Don't Mess with Texas!

Hey all, or maybe I should say hey yall. Well this is probably one of the craziest adventures I have ever been on. So much has happened already so I'll try and pick the best parts. Well I got picked up on Thursday at 10 or so in the morning here which is 12pm back home, I barely had 2 hours of sleep in me but I was able to feed off adrenalin. One of the field biologists/falconer, Paul Juergen, drove me to meet my new partner who's real partner never showed up. She was currently hanging out with 2 other hack site attendants until I showed up. So after a few hours of a drive, and a great view of the mountains separating the border of Texas and Mexico, I met up with Christine Duffy. She is a student at Prescott College in Arizona, but originally from California. The house that these attendants had was great, a kitchen, shower, beds - so of course I assumed Christine and I would get the same. Oh man was I in for it. So we hopped in our new huge truck the Peregrine Fund provided for us, and which Christine and I look absolutely ridiculous driving in, and took off to meet up with the next field biologist, Brian Mutch. A few hours later we found Brian right outside the entrance of the Means Ranch in Van Horn, TX where we would be staying. Now this isn't any old ranch - it spans 90,000 acres! Oh yeah, it is a 20 mile drive on a rollercoaster dirt road just to get to the rancher's house, Jon Means. We knew that it would be inevitable that we would get lost. Well, we got to Jon Means house and he was extremely welcoming. We can use his phone anytime, everything is always unlocked - he is just an amazing man. Oh, and he always assures us that "if you keep the big mountains to your West, you'll find your way." Christine and I always joke about that, because if you were here you would be like, "um yeah, which ones?" So after meeting Jon we started to head another 4 miles of road through many cattle guards, and gates and we stopped and Brian yelled out his window. "You see that tree over there? That's where your house is." Oh my goodness, what a sight. There was a cottonwood out here, in the middle of no where just hovering over a little tin shack. That was going to be our home for next few months. Before we got to our house, or should I say shack, we made a pit stop to bring our new falcons to the hack box. Christine and I got to carry the boxes in and all I could think was, "Oh man, I am the biggest klutz. I really should not be carrying this box right now." Well, we got to the platform and climbed up this rickity old ladder, handing the boxes off to Brian. I was instructed to be the door person and Christine was in charge of making sure they didn't jump out of the box. As Brian went in with his bare hands to grab our first group of falcons Christine and I just stared at eachother dumbfounded. That was probably to coolest thing I've ever seen. Our new children - two boys and two girls: HR, MN, 7V, B1. That's what we call them by - their bands. The first four of our soon to be 22 being released! I had no idea we would get to release so many! Well, after that magic moment we drove about one mile down the road - towards what we like to call now, the tree of life. This house was sooo adorable. It has a front and back porch, a moon outhouse, a fridge run on propane, one of those shower bags attached to an old swing set; yep this would need some work, but we made it work. And now we love it. Christine was very into the fungsuei of the space, so now it looks really high class. Our first night there was a huge lightning storm and Christine and I discussed the safest options if the lightning got close. Everyone kept telling us we would be fine in our tin shack, but we really didn't think sitting on our metal bed frames in our tin shack would be the best bet. Then we thought just lying outside, close to the ground - but the crazy bugs and animals and that huge tree diturred us from that option as well. We figured our best bet was out big pick up truck. So I'll try and speed this up and just give you the most interesting things that happened each day. Day too we woke up and drove down to the hack box. I got out of the car and almost stepped on a taranchula! We were sitting on top of the platform looking in through the little peep holes to take notes on the falcons when Christine spotted a huge, yellow 8" millipede right beneath us. Later in the day Christine was taking a sip of water and I guess somehow a fire ant got in the water and bit her on the tongue. We started to notice that the desert cottontails love our house and aren't scared to be right next to us when we're hanging out... we're guessing they like the gated community. Saturday morning while we were on the platform we heard a pack of coyotes howling; we tried to search for them with our binocs but couldn't find them, therefore making us think they were far away - at least we hoped. We took a drive to town for the first time and we felt like we were on a safari: red-tailed hawks, black-tailed jackrabbits, turkey vultures, double crested cormorant (which hangs out by a water container), mule deer/black-tailed deer, pronghorn, greater roadrunners,... the list goes on. When we got back home we went to our afternoon viewing of the falcons and then we had to drive back to Jon Means house to make a call in to Brian on how the falcons were doing. By the time we were finished with the call in it was dark so I thought it would be a great time to find more taranchulas, snakes and scorpions on the drive back. We ended finding a couple of taranchulas, but in our excitement we got wicked lost and had no idea where the heck we were. We ended up driving for hours, and we were just going to give up and go back to the ranch house to sleep in the truck. Well, we gave it one more try and by one in the morning we made it back to our tin shack. Luckily I was still awake because right before I opened to door to hit the sack, I noticed a big black spider decided to make its home right in front of the door. I looked a little closer and saw the red, violin-shaped mark on its under belly. It was a black widow! We took a few pictures and then Christine took a mop and tried to pick it up to place it somewhere else. Then she started to wack it as it started to crawl away. Now we have black widow remains on our front porch. After that crazy adventure on Saturday I think mother nature decided to give us a day break. Sunday was pretty laid back. We hung out a bunch at the house during the middle of the day, just tanning in the back of out pick up and making some delicious salads to snack on. The falcons are great, all seem healthy, which we're both ecstatic about since the last group Christine was staying with wasn't having much luck. One of their falcons was run over by a train. Today we woke up to a rain storm. It was suprisingly chilly and the wind didn't help, especially being so high up off the ground. We made it through though - and now I'm just sitting here, writing to you all in the town library which is suprisingly very quaint. Love you all - I will be writing to you again soon, I hope.