Wow I am late posting this! Sorry! Well since it is so late I will probably forget some of the stuff that we did so I am apologising for that now and if anyone has anything to include then please let me know.
We left on a Friday, with no vans so we took our personal cars. Mrs. LeJeune and Mr. Johnson left with a group that morning and Felicia and I left after lunch, headed down to Merrill, MS for our weekend trip. The group that left that morning spent the day marking Gopher Tortoise burrows.
We had a small accident on the way down and busted the grill out of my car. We still made it by that afternoon. Well that evening we were supposed to meet up with a lady from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to help with a bat study she was conduction in the Pascagoula River wetlands.
We went on a long wild goose chase! We rode for an hour and a half looking for the group we were supposed to meet. Needless to say we saw some interesting country side but no research team.
We really roughed it that night, our camping was in the Nature Conservancy office with an A/C.
Saturday morning after breakfast, we loaded up and drove down to the Audubon Center at Moss Point. They were having a wildlife festival that day. They had some wonderful speakers and great demonstrations. There was a falconer there with his red tailed hawk, we did find the bat lady that day, and there were other great booths set up with valuable information.
We went on a McCoy's Swamp tour from the Audubon center. That was a great experience. Mr. Benny McCoy is so knowledgeable of that area. He knows all the plants and animals, along with history associated with them. It is definitely worth the money.
We finally finished up and headed back to the Nature Conservancy. That night after supper, we did meet up with the bat lady and she took us out with her research team where we set up nets and waited. We were hoping the bats would fly into the nets and we
would go capture the bats, take a tissue sample so they could extract the DNA, and mark them, then release the bats. This did not happen. We started around 5:00pm when we put the nets up, we got back in the car at 12:00am without catching a bat. We did learn a lot on the trip and had fun. Of course we were hungry,so at nearly 1:00am, we popped a pizza in the oven and enjoyed eating it.
Sunday morning after all the showers, breakfast, loading our cars, and cleaning, we headed out. For the trip home we took a detour to the Wolf River, just north of Pass Christian, MS. We rented canoes and spent a couple hours paddling the river. This was a great ending to our trip. We picked up trash along the way, stopped for lunch, and just had a great time on the water.
One thing I failed to mention earlier in this post is, Felicia, my wife, was going on eight months pregnant during this trip. She managed the trip very well I would have to say.
This was a wonderful coast trip, and we enjoyed our last real outing for the
semester and the last trip we will have with Mr. Johnson as a ECEC sponsor. We will try to get him to go on some other trips with us in the upcoming years.
We left on a Friday, with no vans so we took our personal cars. Mrs. LeJeune and Mr. Johnson left with a group that morning and Felicia and I left after lunch, headed down to Merrill, MS for our weekend trip. The group that left that morning spent the day marking Gopher Tortoise burrows.
We had a small accident on the way down and busted the grill out of my car. We still made it by that afternoon. Well that evening we were supposed to meet up with a lady from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to help with a bat study she was conduction in the Pascagoula River wetlands.
We went on a long wild goose chase! We rode for an hour and a half looking for the group we were supposed to meet. Needless to say we saw some interesting country side but no research team.
We really roughed it that night, our camping was in the Nature Conservancy office with an A/C.
Saturday morning after breakfast, we loaded up and drove down to the Audubon Center at Moss Point. They were having a wildlife festival that day. They had some wonderful speakers and great demonstrations. There was a falconer there with his red tailed hawk, we did find the bat lady that day, and there were other great booths set up with valuable information.
We went on a McCoy's Swamp tour from the Audubon center. That was a great experience. Mr. Benny McCoy is so knowledgeable of that area. He knows all the plants and animals, along with history associated with them. It is definitely worth the money.We finally finished up and headed back to the Nature Conservancy. That night after supper, we did meet up with the bat lady and she took us out with her research team where we set up nets and waited. We were hoping the bats would fly into the nets and we
would go capture the bats, take a tissue sample so they could extract the DNA, and mark them, then release the bats. This did not happen. We started around 5:00pm when we put the nets up, we got back in the car at 12:00am without catching a bat. We did learn a lot on the trip and had fun. Of course we were hungry,so at nearly 1:00am, we popped a pizza in the oven and enjoyed eating it.Sunday morning after all the showers, breakfast, loading our cars, and cleaning, we headed out. For the trip home we took a detour to the Wolf River, just north of Pass Christian, MS. We rented canoes and spent a couple hours paddling the river. This was a great ending to our trip. We picked up trash along the way, stopped for lunch, and just had a great time on the water.
One thing I failed to mention earlier in this post is, Felicia, my wife, was going on eight months pregnant during this trip. She managed the trip very well I would have to say.
This was a wonderful coast trip, and we enjoyed our last real outing for the
semester and the last trip we will have with Mr. Johnson as a ECEC sponsor. We will try to get him to go on some other trips with us in the upcoming years.
