Favorite Memories From 2012

I was reading one of my favorite garden bloggers, and saw she had reviewed her year with favorite pictures. Another blogger is suggesting that we all do the same thing and then link back to his blog. This is another reason I love to write a blog and read other people's blogs.  They really both expand my views and energize me. But anyway, I decided to do the same. 

This past year has been the  most exciting year of my life. ( At least except for the year I got married or had my first child.)  I got to work and explore California and Eastern Oregon and got on vacations in Idaho, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota, New Mexico, and Utah.  I've also had some great times in Texas and Louisiana since I've returned south. I've had more adventures this year than most people have had in a decade.

 I spent the first two months of the year at Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, for a total of four months there. I got to live with three young guys in the bunkhouse, which was a new experience, and had four of my friends visit me for a week. We also had a famous visitor, the falcated duck, who stayed for nine weeks and attracted around 10,000 visitors. Wintering ducks and wading birds were our big attraction there. The flyout every evening was magnificent and awesome. We also had raptors, including bald and golden eagles. And I enjoyed the people I met there, including people that came for the tours I led or for the children's photography workshop I facilitated.  We even had an eagle sit low enough in a tree that all the children could get a good picture of it on their little cameras.

 A few of the birds of Sacramento  Complex Refuges

 While there I did a lot of traveling and  especially loved meeting  the chickens of Yuba city. And I was totally blown away by the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden. It was fabulous, even in January.

A few of the feral chickens of Yuba City

A few of the fantastic gardens and plants at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden.

 At  the end of February, I made two trips to Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, about four hundred fifty miles away, to get all my stuff transferred. On the second trip, I took a break and visited the Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay, which crosses the Sacramento River in the heart of Redding, California. I was stopped by  big-horned sheep in Oregon on my way to Malheur.

The Sundial Bridge at dawn

These are iconic pictures for me. I love the California quail, was amazed by the big-horn sheep encounter,and my picture of the Blitzen River was a finalist in the National Wildlife Refuge Association Photography contest.

The two big icons of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are Malheur Lake and Steens Mountain.  Steens Mountain is visible from most places on the refuge. Malheur Lake is too big to photograph from the ground.

A view of Steens Mountain in early spring

 I was told to be SURE and visit the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. I ended up visiting it twice, the second time to show it to my friend, Lucy.  The fantastic colors in the Painted Hills were the most amazing parts of the monument to me.

A view in the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds

 I fell in immediate love with Malheur  - both the refuge and the staff.  I begged to stay all summer. But there wasn't room for me in August so I started inviting my friends to take a vacation with me. Several of them did, and I also had my own vacations in between. I ended up having to spend two months on various vacations in New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota. It was definitely NOT a tough life.

One of the beautiful mushrooms I found in the Boundary Waters

The pool called Morning Glory in Yellowstone National Park

Crystal Falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Yellowstone Buffalo

  I worked back at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in October, finishing up my bee pinning and bee display.  I'll write a blog on it as soon as I get the finished files for the posters my boss was making, using my pictures. She is also going to send pictures of the finished display.  I just left dried plants with bees and butterflies glued to them and several boxes of pinned bees.

My  friend, Lucy, stopped by to see me on her way from Alaska, where she worked all summer, to Texas. She hung around so long, I suggested she just ride home with me. We managed to cram in lots of good places including, Craters of the Moon National Monument,  Bryce Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and Petrified Forest National Monument.

A few hoodoos

View on the Emerald Falls Trails in Zion

 I enjoyed getting to spend time with one of my oldest friends, Hulin, and also visiting the huge camillia research garden in his town.

I finished out the year by visiting old friends and getting in some more paddling. I also did a lot of cooking and gardening. The end of the year found me back in Louisiana at Lake Fosse Point State Park camping and paddling.It's going to be hard to top last year. But I'll definitely make the effort to do so.

Paddling a little canal with Bill and Bob in the Atachfalaya Basin

One of the features of Natalie's yard is a huge satsuma tree. It gives the neighbors and us fruit from late November until February. One neighbor trades us deer sausage for the fruit.  A very good exchange!

Nature's Mystery Geocache

Geocaching is a very popular sport that requires people use GPS units to find the coordinates of a cache.  However, the rules for National Wildlife Refuges say that nothing can be brought in or removed. So Sacramento has used the idea of virtual geocaches to let people interact with some of the many refuges and refuge units they manage.With a virtual geochache, you don't find an actual cache, but interact with the environment  and usually post pictures.

