kissalostsoul

I think I mentioned a few days ago that I’m never quite sure what I’ll be doing each day on this refuge.  I went into headquarters this morning not knowing if I’d be working or not.  Phyllis and Albert, from New Jersey, finished up their volunteer stint here this past weekend, and will be pulling out tomorrow morning.  Tom is still in the hospital for his cellulitis and Sally has spent her days there being with him.  That leaves Don and Mary and myself to cover things with the visitor’s center and other duties.  We scrambled a bit this morning to figure out how to cover things this week. I’ll be taking over for Tom and Sally tomorrow, and doing the tour in the morning.  I’ll probably be putting in more hours this week until the next couple arrives, but I really don’t mind.  RV volunteers are like the RV blogging community, and we tend to stick together and cover each other’s backs.  What with Tom in the hospital for over a week after Sally just losing her father, it’s the least I can

The last two days have been taken up with necessary mundane chores, with a few hikes with Emma in between.  Today was shopping day for me, and I had a list.  First stop was J C Penny.  I needed some new sheets for the bed.  Am I the only person left in the US that thinks January is the month for white sales?  When I asked the very young salesgirl where the white sales were, she said that she didn’t know what I was talking about.  I wanted 400 thread count sheets with extra deep pockets, and nearly passed out at the price.  I guess it’s a good thing I don’t buy new sheets very often. After a few more stops for essentials, I ended up at the grocery store in Ocean Springs.  I took four of my cloth shopping bags into the store with me.  It was not a major grocery day, but the things on my list were heavy items such as milk, laundry detergent, softener, bleach, and large cans of fruit and tomato juice.  When I reached the check out, I told the checker and packer that I had brought four ba

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.  Or maybe, life in the natural world rivals manmade soap operas.  Take the saga of Crossbill for instance.  She is a 10-12 year old female Mississippi sandhill crane with a disability; her bill is malformed.  For ten years, she had no mate.  She spent her time traveling around with a normal pair of sandhills.  It was thought that because of her crossed bill, she couldn’t find a mate.  Then, a little over a year ago, the female of that pair died.  Can you guess what happened?  Suddenly she looked pretty good to that four year old lonesome male crane.  Last spring, they became a pair even though he was much her junior.  (I’ve heard that young men have more stamina!)  They built a nest, but I don’t think they successfully raised any young last year.  In a stellar year, only four wild born cranes make it in this endangered population, so this was not surprising.  However, these cranes do mate for life, so they’ll try again this year.  Fast forwa

And I didn’t even do anything wrong!  The SHED is a local barbeque joint that has been featured on “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives” on the Food Channel.  If you like barbeque and are along the Mississippi gulf coast, this is the place to go. Its name is a good one, because you won’t find fine dining here.  There is seating inside and out with gravel outside and wooden boards inside.  Thousands of one dollar bills are attached to the ceiling.  Watch your step, though, because the footing is rather uneven. JERRY and Wanda, in their Casita, were stopping in the area overnight, so we got together for a late lunch this afternoon.  I last met them while I was making my challenging trip from Indiana to the repair shop in Louisiana last fall.  They are native Mississippians, and offered to give me a tour of Natchez should I head that way when my gig is up here at the end of April.  I’m thinking that sounds like a great plan.  They are a delightful couple, and they recently met JAN

At a few of the refuges that I have volunteered at, an occasional day is set aside to take all the RV volunteers on a field trip.  To be honest, it is one of the things that endears certain refuges to their volunteers.  That was on the calendar for this morning, but I wondered if it would be cancelled as a front with severe storms began moving through the area.  Our intrepid volunteer coordinator, Doug Hunt, cast the weather aside and said to hop into the van.  So, we did. Our destination was the Southeast Louisiana Refuges Bayou Lacombe Centre’, about 100 miles away.  It houses the visitor’s center for seven of Southeast Louisiana’s National Wildlife Refuges.  I’m sure glad I wasn’t driving that van, because we encountered an absolute deluge as we headed west through Biloxi.  Doug then hopped off of the interstate and gave us a narrated tour as we drove through all of the towns along historic route 90.  He has such a wealth of knowledge and stories about the southern Mississippi c

