An Almost Normal Week

Finally it's warming up here at night ... no frozen pipes over the last two nights, but a little cooler during the days.

It was an almost "normal" work week. On Wednesday it was very cold when we left for the visitor center before 8.  We checked on the quail in the flight pens and in the demonstration pen. Normally, Chuck and Betty do this on Wednesdays, but they were off early to do one of their snake presentations at a school.

We could only find one of the birds in the demo pen and he was quite puffed up, definitely wearing his down coat. There are supposed to be three birds here. They are very old and we are a bit concerned about their survival over the really cold nights.

The food containers in this pen were completely empty, not even a crumb. These are galvanized two gallon buckets with holes in the sides that hold quail food. They looked like they'd been licked clean. The rodents seem to be winning, at least we have fat and happy rats in the ground under the demo pen. One had dug a hole that emerged right at one of the feed bucket openings.

When we went to the large flight pens, the news wasn't good. One of the small pens contained four very old birds and two of the males had been found dead the day before. The other two were moved to one of the large pens with lots of birds. The birds cluster together at night to keep warm so having more birds helps them survive the cold. The chicks in another small pen are almost fully grown and are adept at hiding in the grasses and brush. However, when anyone gets too close, they all flush. This is not good in the small pen as they can fly hard into the side screening and get hurt, but it is almost impossible to avoid.

The birds in the large pens are all older birds and we seem to have been become a bit more familiar to them. Even in the pen where I almost always flushed birds, they come streaming up towards us when someone enters the pen. I think the fact that we scatter bird seed when we go in is the key.

All of their water pools and faucets were frozen on Wednesday morning and I cracked the ice in the pools so they had access to water. In one of the pens, a bird came striding up and across the pool, which it thought (here I must presume) was frozen, and promptly fell in. It shook off the water and went on to the seed I'd scattered.

With Chuck and Betty gone it looked like we'd be spending the day in the visitor center, but an offer to help tear down fencing around one of the stock tanks came along. Ellen jumped at the chance not to be in the VC and I went as well. The local volunteers, Rob and Reta, have been removing this fence for the last week and, with a little help, would be able to finish the job.

There are quite a few stock tanks on the refuge. At home we would call them ponds. These are basically dug out artificial ponds which are filled with water, some from wells nearby, but others are in the base of a drainage and collect rain water. They were created when the refuge was a ranch and were used be the roaming cattle (stock). They are now used be roaming wildlife.

This particular tank, called Rock Tank, also contained the endangered Chiricahua Leopard Frog. The frogs were being preyed upon by American Bullfrogs. The bullfrogs are native to the Eastern US, but invasive in the West and were wiping out the Leopard Frog, among others. The fence around the stock tank was a frog-proof fence to keep out the bullfrogs. The refuge has been successful in eliminating the bullfrog from the refuge, so the fence was being torn out to allow other wildlife access the tank.

Rob and Reta had already torn down about two-thirds of the fence and we helped them remove the last bit. It went quickly, in their opinion, as having two extra people made it go more than twice as fast as they had been able to do it on their own.

Thursday was our normal day to check the birds and it all went well, but I was still only able to find a single bird in the demo pens. After bird feeding, it was off to Arivaca to do our weekly well and water gauge measurements. We made quick work of it this week as we had to be back to the visitor center by 11:30. One of these weeks we might actually be able to spend most of the day there as we'd expected to do the measurements then do trail "roving", greeting visitors and making sure the trails are clean (and a bit of birding). Today, however, was the refuge holiday party.

When we got back most of the staff and volunteers were already there, only Chuck and Betty (another snake demo) and a couple of the law enforcement officers were missing. Sally, the refuge manager, supplied an enormous number of fresh tamales and most people brought a side dish or a dessert. Ellen brought a Farro salad. She was sure no one would take any, but it was all gone by the time the party/lunch was over.

The food was excellent. We'd had tamales in Mexican restaurants in the past and have been disappointed, but these were great. They came from a woman in Sasabe who was a real pro—and you can't get much closer to Mexico than Sasabe.

The highlight of the party was a gift giving game similar to a Yankee swap. Most of us brought small gifts (no more than $5, please) that were wrapped anonymously. Each person pulled a number and the lowest went first. He got to pick a gift and unwrap it. Each following person had to decide whether to "steal" a previously opened gift or pick a new one. Unlike the Yankee swaps we've seen, you had to make the choice before picking an unopened gift. If an item was "stolen", the victim then had the choice of absconding with another open item (not the one just given up) or picking an un-opened one. To prevent a really popular item from continuously changing hands, it could only be "stolen" twice. At the end, the first gift picker could exchange his with any other (except those which had changed hands twice). Ellen ended up with a collection of chocolate quail eggs (actually Trader Joe's truffles, but they looked like quail eggs). I ended up with a small ceramic pot filled with glazed pecans. We both did well.

