It’s been four days of quarantine and I’m starting to wig out just a little bit. It’s funny how cabin fever comes and goes (even over the course of a single day)--I can be itching to JUST DO SOMETHING one minute and then thirty minutes later be very comfortable doing nothing but watching The Office or SVU on the TV. Sometimes just walking in circles for a little while does the trick, but occasionally the itching prompts me to get up and go outside. The nice thing is that there are trails at the resort, so it’s easy to go on a walk and continue to socially distance.
So far, I’ve been on two walks around the trails, one two days ago and one earlier today. I’ve been using these walks to re-teach my eyes and ears how to interact with nature: hear a rustle, pause, turn, look, scan the area to see if there’s anything interesting. I don’t think anyone ever truly loses this ability, it seems fairly instinctual, but in New York City, we like to avoid our instincts and keep on walking. Similarly, I have to remind myself how to slow down, pace myself… although as soon as I notice the size of the mosquitoes around me I speed right back up again!
Now as a geochemist, I typically start by observing the abiotic factors of the area I walk through, so my first walk two days ago I was looking to see if there were any interesting rocks around. When I quickly realized I wouldn’t find very much, I switched to observing the weathered down trails and the beautiful lake, covered in ice.
The ice covered lake from my first walk two days ago.
The ice free lake from my walk today. It's amazing how quickly all that ice melted!
Today, I knew I was going to try and focus more on the biotic factors, so I was ready to spend lots of time looking up in the trees for birds. But when I came over the hill, all the ice on the lake had melted, which meant there were a TON of birds and ducks on the lake itself! I was particularly entranced by the mew gulls because I didn’t know that there were gulls that lived so far inland.
The Mew Gulls were the most active of the birds I saw on the lake.
And while the birds were beautiful (and noisy!), they were honestly not the first thing that got my brain back into thinking about biology. The first thing that got me back into it was a big ol’ pile of scat on the trail my first day walking around.
The first pile of scat I found. Who does it belong to? Maybe a moose?
At first, I honestly thought it might have been a squirrel’s hoard of acorns at first, but upon further inspection, I’m pretty darn sure it’s scat. And today when I went on my walk… it was EVERYWHERE! I lost count of the piles that I saw. And to be honest, it’s a mystery to me! After lots of research, I now think it might be moose scat, but I could be wrong... especially considering that there was a big pile in the parking lot by my hotel building. If that was done by a moose, that moose was being particularly bold whenever that happened.
Whose is it? Do you know? If you do, please let me know in the comments so I can stop wondering!
TGIFAlthough the quarantine continues, I am excited it is finally Friday. I’m looking forward to sleeping past 3:30/4:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, and (if I can manage to stay awake) seeing the sunset tonight around 11:00 p.m. Such a late sunset sounds like a sight to see!
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