I got a phone call at the refuge from NICKIE and Jim the other day.  They are fellow RVers and bloggers, and they wanted to sign up for a tour of the refuge on their way to Baton Rouge this week.  As it turned out, they ended up being the only folks that showed up for the tour today, and what a tour we had!  It’s always great to meet up with fellow bloggers, and what a joy to be out with people that harbor a similar interest in the natural world.  They’re known as the intrepid-decrepit travelers, and since I’ve been feeling a little decrepit lately, we got along just fine.  The weather forecast wasn’t the greatest, but it tuned out that we saw a record number of cranes today.  If I got the count right, we saw 38 Mississippi sandhill cranes today.  We might have seen six of them twice, but even so, if you consider that there are only about 120-130 of these cranes left on earth, that’s quite a few.  If you click on this picture you’ll notice all the colorful bands on their legs.

Last night when I checked my e-mail, I read an interesting possibility for this summer on the Workamper Hotline.  Seems there was a private campground very close to the Blue Ridge Parkway that was looking for workampers for the summer season in North Carolina.  Solos would be required to do 16 hours/week for a full hook-up site.  The campground is just south of the Smokey Mountain Nat’l Park and within 3 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I’ve never spent much time in this area so it caught my interest.  I gave them a call, and left a message.  They called me back this morning while I was working in the Visitor’s Center.  It would require a commitment of six months, and most of my work would be in the office.  At only 16 hours/week, I was pretty excited about the possibilities of being in this area.  Just imagine the Blue Ridge in October with all the brilliant fall colors!  I had plans to send my resume and pictures of the rig and myself to them tonight. Then I checked my e-mail when

And I’m not just talking about the weather.  Although, we have had about an inch and a half of rain the last few days which has put a damper on my hiking plans for my days off.  My title refers to fellow volunteers Sally and Tom.  If you remember, from a couple of days ago, they went off on a trip to visit family and friends in Georgia last week, but had to make an emergency trip along the way to Florida.  It turned out that Sally’s father had suddenly taken ill, and died once he got to the hospital.  It was a shock to them, but they returned last Wednesday to the refuge.  Then early Friday morning, Tom began to feel ill.  Today, he ended up being admitted to the hospital for cellulitis.  I don’t know too much about that, but I’ve been told it can be very painful.  My heart goes out to these folks.  What a stressful time for them. With the wet weather, I’ve spent most of my time inside the rig.  I’m not complaining about that though since temps have remained in the 70’s.  Shirt sleev

After doing the time consuming chore of a week’s laundry in the Splendide this morning, I had to get out of the rig.  You see, I had decided to fix a pot roast for the first time in over six years, and the scents from the crockpot were more than I could stand. So, Emma and I hopped in the car and drove about 15 miles down I-10 to the eastern Mississippi Welcome Center.  I was able to get a booklet with coupons for businesses along the coast last year, but they didn’t have any this year.    Shucks!  Emma, of course, couldn’t go inside the Welcome Center with me, but I knew that at the far end of the center’s rest area was the Grand Bay NWR’s Escatawpa Trail.  That’s why I brought her along on this journey. For a couple of reasons, this trail is my least favorite of the four established trails in the two different refuges.  I chose to combine all three spurs of the trail today for a nice little walk.  The total distance is only a little over a mile, but for me it always seems t

It seems like it’s been a while since I’ve posted very many bird photos, so yesterday afternoon I spent some time hunting down my avian friends around the campsite. Depending on where you live, the appearance of the American robin has different meanings.  This truth was pointed out to me today by Doug, the volunteer coordinator.  If you live in the north, the robin is the harbinger of spring.  If you live in the south, it means it’s winter!  Well, we’ve been inundated with robins here in coastal Mississippi, and despite the warmer temperatures it is winter. A walk with Emma on the Dees Trail found us surrounded by brown-headed nuthatches.  They seem to call continuously as they work the pine trees, and their voice sounds like a squeaky toy to me.  Great bunches of yellow-rumped warblers have also been moving through the forest.  There are still plenty of insects for them to glean. A late afternoon visitor to the trees around my rig was a re