Wild Horses Get Pregnancy Check

As reported by the Bismarck Tribune's Lauren Donovan:

FRYBURG - The wild horse roundup at Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora Monday was anything but routine for the girls in the herd.
 
They went through a physical exam that included a pregnancy ultrasound and the extraction of fecal matter as part of a research project that could lead to the equine version of a pregnancy dipstick test.
They were well behaved about it, considering the intimate poking and prodding required.

The beautiful horses, manes flowing, were pushed out of the rugged park by helicopter. About 90 - better than half the park herd - were in the handling chutes north of Fryburg on the east side of the park by the end of the day.

The remainder will be rounded up today, possibly Wednesday, if needed.

Park superintendent Valerie Naylor said the horses' condition is good and the roundup was proceeding without a hitch.

They're rounded up every several years and some sold to keep the number down to the park's manageable level of between 60 and 90.

This year, the park will sell a number of young horses at an auction at 2 p.m. Friday at Stockmen's Livestock in Dickinson. The idea is to hopefully sell trainable horses, though there'll be some older ones in the mix of 90 or so that will be sold.

This roundup will make history for the park, since it's the first time a contraceptive as a means to hold down the herd numbers has been introduced.

About 25 of the mares were getting a contraceptive vaccine and another 25 were not, to compare how well the vaccine works over the next three to four years.

Christianne Magee, a veterinarian and doctorate degree candidate from Colorado State University, spent part of the day with a shoulder length latex glove on her hand and arm, ultra sounding the female horses through their rectum and extracting feces from pregnant mares.

She said the feces will be tested to see how much estrogen it contains compared to the same horse's blood sample.

The idea is that if feces can indicate pregnancy, park personnel will be able to collect it in the field by observing which horse it dropped from and thus be able to keep tabs on which mares are pregnant as part of the vaccine program.

Terry Nett, an associate dean of research at Colorado State, said using the fecal pregnancy test on horses would be fairly novel and the benefit from testing feces means they wouldn't have to be rounded up and handled for blood draws.

The fecal pregnancy test is very sensitive because the estrogen only measures in parts per billion, he said.

Magee and the three other veterinarians helping with the pregnancy tests and vaccination were finding plenty of pregnant mares in the group. In fact, it was harder to find mares that weren't pregnant - only four had come through the whole day. Naylor attributed that to good grazing and good health, the same for the parks' elk and bison herds.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 701-748-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)

 Also watch a video on the horse roundup.

Mammoth Cave National Park

Mammoth Cave is the longest cave in the world, more than 367 miles long.  As we learned, this is because most of the cave is now dry.  The water that, in most caves, dissolves limestone with carbonic acid and creates stalactites and the like, is not to be found in most of Mammoth Cave.  Instead, there are huge rooms, long, gaping tunnels that look like they were designed for a subway train and carved by people, and very few stalactites.

Ranger Joe in the Rotunda, a huge, round room.  He's ghosty-looking because this was a long exposure.  The wood implements sticking up were used by slaves working to collect saltpeter from the soil in the cave, some of which was used to make ammunition during the War of 1812.

We took the Historic Cave Tour first.  If you're going to visit Mammoth Cave, this is the one to take.  It requires some limberness to squeeze through some of the tighter spaces, but no crawling is involved.  The tour lasted shy of two hours down in the cave and went by many of the original tour spots when the cave was privately owned.  Besides tunnels and rooms, we saw one bat taking a nap, apparently not a common sight during these tours.

Immediately following that tour, we went on the Frozen Niagara Tour, which is very short and unique to Mammoth Cave in that it has some of the stalactites, stalagmites, ribbons, etc. that one might hope to see in a cave.  We also saw cave crickets.  Our ranger downplayed the features on this little trip as being atypical of what Mammoth Cave is really all about - big rooms and big tunnels like we saw on the Historic Cave Tour.

Hooray for caves!

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most-visited national park in the U.S.  More people visit the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I guess we can count ourselves twice for visiting both the northern and southern ends of its nearly 500-mile run.

The Smokies lived up to their name while we visited with fog and mist hampering views but not our spirits!

It was rainy all morning so we didn't get out of the car much (not that ANYONE does at that park).  The darkness and mistiness made taking photos of water easier, which made our afternoon hike seem like an even better idea than before.

