Little Wildlife and Rain…

It’s beautiful out here. I grouch about Travel Management a lot, but really, it is quite nice. I get to be around cool people all day, I get to chat with them, listen to fun music and interesting stories on NPR… The best part about Travel Management, though, are the interesting places I get to see that, were I on my own time, traveling around by myself, I would never get to see.

West Lake is one of those places. It wasn’t as though the lake was anything spectacular. It’s a small low area with standing water. Out here, that constitutes a lake. Considering that most of the lakes I see out here (Jacob Lake in particular) have very little, if any, standing water, West Lake was an anomaly. It looked fairly deep for a northern Arizona lake. and it was teaming with life. It was green all around the water and there were traces of fox, coyote, deer, even the ever-present cows. What I found amazing, though, were some smaller creatures.

At first I thought what I was hearing was a small stream feeding into West Lake. On closer inspection, though, I saw hundreds, maybe even thousands, of wriggling little bodies, all piled on top of each other. Tadpoles! They were amazing. Each one seemed to glow in the sunshine, reflecting the light and the water around them. I was enthralled with them. And there were so many! I had never seen so many tadpoles in one place before. It was truly an amazing sight!

It was beginning to warm up earlier this week, so much so that I was forced to break out my fan so I could sleep at night. Last night, and I have a feeling tonight, as well, the fan will be perfectly unnecessary. It’s cool outside and even raining! It’s a gentle rain, the kind that is perfect in the desert.

Unfortunately, I just washed my car…

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Tags: Arizona, frogs, Kaibab National Forest, north kaibab national forest, tadpoles, tmr, travel management, travel management roads, west lake, Wildlife

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Archaeology, Arizona, Fieldwork, Kaibab National Forest, Wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.