Three and a half months down, one and a half months to go. We’ve finished collecting most of our species and things are starting to wind down a little. Luckily more opportunities have started to open up. In fact, this morning I’m leaving for a week long camping trip down in the Escalante River for some invasive species removal and plant population monitoring. We’ve done a good deal of population monitoring recently and we’re planning on doing some range land monitoring when we get back. I’m looking forward to learning about that. Another potential opportunity we’ll have is cougar monitoring with one of the office’s wildlife biologists, he’s been tracking one with a collar for a while and examining the kills. We also hope we can get out with the paleontology crew again, but we’re still working on that.
Last week was probably the last Hummingbird banding session we’ll have. It’s been a great season, we’ve caught Black-chinned, Rufous, Broad-tailed, Calliope, and one Anna’s Hummingbird! The Anna’s has never been caught in Escalante before and on top of that, we’ve caught more Calliope than they’ve caught in the past. It’s been a great year for banding.
I’ve been doing a good deal of camping this last month, Zion twice, Arches, and Canyonlands. It’s been great being out here and being able to take advantage of all the great places around me. I don’t know if I’ll be doing anymore major site seeing while I’m here, but there’s still a lot of great local places to check out. It’s also nice that the job puts us out in the field where we end up seeing so much in the first place.