new challenges - new excitement

I have travelled many miles since that dusting of snow. I am away from home and settling into a new temporary job. I drove down to Albuquerque on Mother's Day with my best buddy, Wiskerz. He took the trip very well and we are both trying to get used to the new setting and schedule. I am prone to lack of sleep and this new job is going to challenge that. We start work (on site) each day by sunrise and travel to the site can take up to an hour and a half! Tomorrow, we leave the house at 4:30 a.m.

This week has been composed of training, both classroom and field. I have done a lot of vegetation field work in the past, spending long days outside describing and characterizing vegetation. I have never spent much time studying wildlife. I would say that wildlife biologists get down and dirty more so than we plant biologists. Our first field experience involved heading straight into a cattail marsh and then into a flooded willow thicket, a place where the bird I will be looking for all summer thrives.





So you could say that my first field meeting was conducted in knee-deep water!





No telling what you might see - what fun!!