Can the Wind be a Color? Can You Photograph a Sound?

Today was yet another chilly hunting survey with all the smart hunters home in bed. The cold weather has been very good for the ducks!



I have a lot of random thoughts when riding down the beach on my ATV. My wandering mind helps me forget that I'm in danger of hypothermia... If the wind can have a color, today it was gray.



I had my camera out for random beach photos today and paused by a snow fence. The sound of the wind and blowing sand running along the length of the fence made me pause. The shucka-schuka-schuka of sand hitting the fresh wood and the wind rattling the slats and wire are impossible to replicate.



I don't carry a recorder with me, just my camera - I guess I could have filmed it for a few seconds, but the waves would have been louder than this gentle rhythm. Why can't we see sound? Certainly it would be visible if we could see the sound waves.



The road project is well underway at Opal Beach, which is why there's so much sand fence around. It's a symbolic fence placed at intervals to define the corridor for all the construction vehicles. The road should be open within the next few months. I wonder how the birds will react.



Someone sailing at the Santa Rosa area had a pretty bad day recently -- this boat is very firmly aground, and looks a bit worse for wear. Who do you call when you need to tow a boat? Does SeaTow handle things this well ashore? This boat is in far too fragile an area to reach it by land -- I can ride an ATV down this beach at low tide, but at high tide, it's all marsh. My ATV certainly is no match for this lovely boat anyway.



When I arrived back at the office to thaw for a few minutes, my sister called -- they're taking my uncle in for his bypass and carotid artery surgery as I write this. I thought it would be later this week, but my uncle is happy it's today -- waiting was really hard for him. I expect to have good news late this evening.

PVC and Rattlesnakes

Today, Mark decided to come play in the field. He has been on vacation since Christmas, so he hadn't seen the progress on the new road at Santa Rosa, and he wanted to check up on the birdies too. With saws and a mule in tow, we headed to the park around 9am.

Hurricane Ivan pretty much flattened Santa Rosa in 2004. Arlene and Dennis completed the job in 2005. Since then, no one has made an effort to clean the beach. Asphalt is scattered everywhere, miles and miles of PVC pipe litter the landscape and random hurricane debris intermixes with destroyed park structures. Mark has made it our mission this winter to remove all of the PVC on the island, which is not as easy as it sounds. This is one of two loads we removed today:



After struggling all day to get that small amount removed, Mark has decided to invest in an battery operated power saw -- it will make the job go faster, but it still won't be simple. Most of the pipe is buried in sand dunes, twisted at crazy angles and FULL of sand. Even ten foot long pieces weighed more than I do until we emptied them of their quartz cargo. This is going to be just the gym workout I need, and I get paid for it while making the environment much more beautiful. All we need to do now is find a way to recycle the tons of PVC we'll be removing. Any ideas?

Once we returned to Naval Live Oaks, we found a park visitor with this small, cold rattle snake in a cardboard box, searching for a new home. Sorry for the bad pic -- it's from my phone, but it does show the snake finding winter refuge in a gopher tortoise burrow, which is exactly where he belongs. Thanks, random visitor! Wish more people did that instead of just killing the poor snakes!

Time Capsule

I spent a good portion of this morning at the Fort Pickens Ranger Station, hunting around for satellite location data for Shelly and Sandy, two loggerheads tagged at the park several years ago. It was like walking into an office that stood still while life moved on in the distance. The last day is marked on the wall by the visitor's entrace, just in case anyone forgets what flattened the park...



There's evidence that those in the offices beat a hasty retreat. Garbage bags cover old computer components, boxes and paperwork are strewn across the floor, spilled coffee mugs roll on desktops, cans of cat food, labels faded by years of intense sun, stand by an east facing window, magazines, unopened mail, random rain jackets and gum wrappers, bug repellent and family photos weave a crazy trail through recent history.



I felt as if I was disturbing a memorial, and apologized to the room as I dug through the debris in my hunt for the elusive data. Once I unearthed the priceless paperwork, I headed back to my ATV to return to our temporary office. Traveling by ATV in late December with a box of paperwork is less than ideal, but three years post-storm, there still isn't a road out here. How have we allowed this to happen to one of our national treasures? Have we sunk so low in our quest in the middle east (for what?) that we our trashing our own country? What a waste...



Thankfully though, this retreat into the recent past reminds me of how much better things are today than they were three years ago -- at least we have an office (in a garage, but hey, it's dry and has heat!). The road closure has been great for the birds, though the sea turtles continue to struggle. The lost dunes, flattened landscape, light pollution and frequent flooding make it nearly impossible for nests to survive, even when they are present. There's a lot of work to do, and not just in the box of paperwork now sitting at my feet.

Mapping Asphalt

As a biologist in a National Park, I have many different responsibilities with animals -- shore birds, sea turtles, gopher tortoises, whatever crawls, flies, walks, swims or slithers its way into our forests and beaches. Never did I expect that taking GPS locations of asphalt chunks would be part of my job.

In 2004, Hurricane Ivan flattened our beaches at the Santa Rosa area, Fort Pickens and Perdido Key. Roads were replaced in time for the 4th of July weekend in 2005. Shortly after, they were destroyed again in Tropical Storm Arlene and Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina. It's taking some time to determine the best way to rebuild the roads this time.

The Santa Rosa area road will be started in October of this year -- as a hurricane evacuation route, it is a priority. Only two bridges reach the mainland from this barrier island, one in Navarre and one in Pensacola Beach. At the moment, the two are separated by the washed out road in Santa Rosa. If we lose one of the bridges, people on one side of the island will need boats or ferries to get back to mainland Florida.

This leaves me on the beach, with a GPS backpack, wandering around looking for significant chunks of asphalt from the earlier roads. It's not hard -- there are lots of fields, planks, piles, virtual mountains even, of asphalt strewn throughout the park. The road crews will remove everything larger than a brick, so I must locate each of these pieces on my GPS. It means lots of walking in the still hot sun, lots of standing still waiting for satellite fixes, and hours of boredom as my brain screams to do a little work.




There are some areas that are too sensitive for road crews. When the road washed out, new wetlands were created. These marine nurseries and grass flats serve as a buffet for migrating and wintering shorebirds, create habitat for spawning crabs and fish, filter contaminants and nutrients out of the water, and act as a sponge, absorbing water as tides rise and storms threaten. They are a great resource economically, in the food chain and in natural coastal protection. There are ten to twenty foot slabs of asphalt even here. Do I want to map them and invite machines in to tear up the delicate soil, uproot sea oats, Juncus and Spartina, and scatter the Piping Plovers and other birds feeding on the flats? It seems more appropriate to leave these asphalt mats to the erosive powers of wind, rain and sea, to be reclaimed by the birds and sand, and made part of a new salt march ecology. It's a tough call, but I think it's the right one. Thankfully, the decision really isn't up to me.

After three days of mapping on ATV and on foot, I'm looking forward to a day mapping tidelines and counting the hundreds of gulls, terns, sandpipers, herons and their friends that sit along the shore. If I'm lucky, I may even see a loggerhead hatchling or two...