Road Trip Adventure- Behind the Scenes

Last week I shared pictures, video, and information about the horseshoe crab. This week we take a behind the scenes look at the adventure. While the trip to Delaware wasn’t as tedious as a National Geographic photo shoot (they might spend three months to get that one shot you see in the magazine), it wasn’t the figurative walk on the beach that it literally appeared to be.

Welcome to the second smallest state!
(Delaware Business Times)

The biggest question mark I had to deal with was weather. The forecast was for thunderstorms. Fortunately my daughter and I dodged those. I wasn’t about to head to the beach during a thunderstorm. Your happiness, gentle reader, is not worth my life. It was cloudy that night, and I wasn’t sure if it was the moon itself or just the tides associated with the moon that draws the crabs to the beach. Apparently, it’s the tides and not moonlight. 

Rain was our closest companion during the weekend. I was hoping to get daylight shots at noon’s high tide the Saturday we were there. However, threatening clouds were on the horizon and with more thunderstorms in the forecast I decided to bag it. We managed to get another trip to the beach at low tide, where a few stragglers were going back out to sea. There were also a few dead crabs below the wrack line, some birds, and a shopping bag full of garbage. Saturday night rain kept me awake and at some point during the night the tent decided it was too wet to hold the water back any longer.

And they were right (Pintrest)

Camping in the rain can be a miserable experience, but our second closest companion, at least while we were in camp, was the mosquitoes. They helped me set up the tent by encouraging me to do it faster. They even managed to get inside. They got in the car. They visited me in the bathroom. They were undaunted by the rain. I learned how foolish I was to believe that they lost their taste for me over the years. East Coast mosquitoes will surely beat West Coast mosquitoes in a street fight any day.

Business was booming at the 24 hour buffet
(End Times News)

With rain, you are sure to have humidity. My hair is too short to get frizzy, but that wouldn’t bother me. The bother was driving into camp, to the beach, and back to camp without being able to see anything. Nothing I did could stop the humidity from fogging up the windshield. If it wasn’t the foggy windshield on Friday night it was the actually foggy fog. How humid was it? I had a box of graham crackers (we had raw smores because of the rain) stored in my cooler (no ice) and the cardboard still managed to get soggy, despite the outside (and inside) of the cooler staying out of the rain. I’ve never seen humidity like it.

All this complaining is to remind you that fieldwork has its discomforts. Even though all I did this time was observation, we do this in all conditions. Always keeping safety in mind, research and fieldwork go on despite nasty weather. Obviously, sometimes conditions make it impossible to get the job done. I can’t count frog eggs in the rain because the surface ripples make it impossible to see any eggs below. I won’t be pulling invasive weeds when there’s a foot of snow on the ground. Sometimes conditions interfere with natural processes we’re trying to observe. Insects won’t be around much on a windy day. A cool, cloudy day will keep reptiles away. So we wait. And that’s why your National Geographic picture is three months in the making.