My summer with the Friends of Blackwater: May 29th

Today started off pretty slow because of the recent storms, and it was raining some more when I first got into the office -- you never realize how much you take rain for granted until you live in the Southwest (I lived in New Mexico for three years). I started off by making some more phone calls to some local newspapers for the Climate Change Impacts Initiative - a weekend conference hosted by the Friends of Blackwater about the impacts of climate change on the Allegheny Highlands. Tom Rodd is the Program Director for this event and he is hoping to make it an annual conference. There will be top scientists and climatologists from all over coming to present at this conference so it should be a good one!

After making the calls I started to make the new bait holders for some of our traps -- the traps on the Elakala Trail have not been successful so far because I discovered deer mice have been getting into them and eating all the bait. I made cubes out of hardware cloth to be filled with peanut butter to hang from the roof of the traps. Hopefully this will work out better -- we will know tomorrow!

I finally headed out for trap work around 2pm with the Elakala Trail being my first stop. It was an interesting day on the trail (it is one of the more popular trails because it is right next to the lodge and has a scenic view of Blackwater Falls) because I ran into about 20 Amish folk. Of course they were all in their own little groups and then every group stopped to ask me about what I was doing.

I only got to half of our trap sites today due to weather, and the other site I visitied was the Yellow Birch Trail. I was very glad I decided to put my rain boots on for this trail because half of it was flooded up above my ankles -- It was still nice though. I had 3 active snares today on this trail.

I was supposed to meet up with a guy named Bij, short for Bijon, today at 5pm so we could go out and do the monthly water monitoring project that Friends of Blackwater works on. 5pm came and went and no one showed up...I waited until a little after 5:30 and decided to head home in the hopes we will get it done tomorrow...