Real life adventures in archaeology
More snakes!
Proving that you never get used to rattlesnakes no matter how long you've been doing this, a few weeks ago I heard a "Jesus Christ!" breaking the barely-dawn quiet from my Boss upon discovering that that, in fact, was not a cow patty, but a coiled up snake next to his shovel test.
Speaking of shovel tests and snakes, the best snake story (actually the best several snake stories) comes from the crew member I will call Blue. To imagine Blue, take Zim, straighten his hair and turn said hair blue. Oddly enough, even though he looks a lot like Zim, Blue is 20 years older than me. Anyway, as I was digging 50 meters or so away, I noticed Blue running out of the stand of tall grasses he had put his test in. Some other crew members and I came to investigate, whereupon Blue told us that there was a snake in his shovel test. What had apparently happened was that he had put his hand screen on top of it without noticing, then proceeded to screen over the thing (bare hands and arms here, mind you), burying it with dirt until he had started to fill the pit back in and had found it in his shovel, unmoving. He thought it was dead, so tried to flip it over with his shovel when it rattled at him and he high-tailed it out of the grass.
Blue has amazing luck with potentially-fatal creatures, starting with the day after I met him when he nearly poked a black widow while saying "Is the spider over here?". If you're not familiar with snake guards, they're hot, uncomfortable pieces of cloth-covered plastic you strap around your shins so you don't die. Blue's were making his legs all itchy and gross, so he decided to forgo them one day on the reasoning that we don't actually see snakes all that often. Before lunch, he found this:
Keep in mind that although I'm taking this picture from behind it, Blue's in front of it.
Later that day, we'd finally made out way to the trucks when Blue jumped back clutching his chest like he was having a heart attack. It turns out he'd seen yet another snake slithering away. Way to not wear your snake guards, Blue.
Landowners!
At one point, we got kicked off some lady's land because she wanted 5 days notice of when we were coming so she could "move her horses". 5 days. Horses, which are very mobile creatures. She threatened to call the sheriff on us even though we'd already agreed to leave in case she had a shotgun, and while we walked over to the nearest gate, she followed us in her jeep, going backwards at the speed we were walking until we got out of her field. About an hour after we had left, she called the sheriff and the company ABC is contracting for to say that we were still on her land and that she'd sue or something if we didn't get off.
Yesterday, we had to go back to her land. This time she'd had notice and had decided that she was going to run the show, so she had three survey teams (land, environmental, and us) meet her at 9am (which is two hours later than we'd normally get to a property because it gets hella hot out here) so she could keep an eye on us show us around the property. The reason I brought up the horses thing earlier is that, even though she'd had her 5 days this time, the horses were just being moved right now. She and her land agent then informed us that she (not the company actually building the line) had decided to reroute the line, so instead of the short, straight stretch we had marked off on our GPSes so we could put in shovel tests at the right spots, we were now doing at least twice as much with an elbow over mesquite-and-cactus-filled pastures that went right by her brother's grave (TX law requires things to be built at least 75 feet away from any graves) and no one seemed to know exactly where the line was, so all our work might have to be redone if our measurements were off because we couldn't use the GPS (and because the new route wasn't official). And she wouldn't let us hop over her fences, even on the braces, but tried to make us walk back and forth to distant gates. We of course started climbing over when she wasn't looking. Instead of taking a morning like we thought, this property took two complete days and contained four separate sites, not including her brother's grave.
On the other hand, there was the guy a few days ago who drove down to meet us in his huge truck to give us a ride back to where we had parked, and when I asked him if I could pick up a couple of fossils from his land, gave me a huge handful of crinoid stems. He and his land agent hung around to chat with us and showed us the bloody corpse of a snake the land agent had just hacked to death with a shovel. It was pretty hardcore.
When we first met up with the owner in the morning, he told us that he doubted we would find anything on his land. "*long pause* Except maybe a graveyard." It turns out that he has a historic graveyard somewhere on his land, but an earlier landowner had decided he didn't like it and removed all the gravestones to use as stepping stones in his cattle pens, leaving only three. Two of them were members of a family, one born in 1799 and the other in 1815, but the last one was a slave who had been given to an even earlier landowner's daughter as a wedding present and was so much beloved after his 105 years of life (!) that his owners (or at that point, previous owners) buried him in a pretty neat little tomb:
Blisters!
(Not pictured: All the other rubbed, raw, or blistered spots that weren't omfgMONSTERS. To be fair, this one was probably caused by heat rash and not boots.)
The best find ever.
Saturday morning as we were just setting out, we heard a weird, high-pitched noise that sounded like a mocking bird imitating a cat over and over again. We went to investigate and found, not a mocking bird, but an actual newborn kitten tangled in the long grass. We got him untangled and cooed over him (all members of the crew are cat people)...
...and then heard even more little mews from nearby. We looked through the grass and found a nest of three more kittens!
(Picture taken after we got them all untangled and put the first one back with them)
We figured mom was out hunting, so left them where they were but decided to go back and play with them later.
We went to visit at lunchtime and there was still no sign of mom, so we untangled them again and put a bandana down for them to lay on, then went back to work.
At the end of the day, we came back again to find that the kittens had moved themselves under the bandana to escape the sun, but there was still no sign of the mother. We picked the kittens up...
(My new field hat, by the way)
...and made them a little bandana tent to sleep in. By his point we were worried about the kittens and agreed to check on them again in the morning, and if they were still here with no mother, to take them in and care for them. With some misgivings, we left.
A little later on in the evening, three of us* were outside grilling hotdogs when we noticed that there were really heavy rainclouds out in the direction of the kittens. We knew we had to check on them again, so we hopped in a truck and took off. We drove through some small thunderstorms to get there and found that we'd beaten the rain, but that our flimsy tent was still over the kittens, meaning no larger cat had been by. We weren't about to leave them out alone in the storm, so I put some bandanas in one of our hand screens and we took off for Walmart to pick up kitten formula. It's worth noting that we actually took this kittens into Walmart, too, which was fun.
For the last 6 days, we've been feeding and otherwise taking care of these four tiny kittens who still haven't opened their eyes yet, and even though they sometimes wake us up in the middle of the night and otherwise make things a hassle, we have tiny baby kittens.
Forensic Anthro bonded with the one she was holding in that earlier picture, now named Magellan because he seem to have the insatiable need to explore, blind or not. Ziva has taken to the black runt, who has been named Stevie because of the way he/she plants her/his(/thon's) paws on the ground, raises thon's blind little head into the air and waves it around while mewing loudly. I'm taking two, one grey and one black, who have the temporary names of Ghost-Faced Killer and Nemo:
Of course, I won't know for sure until I take them to the vet, but I think the black one is a girl and the grey one is a guy. So, any ideas for what to name them?
[Edit] They just opened their eyes!
*One of the girls out here reminds me of nothing so much as a very boisterous Iranian Ziva from NCIS, but the other one I have no good nickname for, so she'll just get called the Forensic Anthro for now (even though Ziva is also a forensic person)