Davis Mountains Preserve (a.k.a. possibly my favorite place in western Texas!)

I'm pretty sure I could write about five blog posts, just on the Davis Mountains Preserve.  Usually before I write a post I put all my pictures that I am planning on using in a folder so that they are quick and easy to access.  For this blog I put over 35 pictures in a folder!  I most likely will not put all of them in this post, but there is no shortage of pictures I have from this place!  The Preserve is owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy.  They have several preserves and protected areas around the country.  I feel so lucky to have the chance to get to work there since it is not actually open the general public (although they do have days that it is open to the public about once a month).  However, once you have done any kind of volunteer work or research on the preserve you kind of get a free pass to visit whenever you want if there is nothing else going on at the Preserve during the time you're interested in visiting.  Learning that made me pretty happy since that means if any of you ever decide to come visit I could bring you up there to show you the place!  Anyway, the Davis Mountains Preserve (I call it DMP for short) is located about an hour north of Alpine, and about a half hour north of Fort Davis.  If you remember my blog posts back in March you'll remember that there was a pretty bad fire that spread through Fort Davis.  Part of this fire was creeping closer to DMP and they ended up setting a backfire to prevent further spread of the natural fire on the preserve (basically they set some of the preserve on fire so that once the other fire hit the already burned areas of the preserve it would just go out).  This resulted in one of my trap sites getting burned, which means I'll have to find a new site for that habitat strata.  Well, since I have so many pictures, I'll just start adding them in and talking more about DMP as I go along :)

First, some scenery pictures! Back in October I did a hike with the Conservation Biology Club at Sul Ross.  We hiked up to Mt. Livermore which is the highest peak on the preserve.  There's not much to say about each picture, so I'll just let you look at them without any of my wordy explanations :)

Ok, so maybe a couple explanations.  This is a stand of aspen trees in some of the higher elevations of the hike!  This was basically the only taste of fall that I got from Texas this past year.

This isn't the greatest picture of one, but this is a madrone tree.  They're really pretty! (You could probably look them up on google images and get see some better pictures if you're interested)

This is a madrone tree growing out of an alligator juniper tree.  The main manager of the preserve said they call it a "madroniper."  I liked that :)

Now a few somewhat depressing pictures of the part of the preserve that was burned.  Here I have a few "before and after" pictures.

This picture and the one below are taken from the same view.  Although most of the trees are still standing, you can see that all the shrubs and grass are burned away. (Despite the burned land, look how clear blue that sky is!  At least that is something you can count on down here - a beautiful sky!)

Although the tracks in this picture may look like tire tracks, they are not.  This is an obvious animal path.  Could be deer, javenlina, foxes or coyotes, but it's obvious that even though the habitat has been changed, the wildlife is already learning to adapt.

This was taken on one of the sites I've trapped on (although it ended up being the wrong habitat so I was not going to use it again anyway).  I'm pretty sure that tree in the middle was already burned by a previous fire, probably years ago.  But again you can see that all the grass and shrubs are no longer there.

I wanted to put this picture up since it shows again that even amongst the black soot and ashes there is still life! And it can be bright, like these bright purple flowers that really stood out against the burnt background!

To me this picture and the one below may be the most depressing "before and after" picture I took.  This picture is from my study site that I was planning on using again before I realized it was burned.  I just LOVED this view the first time I trapped there and thought it was so beautiful.  When I drove up here after the fire I purposefully walked to this spot to see how different it looked.  And you can see in the "after" picture below that is it definitely different!  Look how bare it looks now that it was burned!  Even with trees still standing it is just not at all the same.

Ok, I'll make this my last "before and after" pair, because it is making me sad!  These pictures aren't taken from exactly the same spot, but they are basically looking at the same scene.  I never realized how much the grass really makes everything look so much more full.  As you can see in the picture below everything just seems more open and bare without the grass there to fill in the gaps.

