Monday, June 18
Woke up about six to a catbird outside my tent immitating a towheee. It was not nearly as cold as I thought it would be. I think tomorrow morning I'll try to get up a little earlier to enjoy the early morning quiet.
It was a large birdwalk and more of an orientation bird walk than normal. We heard the chestnut sided warbler which I would have called a hooded, so I'll try to get that straight in my mind. I put my bird list for the week at the end of my journal.
Good breakfast - oatmeal and eggs and sausage.
Click on these photos for a higher
resolution. Will be slow with dial-up connection.
I'm in group three and it was our morning to clean the wash house, shower house and latrines, so we got that taken care of, then went to bird class with Bill Beatty. He talked about banding birds, how you get licensed, the criteria you use to determine a bird's age and sex, etc. Very interesting. He had mist nets set up in various spots on the trail - unfortunately there were no birds in them. But maybe we'll see some later in the week.
Taco salad for lunch.
In the afternoon Ashton Berdine took us down one of the trails and we stopped in various spots to examine the plants. We keyed out some flowers and heard stories about different plants explaining their names or something about them. Two members of our group had medicinal plant books and read to us what the plants were supposed to be good for.