We had to flee Gatlinburg, TN, a hellhole of a tourist trap (I called it a commercial desert), and went down an auxiliary park road to the Ramsey Cascades Trail, once again proving that the places most worth going to all lie at the end of dirt roads.  The trail was 8 miles round-trip, with a 2,000 foot gain on the way up, all through a forested valley, snaking around a rushing creek.

All through the mud, tromping up the trail, the forest was very quiet and peaceful, far away from the roads.  Though we did not spot much wildlife, on our trip down the valley, Amber proved to be an excellent salamander spotter.  I had been sort of looking for them, but hadn't noticed any.  Once Amber knew how to look for them, she found at least 5.  There are more species of salamanders in Great Smoky Mountains National Park than anywhere else in the world, they told us in the park's introductory film.  I had never seen a salamander in the wild before.

Salamander

Finally at the top of the trail, the breathtaking Ramsey Cascades were towering over us, spraying us with mist.  A picture just doesn't do it justice because it seems much more massive when one is standing at its base.  It was all I could do to cram it into the frame at full wide angle.  To stand in front of it, you have to crane your neck back to see to the top of the falls.  It was well worth the hike through rain and mud to find it, certainly more impressive than I had expected.

Ramsey Cascades

As we descended, the fog rolled in.  We saw a family out for a hike as we neared the end of the trail.  Not a backpack among them and less than two hours of daylight left in the day, I told them they would never make it in time when they asked if we had hiked to the falls.  Yeah, bud, we've been hiking for the last four hours!  It reminded me of a past bet I had had with a friend regarding running into people toward a trailhead, late in the day, totally unprepared, asking how far it was to the objective.  The winner would have gotten an ice cream sandwich.  I don't recall all the rules of the bet (they were developed during a very, very long hike), but as I remember, I would have had to pay up in this scenario.

U.S.S. North Carolina

While in Wilmington, NC for the wedding which was the object of our extensive tour of the east, I toured the U.S.S. North Carolina with my brother.  The museum ship is run by the State of North Carolina.  The ship was involved in the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II.

It is both very large and yet not as large as I had imagined a battleship must be.  As I stood on the deck, I thought being in the Navy might not be so bad.  Even below deck I initially thought it wouldn't be bad.  Once below deck for an hour, I realized that, no, it would in fact be awful.

My brother manning an AA gun.  Normally powered hydraulically, this one was set up for visitors to crank on the manual cranks normally used as a backup.  It takes two people to aim the gun, each with his own sight.  The right hand seat, being operated here, swivels the gun left and right, rotating the whole contraption.  The opposite seat controls the up and down motion of the guns.  Loaders would load clips of ammunition and the cartridges would eject down a chute behind the gun.

The tour did an excellent job showing the visitor all the way around the ship, snaking through every room of consequence and offering quotations from men who served on ships usually as comical anecdotes related to particular features, such as the guy who cut a hole in the vent above his bed and used a tin can lid to direct air onto himself while he slept.

These are the big shells used in the big guns.  It took teams of men in several different compartments to load and fire the gun.  Firing took place in a special room with awesome analog computers lining the walls by men who couldn't even see the fighting.

It was a great tour, and I'd recommend it to anyone visiting Wilmington, NC.

Moores Creek National Battlefield

Moores Creek was among the opening battles of the Revolutionary War, fought on February 27, 1776.  Fought prior to the Declaration of Independence, the battle was fought by Loyalist North Carolinians including a group of Scotch Highlanders and separatists, or Patriots.
The battle was essentially a trap, an ambush by the Patriots to destroy a group of Loyalist troops trying to cross Moores Creek.  With a decoy camp on the Loyalists' side of the river, the Patriots drew the Loyalists across the river and into what can only be described as a kill zone - a semicircular entrenchment surrounding the bridge.  Just to slow the troops and cause confusion, the Patriots had removed a section of planks from the bridge, leaving only the girders, which they had greased. 

Moores Creek Bridge

Exactly how the Loyalists didn't realize this was a very bad situation boggles the mind.  Their intelligence told them that there was an encampment of troops that they thought they could defeat, but when they got there, that camp was abandoned, tents still up and fires still burning.  Undeterred, the Loyalists pressed on.  When they got to the bridge, it had obviously been rigged to be difficult to use but not inoperable or unrepairable.  For some reason, they saw fit to cross it.  No doubt, some men slipped into the water and panicked, causing some confusion among the ranks.  And when they did get across the bridge, there was a wall of musketballs screaming at them, too late to do anything about it.  At this point, the Scots, armed only with swords, charged and were mowed down.  The battle lasted three minutes.

