South of the Border...

Posted by Sal

Its a tough life when the six monthly meeting of the scientific organisation that is most relevant to your own work is held in Mexico. Even harder when the specific venue is Acapulco.

Now admittedly going to Mexico and seeing only Acapulco is like going to Queensland and only seeing the Gold Coast (although marginally better than going to Cancun in that at least Acapulco is a real town); but for monolingual me it was a good opportunity to do "Mexico Lite" and feel comfortable and safe while getting a small introductions to the fun that awaits in the US's nearest neighbour.

Oh, and the conference was good too.

View from the hotel room - yep, it was hard.

We went to see the cliff divers at Quebrada - they launch themselves off the top of this cliff into an 11 foot channel, timing the dive so that they land just as a wave rolls in... terrifying and amazing. The sunset was pretty good too.

Finally, I took a day off from the conference and visited the 'real Mexico' - only a short bus ride from Acapulco's tourist strip. Careening bus rides around sheer cliffs, goats on the road, dust, eroding edges of the strip... ahhhhhhh. It was reassuring to know that I was back in a developing country and not in the strangely artificial world of Acapulco (*As an aside, Ciaran asked me what I thought of Acapulco while we pondered the week's experiences over beer on a Friday night... my unthinking response was: "a breast implant" - all about artifice catering to overblown fantasies). Anyway...

My destination was Pie de la Cuesta a lovely area with an unspoilt (but dangerously rippy) coast, and a beautiful huge estuary/lagoon full of birdlife and surrounded by mangroves. I spent a very lazy 5 hours on a boat travelling around the lagoon and slowing pace down to measuring time in "Mexican Minutes"... beautiful. Yep, it was just as tranquil as it looks.


Home safe and sound now and looking forward to the next conference - up in Maine in about a month, with a reasonable chance of actually learning and doing something; although sadly fewer opportunities for beach side discos.

Adios amigos... (as you can see, my Spanish has greatly benefited from the experience)

Sal

Things that ain't plants

Posted by: Nic

I spend most of my time thinking about plants so I tend to neglect things that move and lack cell walls. So it is about time we describe our local fauna. The following critters are species we have seen about the place. Now, before I get in trouble I should point out that I didn't take any of these pictures myself and instead got them from wikipedia, and I also got a lot of my information from there too.

Lets start with the least cute one. Down at my site on the coast last I ran into one of these little guys. This is a cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorus), a pitviper species found in the United States. They are found along the eastern coast of the United States from Virginia to Alabama. Their favoured habitat is swamps and around water bodies. The one I saw was next to a large open drain.



Since the weather has warmed up the birds have become more active. This is a Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) which is found throughout the south eastern US. This picture doesn't really capture how striking the red-colour of their plumage is. We get a lot of these in our back yard.

Deer fill a similar ecological niche to kangaroos, and this species is the Grey Kangaroo of deer. The White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) is a medium-sized deer found throughout most of the continental United States, southern Canada, Mexico, Central America and northern portions of South America as far south as Peru. I saw three of these near my canola field, not too far from where I saw the cottonmouth. Sal saw a male one, complete with antlers, on a busy road near Duke when she was riding home one night. Okay, the next dude is interesting. On Wednesday I was working at our field station and needed to relieve myself. Annoyingly the office was locked so I decided that going behind a shed would suffice. Walking behind the shed I disturbed two large fury animals that shot into a burrow before I could get a good look at them. At first I thought they were rabbits but then one emerged and I got within three paces of it. It turned out to be a groundhog (Marmota monax), also known as the woodchuck or whistlepig. These are in the rodent of the family Sciuridae, belonging to the group of large ground squirrels known as marmots. Most marmots, such as yellow-bellied and hoary marmots, live in rocky and mountainous areas, but the woodchuck is a lowland creature. It is widely distributed in North America and common in the northeastern and central United States. In the west it is found only in Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia and northern Washington.

Finally, onto another common rodent of these parts, the squirrel, or Eastern Gray Squirrel to be precise (Sciurus carolinensis). These are a tree squirrel that is native to the eastern and midwestern United States and the eastern provinces of Canada. The species name carolinensis refers to the Carolinas, where they were first recorded by zoologists and are still extremely common. We have a "few" in our yard. I have attempted to take pictures of them but without a telescopic lens it has been tricky. I find these little guys highly amusing as they jump, scurry and dig their way around the place. Our neighbour has elaborate bird feeders with contraptions designed to keep the squirrels away. We have spent a bit of time watching the squirrels figure out how to get around these supposed anti-squirrel defenses.

Aridskies

Over at Aridskies, Nic has made a few baby steps on his promised post about fuel use in agricultural.

A post from the host who can roast the most...

Posted by: Nic and Sal

Semesters over! For Sal at least, yay!!!! No longer does Sal feel guilty about not working on the weekend. Many of our friends are disappearing to head off for a break, but we are still here, and soon Marg and Phil will be too.

Now that Spring is here and people are getting out and about. The new Durham Farmers Market has opened, which is exciting. The old market used to be in a car park during summer and a community center in the winter. The dedicated market facilities (pictured below) were still under construction when we arrived and we helped do a little bit of work there with the community garden. Having aesthetically pleasing covered, but open-air, facilities for the market is fantastic. There are hundreds of people there all day which brings a lot of business and life to part of Durham that is otherwise under-utilized.





Turning to the community garden, up until now we were only there on Saturday mornings but were recently asked to help tutor the students in some of their high school subjects on Friday evenings. So yesterday evening we went along. Sal helped one of the guys with maths and Nic was supposed to help with science but the two girls who needed help didn't come.

It was interesting to watch the students setting up for the market the following day, seeing as though we had never seen this aspect of the garden before. Below is the chaos of the community garden on a Friday night. The second picture is of Fabian, Dante and David preparing vegetables for the market.

Nic has been away setting up switchgrass trials and preparing for his canola harvest. Below is a picture of Nic's work colleagues, Kim and Pete, planting switchgrass.

Nic recently read Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness. This book was published in 1917 and was by Horace Kephart (1862-1931). Kephart is described on wikipedia as an American travel writer best known as the author of Our Southern Highlanders, about his life in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina. This camping guide is still in press and is apparently highly regarded. This guide states that the only way to have good coffee is to roast and grind your own and also states that it isn't too hard. The point of telling you this is that Sal's hatred of US coffee has driven us to try roasting our own beans (for the record, Nic doesn't think the coffee is that bad). Nic did some research and ordered in large bag of beans. Results so far have been mixed but the bad coffee we have made still seems to be superior to the US stuff.