Coffea robusta

Did you know that there actually is a book called Geocaching for Dummies? Well anyway, I liked the challenge of adding a book to the elephants hands and this is what I came up with. Hope you like it.

Wilson's Warbler, you bet. You had a mourning dove in hand? Schweet!

Hey a comic strip would be awesome. "The Adventures of Signal and Static!" Ummmm......well I may be an idiot but I just realized that these little green smilies.... are frogs with an antenna on top. Doh! And this whole time I thought they were turtles. Edited spelling.

Don't have the money for a PDA. But got an ipod as a gift earlier this year and I've just started to play with putting cache info on it. It works ok. It is kinda a pain to save each cache web site as a txt and then transfer all those onto the ipod. But then again, I'm not a speed cacher so I only need to put a few on at a time.

Yep me too. Cheapo fishing vest from Longs Drugs. It's got room to carry all the other little things I like to bring, small field guide, various containers and bags for natures "gifts" (bugs, scat, owl pellets). I usually have a field lens too. Oooo and I love cargo pants. Lotsa pockets.

I guess we can't

can we do image sigs?

my sig

It's just a quickie. Artichoke flowers are so prety in themselves I figured, why change it too much? Edit changed pics from thistle to artichokes.

I liked your idea about the compas. This is pretty simple but it's clean and I like it.

Well, I am hardly an expert. I'll go with mustelid scat, sure. Here in the west are fishers are normally found in the higher elevations. Another source I have tells me the pressence of porcupine quills is a sure sign of fisher poop. Sounds painful. And you're right about racoons displaying on a log, rock or railing. Our gray foxes will do the same. Quote from a pamphlet I have: Bonus picture of raccoon scat: And I just had to add this one: Ok not taken while I was hunting caches. I took this over the summer while bird banding.

And most mammals are active at night. Any good tracking guide is also going to go into scat. Animal tracking is not just about looking for trcks, it's about looking for animal sign as well. Fur left on a branch, the way the grass is bent, and the scat they leave behind. These are all clues to who has been where. Peterson's makes a pretty good guide. There are others too. A Field Guide to Animal Tracks (from Amazon.com) You can also find online guides. Beartracker's Animal Scat page LOL check out the human scat! eeeewwwww! Tracker Trail Well actually they don't all go in the middle of the trail. Some animals like to display their scat, like foxes and racoons. It marks territory. Other animals bury their scat, like Mt. Lions. Some animals use particular places to do their "duty", called latrines. It's hard for me to get a size of the scat you have pictured, but the leaves give me some clue. My guess is a fox or racoon. I know gray foxes leave similar scat but generally have a little twist at the end of it. I'm not sure where you are. You may have red foxes too. It might be some help to know what is in the scat. Oftentimes you can identify bits of bone, fur or insects in the scat as a clue to what kind of animal it is. For example, river otter poop will likely have fish scales and smell fishy. Identifying tracks near the scat can help too. After I ran into the fox I described at the begining of this thread, I was excited to find some extremely fresh scat a little ways further down the trail. It was still warm, and had a smell to it. It was about the size a mid sized animal like a fox would make, was long, tubular, brown, and pointed at the ends, with green grass at one end (either partially digested or thrown up). My first thought was the fox had made it and thus was a chance to view fresh gray fox poo up close and personal. However, it had that even consistency, smell, and lack of fur or other bits so typical of domestic dog-fed-on-dog-food look. So I changed my identification to domestic dog. And as there were homes nearby, not a bad guess. Good luck on making the field guide AnutieWeasel. Have fun! Keep in mind though that scat will be different depending on age of animal, age of scat, and what the animal has been eating! People that love to look at scat are some of the most interesting people. Bonus pic: What animal made this? hint: Yes they do go in the woods.

teast

Sweet! That looks like a great-horned owl. I found one dead the other day on the side of the road. Good condition, pretty fresh. I collected him for the wildlife meusem at Humboldt State. Funny thing was they said great-horned owls get hit by cars quite a bit and they had plenty. Thanks but no thanks. They did take the meadowlark I collected on the same day though. [] Go figure.

Lot's of wildlife in SoCal. I used to live down there and I've run into coyote, bobcat, rattlesnakes, mule deer, just to name a few. All manner of birds and lizards. Even urban LA has coyote (as was attested to earlier in this thread). The hang out in the refugia of steep canyonds that haven't been developed yet. We had a guy from the university up here doing grad work on them a while back.

Rite-in-the-rain is good stuff. Many of the people I know in outdoorsy professions use them (myself included). The sell many prebound notebooks of various sizes, three-ring binder paper, as well as bulk paper for a laser printer or copier. I've never used the national geographic paper but I just noticed that they say it can be used with an inkjet printer. Might be worth a try. Don't know about the other stuff. I think all these types of paper are "cloth" paper that have been soaked in some kind of waterproofing.

Hmmmm....well public park and public access is not prohibited. But suggests you stay on trails. Look at mapquest it looks like this isn't too far off the road. I say go for it. But I like that your note suggests that we be respectful of the hunters (and all other park users for that matter). That's why parks are public!

Just how the heck do I post a pic to this forum? Edit: Nevermind I figured it out.

Ok Okieduo. My first attempt at doing an avatar in this forum. But I came up with this. It's kinda boring but fits the basic design you wanted. Maybe I can come up with something a little more exciting. Let's see how you like this one: and yet another one These are already resized to 75 pixel width.

Sorry if this thread is a repeat. I was just curious about it. I haven't geocaching in a while and this last week I got back out there again. I was thinking today that I must be one of the slowest geocachers. I generally have a pair of binoculars with me and will stop to look at the smallest thing. I'm a birder too and I like the way geocaching will inroduce me to new areas for birding. Sometimes I see some cool stuff while I am out there. Today I saw a number of birds. The highlight was probably seeing an American kestrel eat a mouse. And watching as some rodent was just yanking down stalks of grass and other vegetation. I'd see movement in the bushes and something obviously pulling on stalks of grass. Oh and a nice close encounter with a gray fox too. All this and only logged 2 caches today. LOL. Well what do you guys see? What's your coolest wildlife story?

Seems like new caches around here never go long without being found. It is true that cache density is highest in more urban areas and most caches are quick grab n go kind. I always seem to take a while caching. That's probably I'm busy enjoying nature. Geeze I read a recent log of someone complaining that a cache was in an hard to reach area. The funny thing was the cache description warned of the hazards and the terrain was a 4. Duh! They had the nerve to tell the hider to place the cache in a more accessible area. There are tons of easy caches out there and relatively few of the extreme ones.

23) Take time to smell the roses.....the cache might be under that rose bush!

LOL ROFL LMAO

Yum, well...I like coffee and Coffea robusta is the scientific binomial for the common coffee plant. Coffea arabica is the better tasting bean however.

I think this guy has the best idea. It is public, it is friendly, and it puts the best side of geocahers forward. No need to stoop to this lady's level. If I lived in Phoenix, I would help organize this event. Individuals have no right ot dictate how others use public land. If she has a problem with how people use public land she should raise the issue through the poper public forum. That's why we live in democracy. There is no way really to change this woman, or make her stop. But a public CITO event, that shows geocahers in the best light, will at least make her seem like a looney to others.