Central Florida's Biologist

We woke up at 8:30, just in time to hear the power go out in our hotel room. Apparently the power company had been having trouble with a transformer and decided to shut down power to the town and fix it this morning. We took quick showers and started on our way to Ft. Davis.

Not really thinking, we stopped at a gas station on our way out of town, but the power was out there too. Fortunately, it came back on as we were getting ready to leave, so we fueled up and got breakfast at the attached Subway.

We arrived at the Davis Mountains State Park to get a campsite before making sandwiches for lunch.

After lunch we headed to town to get cell phone service. When we stopped in a parking lot, Jason noticed a large mesquite thorn in our front right tire.

Since we had time and were in a town, we figured we’d pull it out to see if it would cause a flat (better to do it while we had time to change tires than get surprised later). As soon as I pulled the thorn out of the tire, we could hear the hissing of air escaping. Jason is an expert tire changer and we came prepared, so we immediately got to work on changing the tire.

With the new tire in place, we stopped at Herbert’s Caboose Ice Cream Shop for Blue Bell ice cream, which you apparently can’t get in Florida.

Once we finished with our cellular needs in town, we headed back to camp to set our tents and take a nap.

Before getting to our site to start road cruising, we got some Asian food in town at Wok N’ Roll. The food was very tasty (for Americanized Chinese food, Hollis was hoping for something more Chinese), but it took quite a while to make. And yes, they did have rock and roll playing in the restaurant.

On our way out, we opened our fortune cookies, which had some great fortunes in them.

We started cruising at 8, but the sun was long from setting, so we didn’t expect to find snakes out yet. Once got dark, Jason dropped off Hollis, Rhett, and I to walk road cuts while he road cruised.

Despite several hours of driving and hiking, we didn’t find any snakes, although we found some fun wildlife. We found a juvenile rodent (I’m not sure what kind) squealing in the brush, which appeared to have been abandoned.

Then we spotted a Great Plains Narrowmouthed Toad (Gastrophryne olivacea) sitting on a rock.

Our last, and most exciting, find was a Banner-tailed Kangaroo Rat, the largest species of kangaroo rat in Texas (and one that none of us had ever seen before).

We finally called it a night at 1AM, disappointed in our first night searching this trip finding no snakes.