April 3rd

Nice day - Rainy night.

We were joined today by Christy Johnson Hughes and her husband Chris from the USFWS. They accompanied John and Tom in more field testing of equipment. Field tests were beset by technical problems today, one of the other transmitters got activated (possibly bouncing around on rough roads) and it took a hour or two to figure out why we had infinite range on one of the receivers. One of our two way radios has a range problem and crystals truck got scratched by a antenna bouncing around on a rough road.

Daily transmitter/scouting exercises were halted at 5pm due to stormy weather. Last forecast we heard was calling for hail tonight........

A search route covering the eastern 1/2 of our five mile coverage radius around the project was plotted and partially driven by Crystal and I. Rough terrain, it's going to take at least 70 telemetry check points to cover that area. Tomorrow we will plot a route for the west side of the ridge

This is the same overlook as in yesterdays powerline photo, just without the rain and fog.

The rain seems to have infiltrated the phone lines and our Internet connection is super tenuous. Couldn't get a connect at all last night and took a few attempts tonight.

Bat catch so far tonight has been high. It's 12:30 and we have had 7 bats including a big brown. Our species total is up to five. They appear to be hot to exit the tunnel - circling just inside the entrance waiting for breaks in the rain.

Our big excitement of the night was being used as guinea pigs to test a new lemon cake recipe. John is in charge of the official cake review, unfortunatly he seems to be sleeping right now. I'm no Julia Child, but I'll try to fill in. It got a excellent rating on flavor [8.5/10], and appearance [8/10], and rated a fair on texture [6/10] (a bit dry and dense). The 50's woman on the go combination cake/pie tin gets a [9/10] unfortunately we didn't get any pictures of that.

Hmmm, luckily the cake was better than my digital photography.