Ok enough with the burned pictures! Let's move on to something more... alive!  I know in my blog post about Big Bend National Park I mentioned that it was difficult to get good pictures of birds since they don't always sit still long enough to get good photos...  Well, I may have been a little wrong about that.  Apparently I was the one that needed to learn to sit still long enough to wait for the birds to come!  (Should have known the problem was me and NOT the wildlife!)  DMP is an awesome place to see all different kinds of birds.  Since it is surrounded by desert, and there are plenty of trees, it is the perfect place for the birds to pass through during their migrations.  Being that it is easier for them to hide themselves in trees, this also forced me to better learn their songs so that I didn't have to actually see them in order to identify them during my surveys.  In the evenings I sat outside on the back patio of the McIvor Center (where I stay on the preserve) and just watched all the different birds come in.  My little digital camera has fairly good zoom for it's size and I was able to get some pretty good pictures of the birds I was seeing.  In some of the pictures below I also cropped and zoomed in on the birds a little more so that you could get a better view of them - so they may be grainy.  This just makes me want to save up for a really nice camera so that I can get some lenses capable of capturing awesome up close and personal bird pictures!  Maybe some day :)

Anyway, first I'll put in a couple lizard pictures I captured (one of which is a new species for me) and then I'll move on to the bird pictures.

This is a lizard that I have seen quite a few times during my herp surveys, and even when I'm just walking around (which is what I was doing when I took this).  I think I have looked through all my field guides about 100 times trying to figure out what it is and just cannot figure it out!  So if any of you looking at this have any ideas let me know!

This is a Chihuahuan spotted whiptail.  This is the new species.  I was hiking along a trail when I saw my first one (this picture is actually the 3rd one I saw up there), and I think I chased him for about 20 feet or so trying to get a picture!  I finally did get one, but this one here was better, so I posted it instead.

This is neither a lizard nor a bird, but I just remembered that I had it.  This is a rock squirrel - fitting since he's sitting on a rock in this picture.  I know he kind of looks like a regular grey squirrel that you'd see anywhere up north, but upon closer inspection he has spots on his back and a less bushier tail.  I've seen a couple of these while running my mammal traps but have never caught one.  Although I think it would be cool to catch one, I'm not too optimistic considering one would have to really stuff itself inside a trap to get caught. (And I doubt he'd be too happy once I got him out!)

Another mammal species - there were a bunch of deer up near the McIvor Center the last evening I was there and here's one of them.  I'm pretty sure they were white-tailed deer.  Mule deer are more common out here in western Texas, but there are places (mostly higher elevations) where you'll see white-tailed deer.

This may be one of my new all time favorite birds!  Isn't he beautiful?? This is a western tanager - a species that we do not have up north!  I think all tanager species are beautiful, but this one may be the most :)

This cute little guy is a yellow-rumped warbler.  In addition to the yellow throat, yellow patches on his sides, and yellow patch on his head, he also has a little yellow rump patch that you can see when they fly around. They're so cute!

Another shot of the yellow-rumped warbler.  This one was flitting around flying really crazily and it took me a while before I realized he was chasing after bugs! When I realized what he was doing and then watched him some more I could actually hear him snapping his beak shut.  So cute!

This is a hermit thrush.  He actually got pretty close to me a couple times.  They're not too exciting to look at but I still like them.  :)

This is a western bluebird.  When the sun is shining on them in the right way they are SO BLUE!  We get eastern bluebirds back home, and they will come down here also, but you can tell this is a western because it has a blue throat (the throats of the eastern bluebirds are the same color as their belly and sides - the brownish-red that you can see on the one above).

This is a northern flicker.  This is female.  The males have much brighter coloring during breeding season - which it is now.  We have these up north and they are pretty common, so some of you may have seen them before.

They had hummingbird feeders hanging outside the McIvor Center so one evening I went out there and sat at a picnic table nearby to watch them.  I managed to get some really great pictures!  They are pretty hard to follow sometimes since they flit and buzz around like insects more than move like birds...  There are actually something like 10 species of hummingbirds that migrate through this area (Alpine too), so it's a great place to put up feeders!

Here is another one.

There were two species that I saw there.  This is a magnificent hummingbird.  They are pretty large as far as hummingbirds go - at least in my opinion.  I was pretty excited to have gotten this shot!  Look how awesome the iridescence is on him!  Most of the time they just look black all over, but every so often the light would hit them just right and you'd get this brilliant flash of color!

Here is another magnificent hummingbird.

I know this picture isn't that great, but here is the second species that I saw - a black chinned hummingbird.  These have some pretty cool iridescence too.  As you can see in the picture their chins are black, and then purple right underneath on their throats.  And you can't see it in this picture, but their backs are green.  Not as green as the throats of the magnificent hummingbirds, but they are still pretty! I also like that little band of white on the ends of their tail feathers.

Just wanted to put this picture in here so you can see how tiny they are!  You can barely tell there's a bird in the tree!

