Extreme Spotlighting

Sitting in lecture yesterday we received a little bit of a shock. It was the introduction to the new field lecture, for the ecology class, and we were informed spotlighting was involved. So far so good. Then our professor, Siggy, told us about the shifts. Each of three nights (starting last night) groups of nine would go at the 7:30-9pm 11pm-1am and 3am-5am shifts. That's right- 3am. Divided by cabins, cabin 3 (my cabin) was selected for the super-late 3am shift first. Tonight I have the 7:30pm shift and Wednesday night the 11pm shift. I have to say that I was immediately crabby and tired as soon as I found out about the shifts.

Looking back it wasn't so bad. At least it did not rain for my shift- it poured for the other two. Out of the nine people per shift, groups of 3 went to three different types of forests and walked paths to look for animals. My group had the clearing, thinking that at 3am it was best to take the area where you couldn't get lost. Well... a huge field of tall grasses is easier to get lost in than you may think (or maybe you came to this conclusion before I did). My group, two good friends and I, did not actually get lost as much as we took the wrong trail. It worked just fine for our purposes though.

At about 4:30am we headed back to the starting point to collect bugs out of our giant light rig- this is when it got exciting. Brittany took one step off of the road we were walking along, in order to get to the light, and then freaked out. She was about 10 seconds away from stepping on the head of a scrub python about 4-5inches in diameter and 3 meters long. It stuck its tongue out at us and got in the angry double-S shape. We decided to play it safe and run away. The exciting end to the evening definitely made it more difficult to go back to sleep, but here I am at 10:20am. I'm guessing my whole cabin will start getting crabby around lunch time, and I don't think I'll be able to manage 'cheerful' until this weekend when this whole thing is over!

Leaftailed Gecko- it was very spiny.

Baby Boyd's Dragon. This one was about eight inches long, they get up to three feet long. About 2 seconds later our intern picked it up to hold it and pet it... he does that with just about everything in the rainforest.