Mammoth Expectations

So I have been told that since I no longer work on the third largest naval base in the world and now that I am at more liberty to share my stories that I should bring my blog back. There are several fantastic tales from my time in Indiana and if you ever should find yourself sharing a pint with me I will be more than happy to tell them but they will not appear here in my blog. I have shifted from military base work to living and working within a national park and field work never ceases to provide a plethora of tales to share which makes day to day work anything but boring. I will try and share these stories as accurately as I remember them.  

The Celtic band Gaelic storm has a song whose chorus passes along the message “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story” but I am more inclined to align myself with Mr. Sherlock Holmes who in all his wisdom stated “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”. This is the spirit in which I will continue to write my blog. 

I know that I have been working here in Mammoth cave National park for a few weeks now but I still want to start back all the way from the beginning. Before I start spinning tales I would like to provide a background into the work that I do here. I am currently working for a graduate student from the University of Kentucky whose thesis is concerning the roost selection of the Northern long-eared bat throughout the year. The Northern long-eared bat was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act only a few months ago. There is knowledge of the habitats used by these bats during the summer when they are giving birth and raising their young (approximately May 15 – August 5). The time after August 15 until the bats go into hibernation however is still largely a mystery. We are capturing Northern long-eared bats using mist nets and harp traps and outfitting them with tiny radio transmitters so that we can follow them after we release them. We are then tracking these bats to determine what kinds of habitats they are using. This information may be used in the future to help protect the habitat types we find them to be using in order to protect the future of the species. A little sciency and pretty geeky but it’s exciting work to me.

I don’t want to leave a novel as my first blog post back in action so I will just share a few stories from my fist two days of work for now. As a I said I am living inside Mammoth Cave National Park and little did I know that they have a 3 car ferry that you have to take across the Green River in order to get to where I am living or drive an hour around out of your way to use the nearest bridge. This ferry runs from 6:00 Am until 9:55 Pm. Anyone who knows me knows that punctuality is not always my strongest suite. Well the first night I got a little lost between Lexington Kentucky where I had to fill out my employment paperwork and the park. Driving at night not really knowing where I am going and just hoping that I find it before the ferry leaves was quite the adventure and in true Tyler style at 9:51 I pulled my car onto the ferry with a huge sigh of relief.

I thought that barely catching the ferry was just me getting the first day jitters out of the system but apparently there was one more trick up the parks sleeve for me. As I entered the park I saw a coyote cross the road and a bat fly over my car which I took to be great signs of welcoming me to my new home. When working with and handling any kind of wildlife you do everything within your power to make sure that you do not inflict pain or kill any of the animals. This summer I have spent 4 months handling easily over a hundred individual bats without any injury and I can still say I have not harmed any while handling them. This being said a poor red bat decided to dive bomb the grill of my car on my way into the park my first night. I didn’t realize this until the next day when I found it dead in the grill of my car with my new boss that I just met standing right next to me. Needless to say I kind of freaked out that I had just killed the exact creature that I handle on a regular basis. My boss tried to reassure me that it happens sometimes and I took this as her just being nice and doubted its truth. We bagged it and took it to one of the national park natural resources professionals so that they could take samples from the bat. As soon as he saw the bat he said “Another grilled bat?” so I didn’t feel quite as bad knowing that the bats in the park have a history of doing this and it wasn’t just me. Still quite the omen so star the season. Despite this omen though I was not the first person at this job to have to go to urgent care or the emergency room as I was at the last job. The first night of work one of my new coworkers managed to cut himself to the bone with an extremely sharp knife while tearing down a harp trap. I am glad to report though that a few stitches and antibiotics later he is as good as new.

Well this is probably more than anyone wants to read in one sitting so I will stop here but I carry a large antennae when tracking the bats and have heard people whisper all kinds of things and even flat out ask us if we are ghost hunters, if we are searching for cell phone service, tracking bears through the caves, trying to find t.v. signal and even had one homeowner think we wanted to look at her trees to make baseball bats out of them so I hope this clears up a little what I do when I am working with the creatures of the night.

The Speed of Life

I have learned over the years, and I am sure my professors who have had to read my work will agree,  that I am what they call a stream of conscious writer meaning that I have little regard for order, structure, and proper punctuation and just let the thoughts and ideas racing through my mind hit the page as they come. I am sure that this blog will follow this same trend as I try and take thoughts and put them into snippets for the blog. I will get back to telling stories about this summer and the adventures of striking it out alone in the big city of Newberry later but today this is my food for thought post inspired partially by my experiences and partially by the TV show “Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds”.

