New Tricks and a Few Treats

Last week I had the opportunity to see first hand what mist-netting means. Early Friday morning I went over to the field house and saw the huge nets that had been setup the previous afternoon. The nets were a little taller than the house and the largest one was 15 feet wide. We had just setup our lookout spot when only about 2 minutes later a bird had flown into the net. Our first one of the morning! I spread out the net so John could take the bird out. Once he had him out, I got to hold him before we released him. Though it was not the species he wanted to get that day, it was a really cool experience to get to hold a bird. A little while later, after a few other birds had been caught and released, a Starling flew into one of the nets. This is one of the species John was looking for for the study, so we kept it. After weighing it and taking some measurements, John introduced him to his new home.

Saturday morning we went over the LauLau Bay Golf Resort driving range. We got two buckets of balls, some rental clubs, and picked out our spots on the range. A few swings in I finally hit the ball more than a couple feet! I’d say our drives were, how do I put this, inconsistent at best. We could definitely use some practice (and maybe a bit of advice so we aren’t just making up the technique), but it was super fun to just hit a bucket of balls on a beautiful resort! We’ll be back again to practice some more for sure.

For the past couple weeks we’ve been sharing our apartment with a baby gecko. He usually shows up around dinner time to hang out with us and hunt for a meal (though he’s not really the greatest at finding insects). Like most of the animals around here (White Rooster, Brown Bull, Road Dog, Marley the Bandit, Balc Honey Eater) we’ve given him a “name”, we call him Baby Gecko.

This weekend was Halloween. Friday while we were out doing laundry and running errands we saw some kids dressed up in their costumes from school. Superman and a princess seemed to be popular choices. They were all pretty adorable! Saturday we went to Fiesta beach bar in Garapan and hung out there all day. The weather was beautiful, and it was nice to just relax in the sun. The sunset was putting on quite a show that night, and I went a little crazy taking pictures!

Once it was dark, we put our costumes on and headed to Godfathers (our go-to place for dinner when we’re in Garapan) for some pizza. Everyone there was dressed up, including the people that worked at the restaurant. Some were even acting the part of their costume.

Then we went back to Fiesta because they were having a Mad Max themed Halloween party. They had a costume contest (there were some really great costumes!), a DJ, and we even got to enjoy some Halloween candy!