Working on an "Off" Day

It's getting to be boring in the morning, 33° at 6am and partly cloudy.

Tuesday is supposed to be one of our days off, but since we had nothing planned, we decided to try to get started on a new project. I emailed Dan last night, proposing some things that we might start on and indicating that we would be in this morning.

It turned out that everyone came in and we had a volunteer staff meeting, mostly to go over the plans for the Grassland Fair this coming weekend. This took much of the morning. After that part of the meeting we talked with Dan about other projects and we will be starting a survey of the refuge campsites tomorrow. This will entail visiting each of the 80+ sites, cleaning them up if necessary, noting the coordinates and taking updated photos of each site. When we are done, we'll update the guide to the sites which is kept at the visitor center.

After that Ellen and I did the quail feeding on our own for the first time. This takes most of an hour since there are six pens to check and we want to be really quiet and calm in the pens so as not to scare the birds into flight.  If the quail are spooked, they can fly into the hard wire mesh and injure themselves, so it is important that we be calm and slow. It is pretty amazing that the personality of the pens are so different. In one pen the birds are quite skittish, but in the next they are so friendly that they come up to the gate as we approach. It is an interesting task.

After lunch, it was a little late to get started on the campsites as we had been waiting to see if we could get a digital copy of the campsite guide. We'll just make copies of the pages tomorrow, so we can annotate them as we visit the sites. We helped Craig do a bit of clean-up instead. He was filling holes in the lawn and trimming trees where we will be setting up the kid's tent for the fair.

The next couple of days will be taken up by fair preparations, but we will start the campsite survey tomorrow and are going to Arivaca on Thursday to learn how to do the hydrology measurements. We will also be roving the two trails there and making sure they are relatively clean.

On Friday, we and everyone else will be consumed with fair setup and Saturday is the fair, then it should be a lot quieter after that.