Snowbound Herpetologist

Until I can post the video, this just about sums up Maya's thorny devil ( Moloch horridus ) experience:

Things continue to go well!  Unfortunately, we got an entire group of new people out here at the field station, so our internet bandwidth got VERY overcrowded, so I won’t be able to include as many of our absolutely adorable new photos in this post as I’d like (and what I do include will again be low res)!  We also have some totally hilarious footage of Maya’s reaction to some of our lizard catches - she loves (loves!!) 99% of the lizards out here, but is deathly afraid of thorny devils. We got a gigantic rainstorm here a couple days ago, and several of our sites completely flooded out.  We have some epic photos and video of both the flooded roads and of us bailing 20 liters of water out of every pitfall trap.  We had to close some sites down (i.e., put the lids on the buckets and then secure them so that nothing can get in until the next time someone is out here to run the trap lines), and it changed our plans for next week to go out with some of the traditional...

A momentous occasion - Maya spotted her *very first* lizard COMPLETELY unaided (inside the shower stall), alerted her parents (liz-ah, liz-ah!!!), and helped capture it.  Way to go, Maya - an Eremiascincus ! Plus, some photos - more adventures! :)  (Sorry for the super small file sizes, but we have quite limited bandwidth here.) Me with the giant Varanus from the early days Noosing! This is what I was chasing - and I got him :) The inverts out here are so neat! Checking pitfall trap lines with mom We've taught her how to use the BBQ tongs to check traps One of our coolest lizards so far, a Tiliqua Checking traps with Greg Showing off good tong form The crew this morning!

Since this is the place where I post things that I could never share on Facebook (or with my mom), I wanted to write about the strong feelings of ambivalence (in its precise definition, in that I feel very strongly both positively and negatively) I have about taking the baby into the field with us.  Mostly, things are going reasonably well.  I can run half days of actual work in the field while prioritizing an afternoon nap back at the field station for the baby, and these field mornings are run at a balance of about 25% field work, 75% baby-chasing/carrying.  That said, I've seen some amazing things so far, and she's been an absolute DREAM in the car (we drove her 11 hours on April 1st with only a couple of stops - she didn't cry once, unbelievable). However, every once in a while, something happens where I'm like, "I am the stupidest person alive for bringing a baby into this."  It's amazing how many little things are no big deal for adults (and thus...

OK, actually this is more of a brief hello than a missive.  We are, however, in Australia!  We arrived in Perth on Tuesday, and we've been spending the intervening days driving around like crazy people trying to acquire the last of the field gear (essentially all the things that we couldn't fly here - including 7 weeks worth of diapers!). Maya did wonderfully on the flights, sleeping 10 of 15 hours on the looooong trans-Pacific leg.  The Sydney to Perth leg was the most difficult, but we managed.  She's pretty jet lagged, so we've had some epic 3am breakfasts and more nursing than I think she did even as a newborn (I think I nursed her every 30-45 min during her waking plane hours, and it hasn't slowed down much from that even yet).  She's also a little sick, fighting a cold she had before we left that's since gotten a bit worse - hopefully that's peaked and she's on the mend!  However, there are kookaburras and magpies calling outside, plenty of s...

My good friend Mark has been yelling at me about my lack of posting, and he's right - totally delinquent!  I thought I was busy before, but now I'm *super* busy.  There is literally no time for blogging, and I'm still way, way behind on work stuff (book chapter review is overdue, super awesome and exciting manuscript STILL isn't submitted, other backed up manuscripts still not begun, and a field season still needing preparation and purchases - ugh).  Husband keeps going out of town for shit (and almost didn't make it home from the latest trip thanks to the weather!), so I've done a fair amount of solo parenting.  I missed a monthly update (Maya's 14th month) for the first time, how sad!  I suppose the slippery slope has begun.  Mostly, I've just been a ball of barely held together anxiety while I try to accomplish the impossible, so this post is basically just an anxiety dump...which is all I have time for :) (I do write "good" blog posts in ...

I have exactly zero time to post this, so I'm writing it over lunch while I wolf down leftover pizza.  Baby is doing great!  We are walking full time now - mostly without incident, although we did have a traumatic face plant last night resulting in a lip injury and a not small amount of blood, yikes!  She has 30 words (if you include animal noises, which are indeed used in context and reliably as a surrogate for the actual animal name) and maybe 20 signs.  Adorably, she has some words that she'll only speak (mama, dada), others that she'll only sign (milk, more, please), and some that she always says and signs simultaneously (help, bath).  I suppose it's a little like being bilingual! We are in the beginning stages of true toddler-dom, complete with toddler tantrums.  We had our first public tantrum meltdown this weekend at the zoo, which included flinging herself on the ground while screaming and kicking.  I had to try very hard not to laugh.  ...