I'm on hiatus from Hamilton Pool Nature Preserve right now, during the slow season, but I will go back to thirty or forty hours weekly with Travis County's Parks Department this March -- in addition to my regular gig at a local arts store running their framing department. This is far and away my favorite job, because I get paid to hike a nature preserve, and also a larger, public-use wildland park (Reimer's Ranch). At Hamilton Pool, our primary mission is caring for the uplands which harbor an endangered bird's nesting grounds. Secondarily, the Pool itself draws the visitors -- who pay $10 a car to enter -- and that helps pay for our conservation and education missions.
Here's the Pool. You can see some of its grandeur in these photos, but there's no replacement for being there. When I'm alone down there on patrol, I often get the same sense of awe I feel when I look at the nighttime skies and ponder the vastness of the Universe -- only in the Pool, I think about the millions of years which went into its formation:
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... and here are some of the denizens of the Preserve.
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A bevy of cotton-mouths (or water moccasins, depending on where you're from)
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Juvenile Diamond-backed water snake at top; close-up of an adult, lower.
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Copperhead
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An Ironclad beetle
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Banana spider
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A conclave of turtles, with a close-up of a Yellow-eared slider on the bottom.
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Unidentified lizard
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Giant swallowtail butterfly
More to come ...
Thanks for the pictures! Nature is my Cathedral. Solitary
Thanks. Makes me long for summer.
This is beautiful!
and here I was going to brag about having a hooker on the corner of the street next to my office......you sumbitch.
This has been my dream job since I was a little girl and people would give me funny looks for saying I wanted to be an Ornithologist when I grew up. You lucky bastard. :)
More flora and fauna:
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Red-striped racer
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Same species, different individual, crawling through a porous stalactite.
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One of the ten or twelve catfish which live in the Pool
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Not sure of the species, but a beautiful little frog.
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A big black fly -- again, species unknown to me. Any entomologists, or others knowledgeable about these critters, your help is appreciated.
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Tree-snake
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Adult Diamond-backed water-snake
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The largest of the many fossils we have in the preserve -- my hand for scale showing how large ancient ammonites could grow.
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Coral snake
Some of the hiking I get to do:
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The Pedernales River
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Quote from: aitm on December 12, 2013, 05:20:36 PM
and here I was going to brag about having a hooker on the corner of the street next to my office......you sumbitch.
That's nothing, man. My office is itself full of whores
Male and female.