Here's a few (very few) of the photos that Mike and I took!
This trip was a blast. We went to go see the synchronous fireflies -- did you know that one of the only places in the world with synchronous fireflies is the East Coast of the USA? I'm fortunate enough to live (at the moment) a couple hours from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and so this summer some of us bundled into the department's vehicle and took a trip.
Boy, was it ever an adventure! We spent some of the day sightseeing in the park; I'm from Wisconsin, and we don't have mountains there. We had glaciers that flattened the landscape. We walked to the top of Clingman's Dome and spent some time looking around in awe. Then we went to the Sugarlands Visitor Center, which has an incredible little natural history exhibit (in the photo grid below, I've got pictures of the displays on ichneumonid wasps and carrion beetles). My professor's been there before, many times, and is still wowed by it every time. He kept saying "holy shit, they should compile these into a book and sell them. I would buy ten. Holy shit" so, when we got back to South Carolina, I did some poking around and ended up emailing the park to see if they knew who had done the drawings.
They got back to me the next day and said here's the artist (John D Dawson, who is still living and has a website), and they're from a book called A Naturalist's Notebook by Robert G Johnsson. So naturally I didn't tell Mike this and I went looking around some more to find copies for sale. I found three (3) copies in about two (2) hours of searching; all of them were for sale on Ebay, and the prices? Well. One of them, used, was about $12. One of them, new, was about $60. And one of them, used, was $75. Clearly, the seller of the first one either didn't know what the others were listed for or just really wanted to get theirs out. I bought two of them, one for me and one for Mike, and when they arrived I handed him one. He was blown away, of course. And when I told him it was a gift, he looked like a kid on Christmas day. "No more gifts for a while," he said, "....but I'll take this one."
And, of course, we went to see the fireflies. So, according to Mike, if you want to see them "officially" (through the park's program), you have to enter a lottery. If you win, you show up on your assigned day and they shuttle you in to a place with a whole bunch of other people and then shuttle you out after a couple hours. Well... fuck that. The trails are open 24/7, and Mike's got a spot he's been going for years. We got to sit on a huge log and watch the fireflies for hours. It really was incredible. And then we had a 1, 1.5 mile hike back out, in the dark. That was pretty cool, too. We saw some epic snails and millipedes.
...and what would a museum trip be, without some kind of adventure? ("Cicada," I hear you say, "isn't all this already an adventure?" Shh.) On the way back to the field station we were staying at, at about 1 in the morning, the vehicle got a flat tire. A really rather impressively flat tire. Fortunately, one of us had taken his own car and met us at the trailhead, so Mike told the three of us in the vehicle with him to go back in the other car, he'd fix the tire and come along shortly.
Right, like we're leaving him alone in the middle of the woods with no cell service at 1 in the fuckin' morning, to change a tire on a Chevy Tahoe, on his own. So I stayed with him and helped a little (really it was kind of a one-man job for the most part) and luckily nothing fell on him. As an aside, the spare tire system on the Tahoe is really a thing of great beauty and incredible user-hostility. Wondrously simple and elegant. Horrifically difficult to use. You've got to assemble a long wrench-like thing, put it through a hole in the bumper, get it to a matching point on the spare tire winch-down system, and connect the pieces to actually winch the thing. Sounds simple enough, yeah? Well, now factor in that you can't actually guide the wrench thing other than moving the end you're holding, way up there, because if you put your hand up under the car to guide the bits together then 1) you can't finagle the wrench by the bumper and 2) your hand blocks the piece from connecting. So it took us probably about 20-30 minutes just to access the spare tire. Once we'd got that done, the rest of the process went by fairly uneventfully, thank goodness.
Here's a few (very few) of the photos that Mike and I took!