Days 44-48 - Quail, Quail and more Quail

We just finished our volunteer week at Buenos Aires and will be leaving to head home tomorrow. It has been interesting to be here in the late spring (which might be confused with August at home). It has been warm (as high as 95°) and dry during the day and cool at night (as low as 45°...that's not like August!) for the entire week.

We have spent the week working at the quail breeding facility over in Arivaca, about 45 minutes away from the main part of the refuge, so we have left every morning at about 7am to drive over. We have a refuge truck assigned to us, so Speedy didn't make the journey. Which is just as well, as the last 10 minutes is on a rough dirt road...and the road to Arivaca is in pretty bad shape as well.

We have been doing the general care of the quail, cleaning and filling water stations, cleaning and refilling food dishes in each pen and sweeping up the dust and wood shavings the quail manage to kick out of their pens...and there are lots of pens.

This takes all morning and frees up Paula to get ready for the breeding season. She has been building new, larger breeding pens for this year and it is almost time. Some of the hens have already started laying and we find a few tiny eggs a day as we look into the pens. These aren't the breeding birds. Only a few of the birds kept there are selected as breeders each year. They are paired off and go into the breeding pens soon, do their thing and the hens produce lots of eggs.

We have also helped out with some of the other building and moving tasks as much as we can talk Paula into having us help.

Thursday and Friday are her days off, since no one else wants to care for the quail over the weekend. Usually one of the other staff members comes over on those days to do the general care, but we offered to do it, so we were on our own for the last two days.

Our old volunteer coordinator, Dan Petersen, came by to visit today. He left the refuge just before we did two years ago to take a position with the National Park Service in Nebraska, closer to his home. We knew his visit would overlap ours and it was great to see him. We and most of the other refuge staff met at Clint's house for dinner (Clint is one of the maintenance staff and lives on the refuge, not far from the volunteer compound).  It was a good opportunity to see everyone before we left, in addition to seeing Dan again.

We will be on our way early tomorrow. We just have to return the truck and our keys to Josh in the morning along with our timesheet for the week. We're stopping in Green Valley on the way to have breakfast with Craig and Evelyn and probably stopping for food as well. After that it is straight back to Cohasset. It will probably take 5-6 days, mostly highway driving...and probably almost as many nights in Cracker Barrel parking lots.