Eat lead, Loyalists!  A swivel cannon covering the ground just past the bridge.  The Patriots also had a cannon and 1,000 men to counter the Loyalists' 1,600.

While the focus is on the history and the battle at this particular site, there is a stunning natural heritage there, too, that goes overlooked.  Indeed, the volunteer I talked to there had no interest in it whatsoever.  He had never even heard of a tufted titmouse.  I told him there was one right outside!  There are tall trees and a swamp environment that I found very appealing.  I saw a female scarlet tanager and a pileated woodpecker among other sights.  No alligators, though.

Moores Creek

One of the interesting things I learned was that the trees I had been seeing and wondered about all around North Carolina were long-leaf pine trees.  They do, indeed, have very long needles.  These were the trees used for making naval products including pitch, turpentine, and tar, hence the Tarheel State.  The trees require a fire regime to survive long-term.  Many of them around this part of the state are the same age (especially at the UNCW campus), but at Moores Creek, they are planting seedlings to maintain a more complete forest ecosystem.

Long-leaf pine trees

Appomattox Court House National Historic Site

Appomattox Court House is the site of the surrender of General Robert E. Lee.  I say that carefully because, despite how the site portrays this event's significance, it was not the end of hostilities in the Civil War.  Thousands more would be killed even after Lee's surrender.  But the events that occurred on April 9, 1865 signaled a symbolic blow to the Confederacy, the beginning of the end rather than the end itself.

We cleared up an important point of confusion regarding the name of the site.  Appomattox Court House is a settlement.  The Appomattox County Courthouse was there, and its presence gave the settlement, including a few houses, a tavern, and a jail, its name.  Just down the road was Appomattox Station, where the railroad came through, and where the modern city of Appomattox, VA is situated.  The court house itself is not where the surrender occurred.  Rather, it happened a stone's throw away at the McLean House.  The house today is a reconstruction of the original house, which was unfortunately dismantled in the 1890s.

The table on which Lee surrendered is on display in the visitor center...

...As is the battle flag of the 61st Virginia.

The terms of the surrender required Lee's men to lay down their arms.  They did so along the road into Appomattox Court House, Union troops watching from alongside the road.  Among the men watching was none other than Joshua Chamberlain, who was with the 20th Maine at Gettysburg and Fredericksburg, the other two Civil War sites we visited on this trip.

Appomattox Court House National Historic Site has a small town's worth of buildings to explore, many of them open for viewing.  We toured the slave quarters at the McLean House, stopped by the tavern, toured the jail, and of course saw the exhibits in the visitor center within the reconstructed court house. 

The Appomattox Court House and the Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road upon which Lee's men stacked their arms.

Also, while staying in Appomattox, we ate some local fare at Granny Bee's.  I had the roast beef dinner and a slice of chocolate meringue pie.  I'd never heard of chocolate meringue pie before, but it tasted pretty good!  The folks there were super nice and the food was good home cooking.

Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah National Park was established in 1936 in part to create a "nature" national park in the east, that would be within a day's drive of millions of people, and to provide a natural refuge with cool, dry air for city dwellers in the humid summer months along the Atlantic Coast.  President Hoover also found refuge in a cabin he had built on the Rapidan.  The controversial thing about Shenandoah is that thousands of people had to be removed from their homes on the Blue Ridge for the park to be created.

Sunset view from the summit of  Little Stony Man Mountain.

At a glance, Shenandoah is basically two things: big hills and trees.  The Skyline Drive, the main attraction in the park, winds through the mountains and woods, revealing frequent overlooks of the surrounding countryside on the Piedmont. 

We took a couple short hikes to the tops of the two tallest mountains in the park, Little Stony Man and Hawksbill.  Along the trails, it was not difficult to notice the overgrazing caused by too many deer.  A ranger had advised us that taking the long route around Hawksbill using the Appalachian Trail provided better views and birdwatching opportunities.  I wouldn't say the views were that great (but better than the direct route, for sure), but the birds were easier to see, including Carolina chickadees, woodpeckers, and a warbler I couldn't identify for sure but that I think was a female black-throated green warbler.