It could have been because I had birds on my mind all weekend, but one afternoon when I was opening my traps for that night I saw this cloud and thought is sure did look like a bird!

Well, that's all the pictures I have for now.  I saw several other bird species that weekend that I didn't get pictures of - such as black crested titmice (so adorable!), mountain chickadees (another new species for me), ash-throated flycatchers (that would flit around like the yellow-rumped warbler and catch bugs), lark sparrow (another new species), Cassin's kingbird (another new species, we have northern kingbirds up north that I love, so I was excited about this species!), and turkeys (which were so noisy in the mornings!).  I think that was it on birds.  I have one more weekend to trap at DMP at the end of the month, but I'm taking this weekend off since Bob will be here (he's flying in tomorrow and I'm so excited!!).  Maybe I'll be able to capture some more bird pictures when I'm there next time.  It may be a while before my next post though.  I am moving into my house on Saturday (thankfully, with Bob's help!) and I won't have internet for a while.  I'll be able to get internet in the school building where my graduate office is, although its never that easy for me to sit in there for very long so I don't know how much blogging I will get done.  But, I'll post more as soon as I can :)

I hope I helped you fall a little bit in love with the Davis Mountains Preserve after reading this post.  I sure do love it!  It's such a beautiful and peaceful place to go.  It's so full of wildlife that I can never get enough :)  Like I said earlier if any of you ever come down to visit me this will probably be one place that I'll definitely want to bring you!

As always, thanks for reading :)

Laura

P.S. Just counted the number of pictures I posted in this one - 34!  Guess I did get pretty close to the 35 I put in the folder :)

Big Bend Followup...

Ok, I know that I just posted a blog last night, but wanted to post a little follow up since I just checked the pictures that were captured on my trail cameras.  Don't get too excited - I didn't get anything except a couple pictures of me working up a mouse and a picture of a jack rabbit... BUT I had to save a couple of the pictures just so you could see what I meant about it being HOT down there!  The school truck I use for my field work has a feature where you can see what the outside temperature is supposed to be, and I usually rely on using that in the mornings since I record the temperatures during my bird surveys.  This past weekend the truck kept saying it was usually between 97 and 103... which obviously is hot.  And I trusted that reading even though to me it felt like it was a lot hotter than that - especially judging by how much I was sweating.  I mean obviously you're going to sweat when it's 97 degrees but I've worked it weather that hot before and I just felt like I was SO much hotter than I usually am in high 90 degree weather.  Anyway, I'm making this longer than I meant to and I doubt you all want to hear about me sweating... sorry!  My trail cameras also read the temperature.  Now I know that they are sitting out in direct sunlight so may be over estimating the temperature, but once I saw what the cameras were recording as the temperatures I started to understand why I was feeling so much hotter than what the truck was telling me.  I'll let you look at the pictures below to see for yourselves :)

Okay, first just a couple candids of me and the jack rabbit...

I didn't realize at first that I had sat down right in front of the camera that automatically started taking photos of me.  But here I am shaking a mouse out of the trap and into the bag.

Here is the jack rabbit.  Those ears are so huge!

Ok, and here are the ones that show how hot it was!

Here is the first photo I have showing the extreme temperatures of my study area!  This was the first study site at 118 degrees!  Now you may be looking at the time and thinking that I'd have no reason to be out there at that time since I run my traps in the morning.  But in order to avoid excessive heat exposure to animals who may get caught, I close my traps after checking them in the morning.  So that means I have to go out and open them again in the afternoons, which I usually do between 3 and 5... right around when these photos were taken.

Here is my second study site that is at a lower elevation at 120 degrees!

This is the same camera that took the picture directly above this, but the difference is this picture was taken that fateful morning that I described in the previous post when I was rushing to save (unsuccessfully) the mice in the traps.  No wonder they were dying! It was 107 degrees already!!  Poor things :( It makes me feel so bad!

Anyway, this post was basically for me to feel sorry for myself a little bit and and maybe justify my complaining during these past couple of weekends to those that had to listen :)  I have been keeping an eye on what the weather is supposed to be for the Davis Mountains Preserve where I will be this weekend and it looks like it will be in the lower to mid 80s!  YAY!  It will be like springtime!  As I mentioned in the other post there are also trees there that will shade me and the traps I set! Whoohoo!  It will be such a nice change from the sweltering heat of the desert in Big Bend...