I decided I needed to unravel the Nature's Mystery Geocache so I could tell other visitors about it.

Here's what #1 says:

Near Squaw Hill, CA
Coordinates: UTM: E 578605 N 4418266
Clue: The river can be seen here. (In Spanish)
Task: Meet a tree - use your senses to explore it and then describe it.

I can enter coordinates into my car GPS. So I just used it to lead me to the site. But a hand held unit is  best .In one of the tasks, I needed to put in the coordinates of my favorite nature discovery.

However the first thing I found out, is that my GPS is BLONDE.  Instead of just sending me up Hwy. 5 to Corning and then east to the site, it set me off on side roads leading to the west of the highway and then up them to the north.  But of course, my reward for being lost was this beautiful scene.

I looked through my GPS's directions and decided I could just zoom up Highway  5 to Corning and then turn east. Almost immediately after crossing the Sacramento River, I found this Unit.

I started down the trail, carrying my car GPS.  It said had had a few tenths of a mile to go to reach my destination. On the way, I found this stump lit with beautiful morning light. It reminded me that trees have very important role as habitats  and meals after they are dead.  And they also make great "carvings".

 When my GPS said I was at my destination, I looked for an interesting tree. This one caught my eye as it was close and looked lacy against the sky.

 And its bark had interesting marks and scars where it had lost limbs or been attacked by bugs, fungi, bacteria or even birds.

 It's base was also interesting and looked almost like it had a large foot. Is that a sandal strap I see?

 It was too pretty a place to leave without exploring further,  so I kept going down the trail and then branched off in the direction of the Sacramento River on a side trail. Soon I was watching a flock of western bluebirds fly up and down.

 Old blooms still held beauty.

While new blooms  promised that spring was on the way.

 

The path wound along the river for a little ways and then curved back around and became the path back out. This beautiful valley oak caught my eye.

Virtual geocaching is now called waymarking and has it's own site with a huge list of categories. You can find everything from churches to wildlife to parks to retired prisons. So you might be able to pursue most any interst here and definitely find interesting places to visit along your vacation route or near your home. I'm going to visit some waymarks and hopefully add some of my favorite places to the waymark list. 


References:
FWS Recreational Geocaching Guidance - if you want to talk your favorite NWR into adding some waymarks, or a virtual tour, here are the guidelines.

Waymarking's list of National Wildlife Refuges - this is the place to look for coordinates of places on various NWR's, and to add your own favorites.

And if you want to come  to the Sacramento NWRC and  unravel the Nature's Mystery Geocache, you can get a copy here or at the refuge visitor center.  There are ten sets of coordinates, ending at the Sacramento Refuge.I still need to log my findings.in the box they maintain for that purpose there. It's on the outside of the visitor center so is always accessible.  And you have only nine more waypoints  to go.

Looking Back at My First Year of Full-Time Volunteering

I started working at Anahuac NWR the first of November 2011.  Then I took October off to play before starting a new volunteer job at Sacramento NWR. Since this is a time of review, I thought I'd look back over my pictures from last year and remember some of the high points of my year.

I started the year on a very sad note when I saw the destruction Ike had rendered to our trees. This is the famous Willows, an internationally famous migrant trap, two years after Ike put an eighteen foot wall of water over the trees, drowned some of them, knocked others apart, and finally poisoned the remaining ones with salt. I was crying when I took this picture.  I determined that at least part of my volunteer job would be to work to replace habitat. 

I took off for several days at Thanksgiving and camped and birded in the Valley. This screech owl was one of my favorite finds.

And I loved using my macro lens to take butterfly pictures at Falcon Dam State Park.

In December, I got to spend several days with my grandson, Cian.  He got this bunk bed for Christmas that year.

  

I spent November and December helping the Friends of Anahuac raise money to buy trees. I started an adopt-a- tree program and made cards to represent each tree.  People paid the cost of a tree and gave it as a present. I also filled email orders. By the first of January, we were ready to order the trees.  The trees were delivered two days before a snowstorm and a big freeze.  It was a wild time as staff and volunteers packed up the trees and stored them in the maintenance building. Many of the volunteers couldn't make it to our planting day because of lingering ice on the roads.

