July 2013 - I can't think of anything pithy to put in the title!

 

July started off with me bouncing between my crew, surveying my area searches on River Fork Ranch, and doing point counts along the Walker River.  Then for the final few days of work for (most all of) my crew, we went to the Pine Forest Range, and did some birding  There’s basically no bird data at all from there, and my jaunt with Dennis and Becca last fall convinced me that we needed to get some!  So we spent a few days wandering throughout the Pine Forest Range, birding, yakking, singing ‘round the campfire.  A great time!

Ahh, home turf.  In the far background, you can sort of see Hart Mtn :)

Here’s a pic of Min with an extremely dirty nose.  She has a tendency to want to cache food she doesn’t want to eat at the moment – so she’ll nose it all into a clump, and then nose a bunch of dirt over it.  Crazy dog.

The latter part of the month was spent both trying to recuperate from the field season (I took a weekend off, it was FABULOUS!) and trying to get data entered and proofed to meet our upcoming deadlines.  Gail came down from Lakeview for a meeting, so we had a chance to visit one evening, and I hung out with the neighbors an evening or three, and giggled a lot (not really surprising for me, but hey).  

This guy is TINY, only slightly bigger than my finger

I did take the 31^st off, and had a grand time at Pyramid Lake.  I’d meant to do some hiking on the eastern side of the lake, but the Tribe has now closed that area off – too much impact on the Stone Mother, I presume.  So instead I piddled along the lakeshore – running barefoot in the sand (which felt great at first – by the time I got back to the car though, the bottoms of my feet had burned badly – HUGE burn blisters, so that I wasn’t able to walk for days), writing in my journal, and swimming (which was AWESOME).  Minnie just waded into the lake and barked at me – Cash was very brave and actually swam a bit.  It’s funny having 2 dogs who don’t like swimming after having had Risky, one of whose great joys in life was swimming about, drinking as she went.  Anyway, it was a grand day, and even the darn blisters just seemed to cement the day fondly in my mind!

This was my swimming spot - not sandy here, but fairly birdy and secluded.  Fun!