Okay, thanks for letting me point all that out to you :)  I was the one who decided to work down here, so now I guess I have to deal with it!

Thanks for reading :)

Laura

At the Big Bend in Texas!

You can guess where Big Bend National Park is located, given it's name - Big Bend...  It's at the very bottom of the Trans-Pecos region of the state, right along the Rio Grande River separating the US from Mexico.  Given that the river is usually very low in some places, it is possible to wander across and step on Mexican soils, although this is frowned upon - don't worry... I obey the rules and have not been across (although have been around when other people have!).

Considering this park is in the middle of the desert, it still attracts quite a few tourists each year, mostly during the cooler months.  It is a little different from my other study sites in that I meet these tourists regularly and am often asked about what I am doing down there - which I am sometimes a bit vague about since my study sites are pretty easily accessible even for visitors and I don't really think they need to know too much about where I am working!  Anyway, Big Bend is a popular gathering place for people interested in lots of different wildlife.  People interested in snakes and other herps go there to look for several different obscure species that are native only to that area.   Birders come to the Chisos Mountains (located in the heart of the park) in hopes to see rare bird species migrating through, or species known in the US only to the Chisos Mountains.  The park is also very informative towards visitors about the presence of black bears and mountain lions, which of course starts rumors of how the mountain lions come into camp sites - in broad daylight - to lounge on picnic tables and steal campers' food.  I have had several people ask me specifically how many of these popular carnivores reside in the park after learning of my research objectives there (and are disappointed when I do not know the exact number)...  Regardless of what I tell them, I'm sure they'd much rather believe the somewhat unlikely rumors so that they can go back to their city homes and tell their friends about how they were brave enough to camp out in known bear and lion habitat.  Most seem to have already made up their minds about what they believe anyway even before they speak to me about it. Don't get me wrong - I'm sure that there are many visitors to the park who know better than to believe every rumor they hear and have only come to enjoy the isolation and wildness of the area - but you always have those few that need to tell you everything they know about the animals there and assure you that what they are saying is absolute proven truth (ehem... even though I am the one with the wildlife degree).  Oh well, I'm sure most of you have run into the same kinds of people in your respective career choices.  And to be honest, it is nice to have a little bit of conversation with humans since I am usually alone for the whole time at my other study sites.  After a while of chatting with the mice I catch, I realized they're usually not too happy with me...

Okay, enough rambling.  I spent the past two weekends working in Big Bend.  I was actually supposed to be in the Davis Mountains but because of the fires, that was cancelled until later this month (this weekend I'll be up there).  I knew it was going to be uncomfortable working in the heat in Big Bend, since it is usually about 10 or more degrees warmer there than it is up here in Alpine, but it was a little worse than I thought it would be... Out of the 8 days that I was there between the two weekends, I think maybe two or three of them were UNDER 100 degrees... Most of them were around 104 or higher during the heat of the day.  Yesterday (my last day of trapping in Big Bend for this season), when I started my first bird survey at the first site at 6:45 AM it was already over 80 degrees.  By 9 AM is was over 90.  Now, I start as early as I can so that the animals I have caught do not have to cook in their little metal traps.  But when they're already on the verge of death around 9:30 AM and I'm just getting to my second site that is not good news!  Needless to say, this particular day was a very frustrating one for the biologist in me.  It was bittersweet because I caught a total of 31 animals between the two sites, a new record for me. However, by the time I got to the third transect of my second site, it was already so hot that unfortunately all the animals (except one that happened to choose a trap in the limited amount of shade there was) did not survive.  Now I know that many may say, "Oh they're just rodents, there are probably hundreds more out there!"  And yes, I agree that it may not be a huge loss, but I do believe that any unnecessary mortality of any animal is well... unnecessary.  Plus, rodent or not, roasting to death in a metal trap has got to be one of the worst ways to go!  But I started before the sun had risen over the mountains... and can't start much earlier than that since it would be dark!  The stress of finding several mouse corpses in my traps combined with the very high temperature working conditions, losing my pen on the first site and then catching almost 20 animals which I then had to record data on by using the video setting on my camera and record it by hand later, cruising the roads for 3 nights straight looking for snakes practically falling asleep at the wheel each night and not seeing a single snake (until one morning when I wasn't expecting it and by the time I pulled over and got out of the truck it had disappeared!), and then realizing that I never actually turned on one of the trail cameras I had set out for the weekend, made this past weekend a VERY frustrating one!  Sorry mom, I know that was a terribly long run-on sentence - I'm sure you were cringing the whole way through :)

Whew, I thought I was going to stop rambling... anyway, I am hoping that it was just a bad weekend, and the rest of my trapping for this season will go a little more smoothly.  Luckily the Davis Mountains have !TREES! and should be a little cooler than it was in Big Bend.  Alright... sorry for the lengthy introduction!