But planting went on in January and February - the February work day got rained out except for a bus load of kids who planted willows in ponds. 

By late February, winter was over and the alligators were coming out of hibernation. 

 
I got my all-time favorite job - taking a videographer around the refuge. He was trying to get pictures of snow geese lifting off and other wintering birds. He came back in April for the migration and I was again able to guide him and feed him birds.  A friend and I even got a clapper rail to walk across the road in front of him after trapping it in a small patch of vegetation until he was set up.

And I got to go on the annual kayaking/birding trip to Choke Canyon State Park.  I've been leading this trip for many years.  It is one of my favorite places because it is at the junction of the Texas Valley and has eastern and western birds as well as Mexican birds. Green jays show up as soon as we put out sunflower seeds. This year I got to go as a participant only, which is WAY less work.

March saw the appearance of lots of wildflowers, in spite of the worsening drought.

In April I got to go back and paddle on the Bayou Teche in Louisiana.  This side trip into a swamp was one of my favorites since I love swamps. And I got to visit with paddling friends from across Louisiana and Texas and met new friends, some from as far away as Wisconsin.

In April,  we still had a few lingering shorebirds. But the water was rapidly drying up.  Many mottled ducks had to fly off to find water,  leaving  their hatchlings that were too young to fly, to die.

May was an exciting month because we had the grand opening of our new visitor center and office. I got to lead bird watching tours along the amazing trail/boardwalk that goes through an East Texas mixed forest, then doglegs into a cypress swamp before ending at the edge of Lake Anahuac.

In June I was STILL planting trees and shrubs. This was because we had around 200 trees left to plant after two work days and mostly just me to plant them. Sometimes, it would take me several days to dig the hole because the clay was like cement and I had to add water, dig a little, then add water and wait several hours or until the next day.

In August, I made a deal with Trinity NWR to make cuttings of their button bushes for our refuge and dig up cypress sprouts that were growing in the bottom of what is usually an 800 acre lake but which had dried to about 80 acres in the drought. I got them all potted up in the shade shelter we got this past spring. I also started lots of willows and got a few acorns to sprout.

In September, I spent lots of time taking pictures of dragonflies. This is one of my favorites.

And I continued my watering job which I had done all spring and summer. I hauled water by Kawasaki mule from our rainwater tanks until I used up all that water.  Then I had to haul water in a 120 gallon tank for ten miles from the volunteer site.  The water at the refuge is too salty to put on plants.

We had a volunteer dinner in September and I just managed to get in 3000 hours, 2000 of them in the eleven months I worked there as a resident volunteer.

 I took off the full month of October and said goodbye to friends and favorite places in Louisiana and Texas. The last thing I did was attend a Kayak Festival in Corpus Christi.  There I led a trip to Bird Island and had good visits with lots of my friends from across the state of Texas.

 Early in November I arrived at Sacramento NWR. Here the geese are the big story and I'm almost always in sight and/or sound of them. I hear them coming back to the refuge starting around 5:30A, see them flying up when a raptor flies over them, spend lots of time showing them people and discussing them and the ducks and also spend personal time enjoying them.

And we are really getting on the map due to our Asian visitor, the falcated duck - on right. In the first three weeks he was here, over 1000 cars came to Colusa NWR, mostly to look for him. I spent a lot of time in December at Colusa, helping people find the duck, directing traffic, and reminding people not to get out of their cars or walk behind closed areas around the pond. The duck has been coming closer and closer to the viewing platform to the delight of his visitors.

It was a very good year. And I'm expecting to have another great year.

How to Clean a Bathroom

1) Collect your equipment for Sacramento.  Binoculars, camera, water, cleaning box.

2) Check out a vehicle and load up.

3) Proceed slowly around the auto tour with many stops to look/ take pictures. Stop and talk to the visitors.

4) Check out the viewing platform views. Be sure and visit with all the visitors.

5) Spray toilet, and wipe down. Take out trash and replace bag. Check the toilet paper.

6) Finish tour, slowly and carefully so you don't miss anything.

7) Repeat for Llano Seco except this is a thirty mile drive each way and it has two platforms that need checking. And there are lots birds, including tundra swans to watch.

White-faced ibis

Savannah Sparrow

Traffic Hazards

Sandhill Cranes

The rest of the gang at Llano Seco

Killdeer

Bikers enjoying a beautiful day at Llano Seco