After the party, Ellen went off with Rob and Reta to collect more Four-wing Saltbush seeds and I stayed around to play with computers and maps. Gary, a local volunteer who has been associated with the refuge for years, has been locating the barbed wire fences on the refuge and been leading groups, such as the Sierra Club, to remove them.

Since the refuge has been in existence in the 1980s, they have removed 100 miles of fence and they have over 50 miles to go. These fences were from the ranch days, when the ranchers wanted to partition off grazing areas to contain their cattle. The refuge doesn't want fences because they impede the movement of wildlife, particularly deer and pronghorn, and are a danger to all birds.

Gary had the locations and extents of the existing fences on his computer in Google Earth format, but didn't know how to get it off so that the refuge could add the data to its GIS system. He offered to bring his computer to the party and I would download it. His computer turned out to be a full-sized desktop tower and he just brought the tower. We managed to find a monitor and cables (the cables were the hard part) and a mouse and download the KMZ files to a DVD. We also extracted his scanned maps that had the fence lines drawn on them.

I took the data back to my computer and transferred them to a USB drive and brought them to Ann the biologist to load on her system. We could see them in Google Earth, but she didn't have a utility or extension to convert them to her GIS system. I said I'd try later. I was able to convert the data to the shapefiles she can use, but she has been out over the weekend. Hopefully, I will be able to work with the data and also convert the scanned maps into useable historical data.

On Friday we didn't have to go to the quail facility. Paula had pretty much caught up with her construction project and the only thing we'd be doing was feeding the quail. She didn't want us to come all the way out there just to spend an hour, so we were free to do some local projects. The local project was rearranging storage in the visitor center. Ellen and Evelyn got started while Craig and I went off to feed the local quail in the pens. We managed to locate one of the other demo pen birds, but there is still one missing. The flight pen feeding went well. It was warmer so the water was unfrozen and everyone had food.

There is a small room next to the visitor center counter where the volunteers have been trying to work and store their belongings when in the VC, but most of it was taken up with shelving with storage boxes on it. There is also a room between the refuge bookstore and the media room where we show a refuge video to visitors. This room had been used as a kid's project room, but we didn't have many children visiting and even fewer who wanted to stay in a little room and do indoor stuff—so we were turning it into a big store room. First it had to be cleaned out as it had become a quasi-store room.

Ellen and Evelyn had removed most of the contents by the time Craig and I returned. They were in the process of tearing out the wall-to-wall carpet, a dirty and worn one. The floor underneath wasn't anything to write home about (but I am anyway), being concrete and ceramic tile ... the room had been a bathroom when the building was a ranch house. One of the things we found under the carpet was ancient telephone wiring. Three wires in all, two just came out of the wall and ended in the middle of the floor the other ran out of one wall across the floor and through the next.

We followed the wires through the wall and into the media room where they seemed to end in unused telephone connector blocks, so we figured that the wires were all relics and cut them out. (More later ...)

We proceeded to remove everything from the shelving in the volunteer room and started to move the shelves, a large 2x4 and plywood structure into the new storeroom. It had to be modified a bit first as it was three inches longer than the new room was wide. Since it had 2x4 cross pieces on the outside of the ends, we figured we could remove them and it would just fit. As we started to do this, Dan announced that his phone was no longer working.

Somehow, when tracing the wires, we had missed where one of them went through the outside wall in the media room. They ran along the wall, were painted and a wire came back into the room from the outside about an inch further along. We (I!) missed the gap. The wire running across the floor went to the VC phone system. Oops!

Time to visit Speedy. Nobody from Maintenance was around on a Friday, so the only source of tools was Speedy's tool kit. I have a multi-meter and some electrical connectors and went off to get them. Amazingly, I actually had some telephone wire connectors in the Speedy spares kit. Armed with these, I was able to find the live wire pairs and splice the cut wire back in. Fortunately, there was enough slack in the wire to do the splices. Telephone service was back.

We returned to modifying the shelves and when we moved it into the room it just fit.  It was just a matter of stacking the storage boxes and filling the cabinet we also had moved into the room. We now have a larger space in the volunteer room (another desk would be nice).

While we were having lunch in the kitchen, Sally came by and told us that there were leftover tamales in the refrigerator and we were welcome to them. We took six when we left and had them for dinner. They were still quite good.