Mas en el campo

While we're stuck inside during yet another thunderstorm (this one may be complete with hail), I thought I'd post another update about our field work.

There has been a lot of storms lately, and we've been pretty impressed by their intensity. After another night of storms, we ventured out the other day to get some field work done (grasslands, here we come!). We were through 3 of our 4 gates of fun when we discovered this...

There's an old eucalyptus grove along the side of the road. We've now learned that eucalyptus tend to be shallow-rooted trees, and several came down during the last storm. It was pretty cool to see all the damage, although it took awhile to find a route around the grove. Two days later, the tree is still there, and there's been no attempt to clear the road.

While we were walking around, carefully surveying the damage, and of course, taking pictures of what we saw, we found some cool fungus on a log. I realize we're science geeks at heart, because not everyone would be interested in the fact that even the fungus is cooler here. I've never seen any so bright orange like this one.

We were then welcomed into our grassland plots by more unknown species than I care to count. We are making progress, but at times it is painfully slow. The plots aren't as diverse as we were afraid of, but we're still dealing with 50 different plants by the end of the day.

We were popular at this site, too. This horse, and two of its buddies, wandered closely to the exclosure during the afternoon while we were there. I've never seen a horse where the tail and mane were different colors - the main was snow white (except for right on the top of its head), but the tail was black. He didn't have any black on his body, so I'm not sure where that came from.

The horses were then joined by a herd of cattle. Generally, the horses and cattle stick together in their own groups, and slowly wander the entire area together. Sometimes they merge together for awhile, and sometimes they don't. This was the first time we saw up close the horses right in the middle of the herd of cattle. They stayed like that for awhile, and then split up again and wandered their separate ways.

Our list of wildlife we still need to see is progressively shorter (we still have the armadillo and endangered fox on our list of must-see wildlife), and yesterday we were able to check another one off the list. We had heard there were tarantulas in the area, and we wondered if the semi-large spiders we see in the woods were what people were referring to. As we were driving out the other day, we saw a huge black thing wandering across the road. We stopped, parked, and grabbed our cameras.

I've never seen a tarantula up close, and it was pretty fascinating. They're covered in hair and move relatively slowly. We didn't get any closer since we weren't sure if they are poisonous here or not. He was pretty cool...