Back Down South

Following our New Jersey and Delaware sites, we blasted through our three sites in Maryland and Virginia with relative ease. But again I was stung by wasps, twice, at our Virginia site on the Rappahannock River. This time it was by a paper wasp, from the large nest which you can see in the photo below (I took the photo after I was stung). The stings from these hurt nowhere near as much as the one I got the previous day, and look nowhere as bad either. I wish I knew what sort of wasp it was that stung me at Estell Manor, but I only caught a fleeting glimpse of it as it buzzed away!

The paper wasps (Polistes sp.) which stung me!

We had Monday off as Tim, the Park Ranger at Mackay Island Wildlife Refuge, couldn't take us out in the boat until Tuesday. So we decided to go to Kitty Hawk, a small town in North Carolina, famous for being the the town right by the huge sand dunes where the Wright brothers performed the first controlled powered flight. The main attraction there was the memorial to the Wright brothers, which was pretty cool. It was situated on the actual site where they made their first flights, which were marked out by boulders. They made four flights on December 17, 1904; the first three just 37, 53, and 61 metres, respectively, but the final one was really impressive, at a whopping 260 metres! The memorial also had a nice museum with exact replicas of both their glider and plane which made the first flight. We also checked out what is supposedly the largest sand dune on the east coast, which was pretty cool, but had nothing on the dunes at Mason Bay on Stewart Island.

Hangliding off the top of the dune

The next day we were up at 5 am for an early start at Mackay Island, where we have three sites. We had been dreading this day since the start of the trip due to the waist deep marsh water in some places, high humidity and heat, and the strong possibility of close encounters with deadly and agressive cottonmouth snakes. As it turned out it was actually a pretty easy day. We didn't see any snakes, the weather was cool and the forecast thunderstorms stayed away. We stayed in a hotel literally right beside our final site in Georgetown, South Carolina, nailed that site early the next morning and then had a boring thirteen hour drive back home. So the trip was ultimately a success; some useful data was collected for all of our research projects, we arrived back in Baton Rouge two days earlier than planned, and I even managed to add another two states (West Virginia and Pennsylvania) to the list of those I have visited, bring the total now to 21. Classes start back at LSU on August 20, but before then we have our six sites in Louisiana left to do!