It was a busy week and we did a few unusual tasks.
First was the staff-wide work party at the flight pens on Tuesday (not one of our work days). In preparation for moving most of the quail outdoors, a major renovation of the flight pens is ongoing. One of the major tasks is to install rodent barriers along the edge of the perimeter fence. Up until now there has been a three-foot wide layer of wire mesh extending outward from the fence and buried about a foot underground. This has been effective at keeping large animals such as raccoons or coyotes from digging their way in, but the rodents just tunnel underneath.
The current plan is to uncover the mesh, lift it up, and install solid metal sheeting that extends about four feet down, deep enough to block the rodents. The mesh would then be re-laid on top and the whole area covered with coarse gravel. The initial attempt at uncovering the mesh using heavy equipment was not very successful as it was too easy to tear the wire. So the solution was to scrape down to about six inches above the mesh and then uncover the wire surface by hand digging. It took two maintenance men most of a week of hard digging in clay to do one side of the fence.
Time to call in reinforcements. Dan asked for volunteers to come and help dig on Tuesday morning. Virtually everyone on the staff showed up as well as many of us volunteers. It took just about two hours to do the other three sides of the fence. Ellen and I were not particularly fast, maybe a fifth of what each guys on the fire crew could do in the same time (but they do a lot of digging when fighting wildfires and are at least half our age), but we managed to do our share. Let's just say that we were rather tired after that exercise.
On Wednesday we led a private hike at Brown Canyon (see Brown Canyon Time Three).
Thursday was hydrology day at the Cienega (see Water Work) and we returned in time to join the Hello/Goodbye Party, welcoming a new Assistant Manager at the refuge and saying goodbye to our young intern, Emily, who is off to a new job at Sutton Avian Research in Oklahoma. Again, it was a "bring a plate" affair with the refuge providing burgers, sausages and potato salad. Ellen and I did our bit by baking lemon squares the previous evening and dropping them at the visitor center before leaving for Arivaca. After lunch, we headed out on the refuge to help Rob and Reta make barriers and install signs. There are many unpaved roads on the refuge that are open to traffic and much of that traffic is the Border Patrol. They tend to stop and pull off the road wherever they want and carve out large sections of dirt in what was previously grass. They are not the only ones to do it, as other backcountry visitors also create ad-hoc campsites, something rather unnecessary since there are over 80 official campsites spread over the refuge. The refuge has an ongoing project of blocking off access to these degraded areas and posting "Restoration In Progress" signs to allow the grass to eventually regenerate.
This project is one of Rob and Reta's long-term efforts. As we had nothing else scheduled for the afternoon, we joined them for a little brush-cutting and signpost installation in the southern part of the refuge. When they started this effort, they would find rocks and use them as barriers to delineate the area being blocked off. But many sites didn't have much in the way of rocks, so they started using dead branches from Mesquite trees which appear to be in limitless quantity.
Since the Mesquite is an unwanted tree on the grasslands, we decided to just use whatever was there, cutting off branches as needed. This made it easy to create barricades. With the four of us, we could block off a damaged area in just a few minutes. It seemed to take longer to drive between sites than to actually do the work. We did about a half-dozen sites in the afternoon time we had and saw a good chunk of the south portion of the refuge in the process.
Friday it was back to the quail facility to help Paula. Things have become a bit more restricted there. A small number of the quail have come down with a virus, sort of a cold, where they start sneezing (it sounds like a "snick" and is called snicking). Fortunately, the affected birds were all in one room, so that room has been quarantined from the rest of the facility. At the same time, the room with the majority of this year's chicks is also under quarantine since a subset of those birds are to be shipped to a breeding facility in Mexico in the near future and international transfer of endangered species has lots of rules including several months of quarantine.
With two out of three rooms in quarantine, there is now a strict protocol for moving about in the facility. If you are working with the quarantined chicks, that must be done first, once you leave their room for another room with birds you cannot return. Once you work with the "snickers", you can't go into the other rooms and to work with them, you have to put on a set of clean coveralls and wear plastic booties over your shoes as well as stepping through the disinfectant foot bath. (A foot bath is used at the entrance to each building as well as each room.) So the order of visiting the birds is chicks, older birds and under-the-weather birds.
We had a new task this week, changing pan liners in the chick room. Each of the brooders has six shelves, with a group of birds on each shelf. It can be thought of as a six-story apartment building with a three room apartment on each floor. The floors are actually metal gratings, although we place cardboard "rugs" on them so the quail don't have to stand on a grate. All of the droppings from the birds as well as food that they knock out of their feed troughs drop through the grates onto a pan. There are three pans to a shelf and each has an absorbent pan liner on the bottom, sort of like a big spread out disposable diaper.
We had to pull out each pan, remove the liner, encrusted with two weeks worth of droppings and food, scrape out any excess, put in a new liner and replace the pan ... all without disturbing the very jumpy birds. There are three pans per shelf, six shelves per brooder and six brooders in the chick room—108 liners. We donned rubber gloves, put on face masks and went at it. We were done by lunch time and had about a dozen trash bags to show for it. I'm sure the quail appreciated it. It really wasn't as bad as it sounds but Ellen insisted on washing everything when we got back to the outpost.
After lunch we donned plastic suits and booties and helped out in the room with the recovering birds. They seem to be doing well and I think we only heard a couple of "snicks" while we were there. We just did some of the normal tasks that we've done in the past, checking the food troughs to make sure they had enough food and changing out soiled cardboard rugs and pecking boxes. That was enough to finish our day.
Photos
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