Hawksbill Mountain, the tallest in Shenandoah National Park.

We stayed at the Skyland Lodge, and got a room with a phenomenal view.  But I can't say I liked staying there much.  The room came supplied with Starbucks coffee, but no coffee mug!  And it smelled like cigarettes!  And the dining room staff seated us for dinner and forgot about actually serving us for about 10 minutes!  I hate park concessions! 

We drove from north to south through the park, winding down the Skyline Drive through colorful woods.  I don't know my eastern hardwoods well enough to tell you what we saw, but there were plenty of fall colors and blowing leaves with a high pressure system blowing in the second day of our visit.  As we exited, we drove down the Blue Ridge Parkway for quite a distance.  At the entrance at Humpback Rocks, we toured a historic farmstead, complete with several chickens and a bear-proof hog house.

Shenandoah is a neat place to explore, especially with fall colors lighting the woods.  It's all pretty, but a little monotonous after too long because the habitats and scenery don't really change significantly.  The displays in the visitor centers are some of the best I have seen in an NPS site.

Fredericksburg National Military Park

We stopped for a short visit to the Fredericksburg battlefield, formally Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The museum has a good sampling of artifacts from the battlefield that one might expect. There is a film with a dramatization of the battle that's pretty helpful. As far as the story, similar to Gettysburg, the main highlight of the story is a ridiculously miscalculated attack on a very defensible position, here along the Sunken Road. The Confederates had the high ground and held the Union troops coming across the river at bay.

The CCC rebuilt a good portion of the wall of the Sunken Road, but part of it is still original. You have to use your imagination to picture the federal troops coming up from the river, as modern buildings come right up to the park. What's not hard to imagine is how amazingly good that cover was for the Confederates. According to the park's website, "Of the 12,600 Federal soldiers killed, wounded, or missing, almost two-thirds fell in front of the stone wall." Lee lost just over 5,000.

One of the interesting features along the trail is the Innis House, a small, white house along the Sunken Road. The building got a bit shot up during the battle. Some of the bullet holes are still visible! There was also a white house cat lounging along the rock wall by the house.

Innis House

Atop the hill is the Fredericksburg cemetery. Many of the graves have more than one person in them.

The National Mall

We had a whirlwind tour of the National Mall and the D.C. area on my birthday.  We figured out the metro, and Amber had smartly found a great hotel right on the metro line, so it was very convenient.

We started with the Museum of the American Indian.  The Museum of the American Indian is a very new facility and is packaged very nicely.  There is an interesting film to introduce the museum in a circular theater that perhaps is most like a dancing arbor.  The screen is made up of some sort of woven material, but beneath it is a large rock upon which images were projected and the entire "sky" of the room also became part of the ambience of the film.  While the main story was told on the center screen, the rock lit up with water and ground images.  The sky of the room had images that stretched across the whole sky; looking up into a forest canopy, looking across a village, etc.  While the speakers spoke during the film, the actual speaker's hand crafts lit up in cases spread throughout the entire theater.  The best exhibit is the "Our Universe" exhibit, adjacent to the theater, which actually envelops the visitor in many exhibits about the cultural traditions of many tribes across North, Central, and South America.  Many other exhibits in the building blend cultural heritage with modern issues.  Overall, the museum is about three things:  1) there are many perspectives from diverse native peoples, 2) these cultures are still here today, and 3) there is still an acute danger of losing a culture's identity, language, or traditions.  We returned later to eat lunch there, and I visited the "Mesoamerica" stall and picked up a tamale, squash, and beans for an exorbitant price (but it was mighty tasty).

Next door, we popped into the U.S. Botanic Garden and were fairly amazed with what we found.  There were loads of plants all over, but my favorites were the awesome displays of orchids and bromeliads.  We didn't do a lot of reading and mainly kept moving through the museum.

For the next stop, we paid a visit to the front of the U.S. Capitol Building and took the obligatory picture.  I saw a red-tailed hawk fly over.  We saw the Capitol Reflecting Pool and the U.S. Grant Memorial.

