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Best office ever [pic-heavy]

Started by Thumpalumpacus, December 12, 2013, 01:38:52 PM

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Thumpalumpacus

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:





... and here are some of the denizens of the Preserve.  






A bevy of cotton-mouths (or water moccasins, depending on where you're from)



Juvenile Diamond-backed water snake at top; close-up of an adult, lower.


Copperhead


An Ironclad beetle


Banana spider



A conclave of turtles, with a close-up of a Yellow-eared slider on the bottom.


Unidentified lizard


Giant swallowtail butterfly

More to come ...
<insert witty aphorism here>

Solitary

Thanks for the pictures!  Nature is my Cathedral. Solitary
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

stromboli


PickelledEggs


aitm

and here I was going to brag about having a hooker on the corner of the street next to my office......you sumbitch.
A humans desire to live is exceeded only by their willingness to die for another. Even god cannot equal this magnificent sacrifice. No god has the right to judge them.-first tenant of the Panotheust

Smartmarzipan

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. :)
Legi, Intellexi, Condemnavi.

"Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die." ~Anon

Inter arma enim silent leges

Thumpalumpacus

More flora and fauna:


Red-striped racer


Same species, different individual, crawling through a porous stalactite.


One of the ten or twelve catfish which live in the Pool


Not sure of the species, but a beautiful little frog.


A big black fly -- again, species unknown to me.  Any entomologists, or others knowledgeable about these critters, your help is appreciated.


Tree-snake


Adult Diamond-backed water-snake


The largest of the many fossils we have in the preserve -- my hand for scale showing how large ancient ammonites could grow.


Coral snake

Some of the hiking I get to do:





The Pedernales River
<insert witty aphorism here>

Mandingo

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.