Bugs

My mom has been a great commenter on my blog so I'm going to answer her question about bugs. It hasn't been too buggy yet actually. It's still too cold for most of the annoying insects like mosquitoes and black flies. In a month or two they will come out in full force so much so that we would need to be wearing nets around our heads! So we are very lucky to be on an earlier team! Today it was slightly warmer and I swear more bugs started to come out. There were some little gnats and some bubble bees. We also saw some pretty caterpillars. However the bugs we've seen the most are the arachnids...

Arachnids are the eight legged creatures such as spiders and ticks. They are not insects (these have 6 legs). I've seen all kinds of spiders, some of which have pretty patterns on them. When we were on the shore the first day we saw a lot of black spiders which scurried under the rocks. Similarly today we saw lots of little black spiders which scurried under the grasslands... I'm not sure I've ever seen so many spiders... but at least none of them were on us.

However what were on us today (and many other days) were ticks! These are wood ticks which don't carry Lyme disease and are actually quite easy to see. I've gotten used to having ticks as I've had many on me before so I don't really freak out when I find one. I've also been the designated 'get this thing off me' person. I've pulled off many ticks from my teammates including one that was latched onto some one's scalp today. That was a little gross and I definitely don't like when they've latched on. We do tick checks throughout the day and a very thorough one at night. Most of the ticks we've found have been just crawling around on our pant legs. We've all learned to tuck our socks into our pants or wear long johns to help protect ourselves. Bug spray doesn't really help with ticks so we don't really bother. In total we've probably averaged about 8 ticks each!

I got a lot of ticks today when I was kneeling in the grassland testing the satellite equipment yet again. I tried for over an hour to connect the laptop to the terminal and only connected once. I had a strong signal but for some reason it would not 'register with the network.' I must have tried re-starting it 10 times and most of the time I couldn't even get the computer to recognize that the terminal was there! It was very frustrating. I'm not sure this satellite technology is the way to go forward with our Live from the Field program. It's just too much hassle and not practical. Maybe the equipment has a 'bug'. I will try one more time tomorrow... wish me luck!