If this works, don't blame me!

(I love this picture. Can anyone tell me what is missing from this intersection? You know, besides pavement.)

Today has been a super fun day. I didn't think it would be when I woke up though. I am a notorious bear in the morning. I hate waking up and I loathe waking up before the sun. The perfect time to wake up, in my opinion, is several hours after the sun is up.

Think I picked the wrong career choice? Let me clarify. Once I have woken up and managed to drag myself out of the warm, clinging comfort of my bed, I'm okay. I was even energetic this morning. Course I had been awake for an hour, but nevertheless.

This morning I was off to Cherokee to teach 5th and 6th graders. Well. I taught the 6th graders. Curtis went with me because he tackles the 5th grade class. I would easily call it the most popular program that we offer. And that's because Curtis is the snake guy. He brings his collection of turtles, lizards, snakes, toads, and frogs (some of these he captures for the program and then he lets them go afterward). Now, none of the students get to hold the animals. That's where I come in. I hold them and walk around the class so they can pet or not pet as they choose. Except for the Prairie-lined Racerunner. That lizard stays in his container because if he gets away there's no getting him back. He's far too fast.

The best part of the 5th grade program for me are the snakes. Curtis brings several: his Speckled Kingsnake, his Prairie Kingsnake, his albino female Corn snake and his regular male Corn snake, his Bullsnake, and then today he also had the Western Ribbon snake - pictures are in the previous post. My favorite of those is the female corn snake. She just looks amazing - no pigment but the corn snake pattern still shows up. But I love her because she's one of those cool snakes that wraps herself all the way up your arm and squeezes. "DON'T LET GO OF ME," She seems to be saying - makes a girl feel loved. She's a pretty good size, can definitely take down a rat or two, and she's just fun to hold and play around with. She looks something like this:


My next favorite is the Speckled Kingsnake - and for about the same reasons. He is active and friendly (well, he was to me anyway) and very curious about the person holding him. But, more than that, he just looks amazing:

Do you wonder why he's called speckled? Another thing that I didn't know until I talked to the snake man - Kingsnakes (King Cobras, Prairie Kingsnakes, Speckled Kingsnakes, etc) are called such because they enjoy eating other snakes. In fact, they won't touch rodents unless they absolutely have to. They love snakes and lizards. Curtis's Speckled Kingsnake ate a rattlesnake once, and he got bit 4 times by the venomous snake in the process. But because they have evolved in an evolutionary arms race with the rattlesnake, the poison doesn't affect them (it's the same with TX horned lizards and Harvester ants.)


Here's some pictures of the other snake species Curtis brought this morning. I didn't take any of these snake pictures, more's the pity.

This is a Prairie Kingsnake

This is the regular pigmented Corn Snake (Big difference, no?)

And this is a Bull snake. What I love about bull snakes are they're eyes - something about they way they're marked make them look like "angry eyes" all the time.


So that was the 5th graders. The 6th graders were....obnoxious. That's the only word for it. And I have found that instead of yelling, I just become very sarcastic. Nothing too terribly mean; I just don't see much point in getting angry. And, I've found that if I can throw them off their balance, they'll pay a bit more attention. They're used to authority figures yelling at them and they expect it - they're obnoxious. Sarcasm or no though, these kids were tough to deal with. I'm afraid they didn't learn anything except how to play a habitat game with hula hoops. I asked the students what they learned. Responses had only to do with how to play the game, not the underlying theme of protecting habitat and making responsible choices. Sigh. Ah well.

In the fifth grade class there was one very enthusiastic and talkative boy. He had a hard time staying in his seat. Another student had asked Curtis how do you know whether a turtle is a boy or a girl. This little boy answered "That's easy. The boy is the one who gets on top."

...Oh the things children say!

Tomorrow is pre-K, 3rd and 4th, and I'm looking forward to it. The 3rd grade program (with the noisemakers and the predator/prey game) is by far my favorite.

Anyhow. I came back to the refuge and had a very busy afternoon. Curtis and I went out to Sand Creek Bay. Actually we went to the other side of the bay - the side I've never been to. We had to go through what the refuge calls "The Wilderness" (Ironic, isn't it? But apparently, a refuge's "wilderness" is defined as an area that isn't managed at all - it's just allowed to grow over. Our wilderness isn't allowed to do that, but we call it the wilderness anyway).

We went there to set up a camera. This camera will tape whatever is on the bay and. It rotates and swivels and does all kinds of fun things - but it's very fragile. And very expensive. "Don't drop that," Curtis tells me, "You have about $4,000 in your hands there." Curtis has been messing with these cameras for over a year now. They broke on him, and he spent hours on the phone with maintenance people in Alaska and California, replaced dozens of parts, and then finally shipped it back to Alaska so they could mess with it. All in all, he's pretty tired with the project. But. We have the cameras back now, supposedly fixed and ready to go. So we go out there to the bay where the two poles that hold the equipment were set up. We set up antennas, a solar panel (heavy and covered with spiders), a power box (heavy), a cable that runs from the cable box to the camera (that has a tendency to malfunction), and two car batteries. I had fun. Curtis's phrase was "pain in the ass". Haha. Can't say I blame him.

But the reason these cameras are so cool is they give a direct feed to a tv in the visitor's center. If/when this works, you can actually sit in the visitor's center and get a close up view of the birds on the bay during the winter months. For the summer, the camera gets moved out to Ralstin Island (the big natural rookery in the middle of the Salt Plains Reservoir). One of the antennas is a microwave antenna that feeds the info to another antenna here at Headquarters. That feeds into the tv here (I'm not sure how. But here's betting I'm going to find out soon!)

As we were stomping through the extremely tall grasses back to the truck, me carrying the extra tools and boxes we had, and Curtis carrying the 6 ft ladder we needed, Curtis was telling me more about all the problems he's had with this very fickle and fragile system. We were also talking about what we still needed to do tomorrow and he tells me, "Well. If this works, don't blame me!"

Haha. You got it!