TARYN'S BACHELORETTE WEEKEND

Taryn and her girls spent a wonderful weekend up in South Lake Tahoe to celebrate the end of her singledom. It was everything I'd hoped it would be!

Heading out with a Surburban full of suitcases, groceries, and girls!

Hitting a local bar in our PJ's, shades, and beanies...

It's a bachelorette party... anything goes!

Opening gifts at 1:00am. We were so excited when Jamie and Vicki showed up!!

Heading to lunch at Hard Rock.

One of the games we played over the weekend was a digital scavenger hunt. We split into 2 teams: Team Single and Team Married (we had Taryn flip-flop between teams). There was a list of 25 "tasks" to do, and you had to get your picture taken doing them. Team Single won, but only by one point! Here are a couple highlights:

Team Married poses Rockette-style with a Harrah's babe.

Team Single does some shots. (Hey, where's the whipped cream?)

"Here's to our Miss Taken, the future Mrs. Bacon!"

All dressed up (tiara's and all) and out to dinner!

She's getting a little emotional on us here...

Finishing out the night at Club Vex!

FORT HUACHUCA RECON

For my third work trip in a row, I went out to Arizona. The main purpose was to meet our Point of Contact (POC) for the pollination networks project, as well as some other key players (botanists, GIS specialists). While I was there, I learned my way around base, picked up some maps, copied lots of info on pollinators and plants found on base, and explored the various ecosystems. It was not what I expected. The view heading onto the base looks like this:

There were many more trees than I thought there would be, and when I got up into the canyons I was really surprised! There were streams! It was really beautiful and I'm looking forward to working there for the next 2 years (it's a long-term project with 2 long field seasons: April-September). Hands down, the best part of my trip, was of course adding new birds to my Life List. In particular, I was amazed to see a pair of Mexican Spotted Owls, just 50 ft up the trail from an endangered plant I was observing:

One more cool experience on this trip was getting to meet a couple of hummingbird specialists and watch them work a migration survey station.

This is the trap they use to catch the hummingbirds, fine mesh on a pully system!

Here's a beauty waiting to be processed (they caught half a dozen during the hour I visited).

I've never seen a bird weighed like this before... but it sure worked like a charm!

And the BEST part? I got to be a launch pad!

TN & AL BATS

This month started off with another field trip, this time to Tennessee and Alabama to sample gray bats. I started off near Knoxville, then went through McMinnville and Huntsville. I worked with a couple of contractors from Copperhead Environmental Consulting, Inc., as well as employees from USFWS and TWRA.

Let's start off with some photos of gray bats:

This one shows a gray bat and another endangered bat, the Indiana bat. They gray bat is the larger of the two:

How do we catch them? With harp traps (fishing line is strung like harp strings vertically above a catching bag, when the bat hits a string, it falls into the bag below):

What do we do once we catch them? We take various measurements, such as weight and arm length, then I use a biopsy punch to sample a tiny piece of tissue (which I'll extract DNA from back in the lab). I also collect guano (as a back-up and/or non-invasive DNA source).

One of the caves we sampled was a big, deep pit that we had to repel into. Here is Piper, headed down with the guano collection equipment: And finally, here are Jennifer, Bill, and Steve, finishing up for the night.

ARKANSAS BATS

Yeah! Back in the field! We went up to Arkansas to get some more samples from the endangered gray bat. Jay came along to help out. We went to Blanchard Springs Caverns, a place we're hoping to go back and tour someday just for fun. Arkansas was actually much prettier than we expected!

Jay sets up the harp trap.

Gray bat on the left, Eastern pipistrelle on the right (look how pink their arms are).

Rick shows Jay how to tell a gray bat from other species.

Bands for bats are even smaller than the ones I used on warblers!

Just a little tissue sample for analyses...

We caught 30 bats that night, so Jay had to get creative...

GRANDMOTHER'S 92ND!

Here are some photos from our weekend in Georgia with Jay's extended family. We celebrated Grandmother's 92nd birthday at Doug and Cheryl's lake house. There were presents, cake, water sports, and of course, football!

Here are some scenes from around the house:

And some of everyone out enjoying the lake:

Thanks Waddells, we had a blast!!