The hills are alive...blah blah blah blah blaah blaaaaah...

About once a week I get to leave the dim confines of my office and drive up to Palomar Mountain. I spend the whole day looking for butterflies! Me and the rest of the survey team are specifically searching for an extremely rare endangered butterfly, the Laguna Mountain Skipper. We think their flight season is almost over (sightings have tapered off a bit), but I thought I'd post some pictures of some of the butterflies - and other things - I've encountered on the mountain. Enjoy!

Here's the Laguna Mountain Skipper. It's about the size of your thumbnail, maybe a little bigger. There's a look-alike species that is also present, just to try to fool us; but I've been scoring 100's on my LMS tests, so I think I've got that problem licked.

See that little white dot on one of the leaflets? That's a skipper egg. The butterfly will land on horkelia (the host plant pictured here), curl her abdomen around the underside of the leaf, and deposit one egg, maybe another one on a neighboring leaf. They're kind of hard to find, and each individual lays only maybe 100-200 eggs before dying. Most of the eggs are parasitized by wasps, or grazed by cattle when they eat the plant. It's tough being a skipper, and I'm surprised any of them make it to adulthood!

This is a funereal duskywing; there were a lot out this week but they moved very fast and were hard to photograph.

Here's a lupine blue - there were a ton of blues out last time I visited the mountain, and there are a bunch of different types. They are some of my favorites! They're still relatively small, a bit larger than the skipper (some of them).

This is a Melissa blue, which hasn't been documented on the mountain until now. I took this picture because I thought the butterfly was really pretty!

This Mylitta crescent is quite a bit bigger than the other butterflies pictured; kind of mid-sized. There are a lot of larger butterflies on the mountain - we've seen monarchs, admirals, and swallowtails. This one just happened to stay still long enough for me to get a picture of it!

Sick of butterflies? I came across this Southern Pacific rattlesnake last time I was out in the field. I also saw two green racers, but this rattler let me take several photos of him. Don't worry - I didn't almost step on him, and my camera has a very good zoom lens. This guy was easily as big around as my wrist, and I'm not sure how much more of him was in the burrow there. I'm definitely learning to watch where I walk!

I Dreamed It, I Did It!

For all of you who can't see my office in person, I have to tell you, my term-to-permanent office makeover turned out FABULOUS! Actually, the office makeover would have happened whether I got permanent status or not, but the timing just coincided. At any rate, I guess I'd been listening to the little Christopher Lowell in my head, who whispered "if you can dream it, you can do it!" over and over. I moved my furniture around to open up my small cube, and brought in a rug and lighting. I'd been using the overhead flourescent lights, but decided that they were making me crazy and I vowed to do something so I wouldn't have to turn them on ever again - they kept making this constant humming noise, and I had this light-poking stick that I kept shoving at the light to stop the buzz when it got too loud. ANYWAY, take a look at the before and after results and let me know what you think - these images are taken of the same views (match up the posters on the walls for reference):

BEFORE: creepy lighting, crowded feeling (also, these pictures were taken during Halloween when I'd decorated the room with fake spider webs).

AFTER: homey feeling, more conducive to sleep than work (everyone is jealous and is asking me to make over their offices, too).

Wow - More Good News!

A few days ago I received a memo from our head office in Portland re: conversion to career-conditional status. Know what that means? Well, I had no idea either. So I headed over to my helpful HR coordinator, Larry, who explained that this means I am no longer a term employee, but an actual PERMANENT employee with the Service! Woo hoo! So now they can't just toss me out on my arse for any old reason. This, I think, is good news and will be particularly important when I decide that I want to dye my hair bright purple. The "conditional" part of the status will drop off after my probationary year (during which time there will be no extreme hair dying), and after two years I'll be fully vested in all my retirement benefits (which have been accumulating this past year anyway). It's all very confusing, but the main point is that after a year, all bets on the appropriate color of my hair are off.

Coming up next: my fabulous term-to-permanent office makeover!!!