The Cold is Back

It is cold and wet today. The temperature dropped last night and the wind picked up. It was in the 40's by the time we had breakfast.

We were supposed to go to the UTV (Utility Task Vehicle) training course today, but the instructor came down with the flu yesterday. With today's weather, it was just as well, but we hope to do it soon. Most of the travel into the field is with UTV's, so we aren't able to work on our own until we complete the off-road training.

Instead, we were office-bound again. There is an SCA volunteer here temporarily on a regional project to scan historical documents from all of the refuges into a central database. She will be around for a week or two, trying to collect as much documentation as she can. We helped her sort some of the files she wanted to scan into calendar order. Some of it was correspondence from the 30's, 40's and 50's, back when people used mail and carbon copies. It was when the cranes were very scarce and people would write in with possible sightings. The refuge manager answered every letter. There is a trove of interesting history here. Hopefully, it will make it to the public in a few years via this database. I'm sure that the other refuges have similar sets of interesting historical documents.

The bulk of the day found us continuing to catalog books and papers in the biology library and files. Most of the published books are easy, since the Endnote website has access to many collection, particularly the Library of Congress. For virtually any published book in the US, we can extract the citation data directly and just add our call numbers. For various conference proceedings and agency reports, it is much more of a manual entry effort. We are plugging away slowly, but it is a tiring effort.

Tomorrow we get a chance to go back to the Whitmire Unit to check out the state of Foster Lake and a few other things. It will give us a chance to see if the window into the lake that we trimmed a while back is as we hoped. The weather should have improved, it will be good to get out.