A snake in the grass

So here are a few more pictures from the wetland project. This field of yellow flowers used to be a sod farm, believe it or not. Now it is managed by the DNR. It's supposed to be a restored peatland, but instead it's basically an upland community with peaty-soils. They have drained it to the point of no return. The water table is way below the surface. So not such a wet-wetland. But these yellow flowers are pretty! They were hard to walk through though, since they were about chest high. These pictures were all taken in Chisago County, MN.



There were a couple of ditches running around this land though, and they had some standing water. We found this awesome hognose snake stalking a toad (they are toad specialists) along the ditch edge. Look at it's cool eyes! Their main defense is to hiss really load and flatten out their neck so that they look like a cobra. If that doesn't work they roll over, open their mouth wide, shit all over, and pretend to be dead. Luckily, this guy wasn't so stressed out that he had to play dead. I'd have felt bad about that.



It was a pretty big snake. I'd say at least two feet long.




here is the LUCKY little toad that was spared by our interrupting of his afternoon foraging. By now, he'd definitely be snake food!



We left for this trip on Wednesday morning and we worked all day Wednesday and Thursday. We camped along the St. Croix river. Since I'm the only girl I get my own gigantic tent all to myself. I think I need to invest in a sleeping mat however, as the ground was not kind to my back!

One place we went was an old tamarack swamp that was chock full of nastiness. It was a meandering half mile hike through soggy, hummocky, boot-removing, mosquito-infested, Lyme-disease riddled, Black Bear inhabited HELL. I was constantly stuck with both legs sunk in knee deep mud, cursing and pissed off. I fell into nettles facefirst. I scraped my hands and knees on trees. My boot got a rip in it and filled with swamp water. Did I mention the ticks? It was exhausting. Have you ever seen one of those movies where there is a horse going down in quicksand and it struggles and struggles, but just sinks deeper? That was me. In the end I was so frustrated and sore and upset that I was actually crying. That is what the tamarack swamp did to me. Also, it was about 90 Fahrenheit. Poor Kevin was already carrying his 70lb pack of equipment and then on top of it he took some of my stuff to help me along. It was so awful. Especially since Brad and Kevin were not having NEARLY such a difficult time of it, and were carrying much more equipment. Oh well. Done now. I only had one tick on me after all that falling down. Kevin had SIX and Brad had FIVE!! That's a damned lot of ticks, man.

Jillian is flying in on Sunday! (YAY!!) and we're going to have a day of exploring downtown Minneapolis. Even though I've been here 2 years, I've never gone downtown. The twin cities are about 8o miles from Mankato. Then on the way back, we'll stop in Milwaukee, catch the ferry to Muskegon, and visit family on the way back to Michigan for Crystal's wedding! So exciting. I can't wait. I hope the wedding goes perfectly!