Here are some pictures!

I'll start off with some scenery photos...

I talked about the Chisos Mountains a little bit.. well this is a view of them from a flatter area of the park, and you can barely see them because of the fog... Still I think this picture is pretty cool and wanted to include it... although like most pictures I put up here, it looked much cooler in person!

This is a photo I took during my first trip to Big Bend back in August when I first came down to Texas.  I wanted to put this in here so that you could see how brown it has become since last fall.  Compared to that first picture this looks like a lush shrub land!

Here is another view of the Chisos in which they are a little more visible!  I took this picture this past weekend when it looked like it was finally going to rain!  Although there were apparently showers in some areas of the Trans-Pecos there were none here... But I wanted to put this photo up here anyway since we rarely get cloudy days like this.  It's usually all clear blue sky as far as the eye can see.

This picture is up in the Chisos Basin (which you can see in the right corner of the picture).  There is a lodge with a restaurant and little convenience store as well as a campsite in the basin.  Of course there are a few different hiking trails that eventually lead to some beautiful views of the surrounding desert.  This picture I took from my study site in the Chisos.

This is a picture of my trapping site in the Chisos.  I am actually standing on the road that leads to the basin, so I'm sure people driving by have seen me working up there.  This is the hardest trap site I have out of all 11 traps sites.  As you can see it is pretty steep.  And when you're carrying 45 traps and a few trail cameras it makes things a little difficult.  I spend most of my time climbing around on all fours and making sure I don't fall!  I have learned to grab on to any of the surrounding vegetation whether is has thorns or not!

Here is a view of the sunrise during one of the more cloudy mornings.  I thought the colors it was casting on the sky was really pretty.

These last three scenery pictures are also from back in August during my first trip to Big Bend.  This is a tunnel that goes through a little hillside.  It's hard to tell from the picture but there are also some pretty impressive mountains behind it!

Here is the Rio Grande River with Mexico on the other side!  As you can see, like I said before it would not be too difficult to walk across at this spot in the river.  But again, not to worry - I haven't crossed international borders since I've been down here :)

Another view of the Rio Grande.  The sun was setting and I thought the way it was shining on those rocks was really pretty.

Here are some pictures of a trail that I walked out one afternoon in between running my traps and re-opening them in the afternoon.  It's called the Window Trail (you'll see why in a couple of the pictures below).

It's not very often that I get good bird pictures with my camera, just because they never get close enough or stay still long enough to get a good picture!  Anyway, I was lucky enough to get a couple good photos of birds from the park. This is a western scrub jay.  There are also Mexican scrub jays, but I haven't seen one of those yet. There were a pair of these sitting in this agave plant a little ways into the trail.  They are in the same family as blue jays, and just about as obnoxious and as loud as they are too! :)

This photo and the one beneath it are just a couple views from the basin of the Chisos.  Basically this whole trail was surrounded by tall peaks like this one.  It was really pretty!

Another view of one of the many peaks along the trail.  I liked this trail a lot because there were some areas of dense trees.  Although they were not as large as the trees I'm used to up north, it still kind of made me feel like I was walking through the woods :)

And here is why they call it the Window Trail.  This is where the trail ends, and if you walk much further you'll fall right over the edge of the mountains.  It was a bit of an abrupt end! I was expecting a ledge, maybe with a wooden fence or a rope, but there is nothing keeping you from continuing to walk right over the edge of this cliff.  It was a really beautiful sight though!

Apparently there is usually some water trickling over the edge of this cliff.  There was none the day that I was there, but the rocky ground was so smooth and slippery that I assume what I was told about the water was true.  There had obviously been enough water flow to wear down the rock to such a smooth surface.  I am not afraid of heights, although the thought of slipping off the edge of this cliff almost kept me from carefully inching closer in order to snap this picture.  Luckily there was a little "bowl" among the rocky floor that I kind of slid into to take the picture, and then had to carefully climb out of on all fours.  Definitely enough to get your heart pounding and adrenaline flowing!