The U.S. Capitol Building

After lunch, we hit the Air and Space Museum, definitely a popular tourist destination.  It's overwhelming to see the actual Friendship 7, Apollo 11, Spirit of St. Louis, the Wright Flyer, and so much more.  A special surprise for me was an exhibition of Alan Bean's paintings, which I knew a lot about but did not know were actually on display there.  Of course, everything is a surprise when you don't plan anything (at least I hadn't planned anything).

When you have a fender bender on the moon, you've got to improvise.  Above is the fender that Gene Cernan built on the moon out of plastic sheets and duct tape for the Apollo 17 mission.  Without it, they were getting sprayed with moon dust when they drove.  Below is a standard fender.

The Wright Flyer

We worked on hitting the rest of the memorials that we hadn't visited the previous evening and revisiting some of the others.  We stopped by the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and walked along West Potomac Park before walking under the cherry trees to the FDR Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial.  The previous day, we also visited the White House and some other sites including walking by many of the federal offices for various Departments.  Amazing how close it all is once you're down there.  It's also amazing how many Passport stamps you can pick up if you have your Passport to the National Parks book with you.

The Washington Monument

The Jefferson Memorial

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

We capped the day off with dinner at Zed's Ethiopian Restaurant in Georgetown.  It was authentic enough that they didn't bring silverware.  Delicious.

It was an exhausting day.  I got the blisters to prove it.

Gettysburg National Military Park

Our time was short while visiting Gettysburg, but we made the most of it by buying an audio guide and companion booklet for the car and attended a ranger program at Little Round Top.  We spent nearly six hours taking the tour, reading signs, and attending the ranger program before blowing out of town for D.C.  We completely skipped the museum, except to go to the bookstore and pick up the passport stamp.

The audio guide we purchased took us along an established (and well-marked) auto tour route around the battleground, following the battle chronologically.  The tour begins on the northwest side of town.  All along the route are huge stone markers that represent the position of a particular unit at a point in the battle.  So if you were particularly interested in a specific unit, you could find that unit's marker and stand where they lined up during the battle.  Early on was a mound of dirt and a marker near where General Reynolds fell on the first day of fighting.

After talking for 45 minutes or so about the battle along the side of Little Round Top, our silly ranger said to me, "You gonna take my picture or what?"

We cruised the circuit, looping down the road down Seminary Ridge, where the Confederates took up positions along a long, thin lump in the terrain.  We got around to Little Round Top, the southern extent of the battle and a key point on the second day of fighting there in 1863, and looked out across the Devil's Den to where Gouvenor Warren recognized that Confederate troops were moving to take the hill.  It was a very close race between the two sides to get into position on the hill; the Union got there first.  The 20th Maine was the end of the line, and as the Confederates under Gen. Oates's command felt their way around the base of the hill to their right, to the right, to the right, the 20th Maine bent back into an L-shape to protect their own flank.  Toward the end of the fighting, the 20th Maine charged forward and captured many of the retreating Confederates.

What was impressive about the terrain at Little Round Top is the proximity of the fighting.  It was much more intimate than I had imagined, though it might be a bit of an illusion now that much of the vegetation has been thinned where the fighting occurred.

End of the Line.  The left flank of the 20th Maine's deployment.  The stone wall was not there during the day the 20th fought there.

There is a massive monument nearby for the 1st Minnesota Volunteers, who basically sacrificed themselves to hold the Confederates back for a few minutes while additional Union troops were moved into place the previous day.

 1st Minnesota Volunteers

Of course, the tour ends at the "High Water Mark of the Confederacy," a point along the stone wall where some of the men in Pickett's Charge actually made it over the wall, briefly.  There is a marker there for Gen. Armistead, who was fatally wounded after he got over the wall, trying to capture a Union artillery piece.  Standing there, looking across the large, open field, one might admire the courage of the men who made that charge.  I think, today, one has to look back and wonder why it was attempted at all.

A Union cannon overlooking the field across which General Longstreet's corps advanced to attack the Union center.

The Battle of Gettysburg took place in an area that is both larger and smaller than one might imagine.  The line stretched a long way, but the fighting was all very close.  I wouldn't say that it was an awe-inspiring visit in that I knew quite a lot about the war and the specific battle prior to our visit, but it is always interesting to see how a place compares with one's perception of what that place might be like, and to actually materialize as something manifest, something real.  Gettysburg is very real, and they've done a terrific job making it easy to visualize the battle!