of Hawksbill (highest peak in the park) so it is as much as a natural nest as possible. This whole process is called hacking (don't ask me why). Falcons that have been hacked in the park have been found nesting in the park, like this year's pair at Stony Man, so this program is so far considered successful.

Since peregrines are birds of prey, its not like we can throw a handful of grain in there. So this is where the intern comes in. Every morning, I get eight whole quail out of the fridge (we have a separate fridge for our lunches, probably not necessarily because people are grossed out but because there is no room) and 'prepare' them for the chicks, like the mom bird would do. After doing this over and over, I have become quite an assembly line for ripping up quail. Anyone want to come over for dinner next week? We are having quail. Oh, the intern also comes in the picture when its time to clean the hackbox of bones and carnage and peregrine poo.

So for now I just watch, I sit up on the cliff and entertain myself until something interesting flies by and make sure no person or raccoon or bear bothers the box. Everyone says I have a pretty boring job for the next two weeks until they learn to fly and hunt. Maybe so. But I have greatly appreciated the mandatory down time and maybe, just maybe, I can learn to slow down. I think that task is going to be harder to accomplish than sucking it up and cleaning out bones and poo.