Volunteer orientation started on Monday. It is scheduled to take three days and Dan had an extensive agenda. We decided to walk over to the visitor center to see what it would be like, giving ourselves about 30 minutes to walk the mile and a half. We brought our binoculars along which may have been a bit of a mistake—we made it with about five minutes to spare.
In addition to the other five resident volunteers, several of the local volunteers also attended. These local volunteers started out as resident seasonal volunteers like us, but fell in love with this area of the southwest and ended up moving here.
After an introduction by Sally Flatland, the refuge manager, we all introduced ourselves in a rather unusual, to me anyway, manner. Dan gave each of us three chocolate bars corresponding to three categories, our hobbies, a favorite place, a particular memory as well as a wildcard of anything we wanted to say about ourselves. Then we went around introducing ourselves using those categories. Eating the chocolates was optional ... after all, it was 8 AM.
Dan then talked about schedules. Ellen and I are currently scheduled to work Wednesday to Friday and do biology projects and occasional visitor center staffing. I hope more detail will be forthcoming.
The head of the law enforcement group then gave a safety presentation, mostly centered on the possible interaction with people crossing the border illegally. Basically, the rule is to leave them alone, do not interact and call the law enforcement officer on duty. He showed data that the numbers of people coming in across the refuge has fallen dramatically in the past few years, now that there is a fence along the border across the entire refuge, but he said that we should still take care to be safe.
He also talked about drug smuggling, mostly marijuana. The smugglers don't want to be seen so they will keep out of sight, but if we come across any burlap sacks, we should just ignore them and keep on going and report it to law enforcement. The smugglers drop them if they see anyone and move off into the bush. That way, if they are caught, they can claim to just be immigrants.
We then took a little field trip ... to the border fence. It a 15-foot high steel tube fence that extends another five feet underground. The uprights are steel tube, about four inches in diameter, filled with concrete and spaced about four inches apart. It looks pretty formidable, but there was an engineering error. Someone decided that the fence would be stronger if a bar was placed along the top. Unfortunately, this allows a rope ladder to be thrown over and up you go. It stops vehicles, which were a problem, but not pedestrian traffic so much. The fence has, however, been successful at reducing traffic across the refuge, but it ends in the mountains both east and west of the refuge and illegals (as they call them) now just go around the ends and through the hills.
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| The Fence Looking East |
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| The Fence Looking West |
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| Carpet Slippers and Camouflage Water Bottle |
It was then back to the visitor center. When we got there, there was a visitor, a fellow motorcyclist that I'd met during our morning break. He'd just returned from a ride around the Pronghorn Loop and had found a license plate. It was Speedy's lost plate! Evidently it had fallen off during our ride around the tour loop a couple of days before.
He was an interesting guy who was just touring around the southwest on a small dual-sport bike and camping out. He was doing this while waiting for his VW synchro-van to be repaired. He seemed about our age and could only be described as a professional traveler. Coincidently, he had also spent several years travelling around New Zealand with a campervan and motorcycle, long enough to become a Kiwi citizen. We had an interesting chat.
We ended the day by getting our keys to the visitor center and Sonoran Outpost gate padlock (and virtually every other padlock on the refuge). This was a big improvement over Aransas, where we were never given any keys and only found out two weeks before we left that we should have received them.
We also had an armload of volunteer shirts, several packages and the Volunteer Manual, none of which we'd started the day with. We gladly accepted a ride from Craig and Evelyn back to the outpost.
It was time to move Speedy to a better site. Our friend Norm left in the morning, cutting short his time here to go back to Texas and get his injured shoulder repaired. We were moving into his site under a fixed shade awning and closer to the community trailer. It took a while to pack up Speedy and move hoses, cables, bicycles and the picnic table we'd commandeered over to the new site. It has a great sunrise view. Wi-fi access isn't much better.
After we got settled some, it was time to open the mail. One of the packages was an outdoor USB wi-fi adapter. I was hoping to mount it on the roof (temporarily), connect it to my Mac and use my Mac as a hotspot. The wi-fi reception has been poor inside the van, but okay outside. This was an attempt to fix that.
Unfortunately, it didn't work. An Apple OS X driver was required and the one that came with the device didn't work with the latest version of the OS. The company website was of no help as they had not done a driver that would work. Back it will go to Amazon as soon as I print a mailing label.
Today our second day of orientation began at 9 AM, giving us a bit more time start the day. We decided to bicycle over to the visitor center. It was much faster than walking. We got there early enough to take a little walk around the area. We didn't see much, mostly grassland sparrows that we couldn't identify.
The orientation schedule had been switched around a bit and we spent much of the morning learning about the workings of the visitor center and how to be visitor center volunteers. Just after the use of the telephone system and the protocol for taking reservations for the twice-monthly Brown Canyon hikes were explained, I was standing next to the phone and it rang. It was mine to answer and, sure enough, it was someone calling about hiking in Brown Canyon.
We then walked the nature trail that leads from the visitor center to the Demonstration Quail Pen. Craig, who'd been here last year and did much of the trail work noted how much needed to be done this year. It may be one of our first group tasks to get the trail in shape before the refuge's annual Grassland Fair on the 14th. The quail pen currently houses three older Masked Bobwhite Quail. The quail are quite shy but we were able to locate them deep in tall grass and brush. We left them with some seed treats and were on our way. It was time for lunch.
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| Masked Bobwhite Quail |
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| Ellen's New Friend |
Checking the quails is pretty easy but needs to be done daily to make sure all is in good shape and no predators have breached the fences. We would also make sure that enough food is available, the water taps are working correctly and count as many quail as we could find (trying not to disturb them too much).
While most of the pens contained older birds that had been moved over here from the main quail breeding facility in Arivaca, one housed several adults with chicks. This was an experiment where they took 100 chicks, within hours of hatching and bonded them with adult birds who acted as step-parents. They were transferred directly to the pens so they might grow in a more natural environment. Within two days after the chicks were placed in the pens, the refuge was hit with the remnants of a hurricane that struck Mexico. After the torrential storm, only 10 of the chicks survived. Most of the survivors had been sheltered by one of the older males who had bonded with them. Needless to say, Dan and the rest of the quail staff were pretty upset.
Tomorrow we are supposed to get a presentation by Ann, the refuge biologist, and then take a trip to Arivaca Cieniga and Arivaca Creek. Two areas that have trails and are premier Arizona birding hotspots.
It is supposed to rain overnight, but to have cleared by morning.
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