I was also lucky enough to have a very nice elderly couple arrive just a few minutes behind me and asked them to take my picture.  At least now I can prove I was there :) It's hard to tell in the picture, but you can kind of tell where that little "bowl" was that I slid into on the left side of the window.  It looks like it goes right over the edge, but it doesn't... at least not for about 2 more feet :) It was a short hike, but very rewarding with the view at the end!

Now some animal pictures! (Personally, my favorite part)

The many frustrations that may occur during the process of actually gathering the data are usually forgotten once I come back and find that I've captured some great photos on my trail cameras.  This was one of those times!  The first weekend I was there during this trapping season I was working on that site in the Chisos that I have a picture of earlier in this post.  I caught 2 GREAT bear pictures on the trail cameras! Look at those HUGE ears! Ha! It cracked me up the first time I saw it.  This is obviously a little bear - but who cares! It's a bear!

Here is the second picture I captured.  I am assuming this is the same bear.  If you look at the times the pictures were taken you'll notice they were both around 7pm.  So when I went back this past weekend I drove up there a little before 6:30 and stopped at a place where I could see that area of the mountain to see if I could see the bear in person.  And sure enough, around a quarter to 7 there he was making his way across!  I was so excited! Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures, but I did get some pretty good views of him through my binoculars.  So I have now seen 2 Texas bears in person :)

Another better moment of this past weekend (actually during the horrible morning that I described above), I caught a new species!  This little guy is a spotted ground squirrel (Spermophilus spilosoma).  When I first picked up the trap and felt how heavy it was I thought it was another woodrat, but then this came shooting out of the trap when I opened it into the bag!  I took my measurements and a few pictures, like this one, through the bag before I tried to get him in my hands, since I wasn't sure how well I'd be able to hold on to him!

As you can see he was not too happy (notice the one hindfoot pushing against my hand), but he let me hold on to him long enough to get a couple more pictures.  What a cutie! I also (rather unceremoniously) "tossed" him on the ground when I let him go since I wasn't sure if he'd try to turn around and bite me... but he just shook it off and looked at me for a couple of seconds before running off... hehe)

This is by far one of my favorite trail camera pictures I have captured so far.  Those of you who are friends with me on facebook have probably already seen this, but I wanted to include it on here too.  Although the bear pictures are always exciting, it is not everyday that you get to see a picture as candid as this one. This fox was making his way off with a woodrat that he had captured for a meal that night.  Good for him!  It's one of those photos that gives me goosebumps when I look at it!

This picture may be a little grainy because I cropped and zoomed in on it a little.  This is a Wilson's warbler.  Although it is not a particularly rare species, I still took a picture of it because it was just hanging out in a bush nearby the trail entrance to my site in the Chisos.  Looks like he even posed a little for me :)  Another grad student came to help me out one morning and she is the one who told me what species of bird it was.  You can't see it in this picture, but Wilson's warbler males (which this one was) have a little patch of black right on top of their heads.

Well that's all I have for now as far as Big Bend goes.  I'll be heading up to the Davis Mountains Preserve this weekend and then have a week off because Bob is coming down to visit!  I'm so excited :) I can't wait to see him.  He'll be here for my birthday which will be really nice and he'll be helping me move into a house that I'll be renting at least for the next year.  It will be SO nice to have a yard and some privacy after living in this dorm-like apartment for the past 6 months.  It will also be nice to have a new place to settle into to distract me again from missing everyone at home once Bob's leaves after the week. It's a little ways outside of the busy part of town, down a dirt road.  It will be a little more expensive than where I am living now, but I know it will be worth it.  There is a house on either side of the one I will be living in that are also owned by the same person.  One house is occupied by a boarder patrol officer (who apparently is rarely there), while the other is unoccupied, so the peace and quiet will be nice!  That is until the trains come through since the tracks are practically in the front yard!  Oh well, a small price to pay for a little bit more comfortable living.  I'll post pictures when I can!  I'm going to try to get a couple more blog posts in before I move since I may be without internet for a little while until I see what I can afford!  It's tough being a grownup!  But I like it (although sometimes I feel like I still have a long ways to go before I'm a real grownup)  :)

As always thanks for reading... I'll try not to wait a month before my next post.  I got pretty busy with school work the past couple of weeks, but had my last final this morning!  I can't believe I'm already done with my first school year down here! One down - two to go!

Love and miss you all!

Laura :)