                 It takes 50 milliseconds for our eyes to blink and it takes 150 milliseconds for our brain to process an image our eyes see. What these numbers mean is that there is a delay and that many things happen right before our eyes that our brain cannot process quickly enough to allow us to comprehend. For example when an explosion occurs we see the explosion and the debris associated with it but we do not see the shockwave. The shockwave is not “invisible” because it is impossible to see air molecules being displaced as many would assume, I mean air this invisible substance all around us who would believe that the movements of its molecules could be seen by anything. The shockwave is “invisible” to us simply because it all occurs at a rate too fast for our brain to comprehend but when filmed with a high speed camera this “invisible” force can suddenly be seen clear as day.

In my experiences with nature the speed of life can create true enjoyment and utter frustration. I love when I get a chance encounter with wildlife whether it be walking through the woods or from the seat of a car. There is such a beauty to watching a porcupine slowly waddle around on the ground or sway in a tree top eating to his hearts content. And time seems to slow down when you watch a bald eagle take off from the tree tops, circle, and then dive to the water presumable grabbing a fish before heading back to its roost, I was lucky enough to watch this happen from a boat at work last week. But then there are these moments, these encounters that happen in the blink of an eye that you wish could and would last longer that time would slow down. I am of course not talking about encounters with animals like turtles those you can usually make last for as long as you desire. I am talking about the bald eagles that swoop out of trees right above your head and disappear into the sky before you fully comprehend what just happened, or the bobcat that flashes across the forest road right in front of you as you drive along. I know I saw a bobcat because the size of the blur and the way that it moved were undeniably that of a bobcat but my eyes were only able to capture it as a blur. Those are the moments you wish you could slow down. My brother recently asked me “What do you mean you “think” you saw a bear today?” My explanation was that I saw the back flank of something black that fit the size profile of a bear disappear into the woods. It all happened so fast that I could not rationally think through what I was seeing as it happened but I know that what I saw couldn't be anything but a bear.

This all leads me to the question that I will leave you with. If you think about your experiences you will have some understanding of how this delay in the brain processing the image we see can feel. We have all hat that moment driving down the road and there is nothing on the side of the road and suddenly there is a deer standing there and  startles you because it seems to have just appeared out of thin air. My question is how much of the information that the eye takes in between the images processed by the brain do we in some way retain. The harder I tried to visualize what I saw when I saw the bear the more I seemed to grasp details that I know weren’t processed in that first initial thought of I am seeing a bear. Some may say that our brains create details based in expectation to fill the gaps between the images which may be true but think back to an experience you have had  that happened at the speed of life and I assure you that the more you think about it the more details will become clear to you. Is our brain capable of background processing what we don’t initially see and providing us some detail to draw upon when we look back?

First Cast Into New Waters

                     At the request of my friends and family I am starting this blog to tell the tall tales that this summer in Newberry provides. Before I get into any of the meat of this blog I will start with a map of Michigan showing just where Newberry is located since the most common question I get is "where the heck are you".

         As this summer got underway I realized that moving out on your own in the middle of the U.P. is a process that provides an excess of entertaining stores which I plan to share through this blog. I also had the realization that my job (I will have post at some point describing exactly what is I do) makes me an ear to the stories of many others including fishermen and everyone knows that they are skilled in the art of spinning tales. I have grown up with a soft spot for story telling with greats such as Donald Davis telling me stories (via tape and CD) until I could repeat them almost word for word. Still to this day I do not pass up the chance to listen to radio shows that feature story telling or the special occasions where I am able to attend a story telling festival. I don't know if I will ever be up on one of those stages instead of in the audience but just in case I ever do this blog is also a selfish endeavor so that I will have a written record to remind me of the stories I have to draw from. I will do my best in this blog to provide accurate portrayals of real events as they happened while still being entertaining and taking a few of the liberties afforded to fishermen. If you double check this blog is authored by Tyler Walters not R.J. Walters and since this is the case misspelled words and grammatical atrocities are par for the course. In addition to the written word I will try and include photos and if I can figure out how to I will include a list of all of the wildlife encounters I have throughout the summer. I hope you bear with me in this my first attempt at anything like this but since I work for the DNR now I can assure you it will be good enough for government work.