The Week in Chemistry

Yes, we've gone from biology to chemistry this past week, finding hazardous materials to be exact. The Whitmire unit was too wet at the beginning of the week for us to get to the saltcedar and there is a lack of vehicles at the moment, with most of the refuge trucks assigned to the oil spill clean up on Matagorda Island.

The refuge has a safety inspection coming up (one of the reasons for the monthly fire extinguisher inspections) and one of the deficiencies to be corrected is the presence of Safety Data Sheets (previously known as Material Safety Data Sheets - MSDS) at each location where hazardous materials are present. Each building is supposed to have at least one book of data sheets with pages for each product in the building. Our task is to find all the materials and make sure that sheets exist and are available in each location.

MSDS are 16 section documents that describe chemical products including the composition, properties, associated hazards, treatment, handling, disposal, etc. They are anywhere from a single page to 10 pages. It seems that almost any substance, aside from food, is hazardous including most household and office chemicals like detergents and cleaning supplies.

We spent all week going through buildings finding every product we could. We surveyed ten buildings and have seven to go. Once we search through a building and find all the items we can, we have to generate data sheets for those items not already in the existing books. This entails going online and finding them. The manufacturers create an MSDS for each of their products and almost all are available as PDFs. We found 101 different products in the visitor center alone, mostly various household chemicals, and I searched for and found the missing sheets for 53 of them. There are still four that I haven't found, mostly for really old items. If I can't find a sheet, I can discard the product. I also have another 250 products which need sheets from the other buildings. We will be spending a long time using Google this week.

Although I spent part of the weekend working on the MSDS project, we did get to spend some time birding on the refuge. We have been reading reports of lots of migrants in other places, but we haven't seen many yet. In talking with Felipe, the Visitor Services manager, who is also a biologist, we found out that when there is a "fall-out" of migrating birds due to the weather, most of those reaching the coast around here come down on Matagorda Island, since it is further out on the Gulf. He used to live on Matagorda as a refuge biologist and has seen the trees there full of songbirds after a spring cold front passed through.

We did see a fair number of new birds though, including both Summer and Scarlet Tanagers, Indigo and Painted Buntings, a Great Crested Kingbird, a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, an Eastern Kingbird, a Blue Grosbeak, a Brown-headed Cowbird and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. All of the usual herons and egrets are about and we've begun to see a fair number of Cattle Egrets and Green Herons.

What has gone missing are the Whooping Cranes. We didn't see any this weekend and the last reported sighting, from the list at the Visitor Center, was on April 12th. The crane researchers, Sarah and Matt, have also begun to migrate, they are on their way to Nebraska to survey feeding spots of the migrating cranes between here and there. We won't see them again, as they won't be back here until late next month.

We also got out for a ride on the motorcycles, with a shopping trip into Rockport. We stopped for lunch at Hatfield's BBQ, one that is on the Texas Weekly Top 50 list. It was only pretty good. The ribs were excellent, but the chopped brisket and pulled pork were nothing special. They are probably number 3 on our list. Two Bros in San Antonio is still at the top.

The volunteers are changing here. We went off to dinner with Tom, Cindy, Jim and Christy last night to Bubba's, a seafood place in Seadrift recommended by Greg, our Maintenance manager. He and his partner, Karen, also came along and surprised us by picking up the check, an unexpected gift to his maintenance volunteers, Tom and Jim (Ellen and I are doing the MSDS project for Greg). Bubbas specializes in crustaeceans: shrimp, crayfish and crabs, but also had other things as well (lucky for Ellen). They were out of oysters—the local season ended a couple of weeks ago, so we went with the fish. Ellen had grilled catfish. I had a combo plate of grilled shrimp and blackened catfish. Both were excellent. The place is very casual with big long tables with multiple parties at a table and it was packed on a Saturday evening.

Tom and Cindy pulled out today, heading to a new volunteer gig in Florida for the summer. Jim and Christy will be leaving tomorrow for Nevada, then on to volunteer in Oregon in a month. We thought that it was just going to be us and Norm until we left, but two new volunteers came in ton Friday to work in Visitor Services for the summer. Summers are tough here.  I hope they make it.

We will probably spend most of the coming week on the MSDS project. I've actually spent about 10 hours of off time on it this weekend, building spreadsheets to capture it all. With any luck, we might actually get a chance to go to Matagorda. There is supposed to be a trip tomorrow and I'm going to ask to go along. After all, we need to do the MSDS survey and check fire extinguishers for this month. (Ellen really, really, wants a chance to see an Aplomado falcon). We'll see if it happens.