Sevilleta - Update I

October 16th, 2004 Chris Posted in Uncategorized |

I’m writing right now from a field station in Sevilla National Wildlife Refuge, about 30 miles south of Albequerque. It’s an area the size of Rhode Island that has largely been restored to pristine condition. It’s run by the NSF and is the site of a host of long term ecological projects, including everything from ecology to hydrology.

So what am I doing down here? I’m down here with one of my professors and several other students doing some field work. The specific project that I’m working on is looking for
Histoplasma capsulatum in kangaroo rat dens and in guano samples taken from a nearby cave.

After a tiring 18 hour drive to get here, we went straight out and set traps on Friday morning, then got settled in and crashed to sleep off the long drive. This morning, we got up before dawn so that we could get to the traps before the rats died of hypothermia. We had one hell of a catch too - we trapped 10 of the little critters, and identified seven active dens. That was really phenomenal success that exceeded all of our expectations. Over the next few days, we’ll be digging into a few burrows to take samples.

Besides our primary research, we’re doing a lot of exploring the area and learning a heck of a lot about desert ecology. Oh, and did I mention the three rattlesnakes I’ve already seen? (One of which I was probably about a foot away from stepping on? - Man, if you need a adrenaline rush…)

Dr. Jose Herrera is leading our little expedition, and he’s been coming down here for years and years, and so he really knows the area and the wildlife well. Dr. Scott Ellis, the division head, is a mammologist, and so he’s been helping us some of the animals we’ve encountered, though he’s probably learnign as much as we are from Herrera.

This is a shared computer at the field station, so I’m going to go ahead and post this now, so that other people can have a turn. I’ll try to find time tomorrow to jump back on, edit this post, and write some more about the first days down here. Until then, hope all is well, and I’ll let you know when I get the pictures up - it’s gorgeous out here where the mountains meet the desert.