On May 9th, we finally found the new colt grazing with his mom on the marshes. He was born on or about April 17th . I don’t have a name for him yet but he is by Yankee out of Carol’s Girl. This is the same stallion who sired “my filly”, Miss Mackie. And speaking of Miss Mackie, as of this writing, she remains elusive. I would say I won’t leave the island until I find her but you and I both know that’s unlikely. On June 1st we’ll be NH bound. It’s hard to imagine our three months of volunteerism is winding down.
On our morning rounds we noticed this one site that had been thoroughly trashed. Tents were collapsed, food and trash bags ripped into, cooking utensils and stoves overturned and two cars filled with sleeping campers in the parking space. We woke the people up and encouraged them to clean their site. We continued on our rounds, checked in at the Ranger Station and went back to check up on our trashed site. Upon our return, we discovered the occupants of the cars and gone back to sleep. So we woke them up once more and found one of their party who spoke better English than the other nine. I took photos of the mess, the trashed tents and their license plates while Carl called law enforcement to assist us with expediting the cleanup and their departure.
It took the officer 45 minutes to arrive at our location. In that time, we were able to discover the people arrived with missing tent parts causing them to tie one tent to the nearby bushes. This is against the rules. While cooking supper, a fox or raccoon came out of the woods. The would be campers retired to the cars leaving everything right where they left it. Part of the mess was caused by the fox or raccoon but most of the destruction was caused by the chestnut stallion, Corky. He was seen leaving the scene of the crime through the bushes. Now, the food being left around breaks a couple of important Park rules but these poor people also had had car trouble leaving one of their vehicles on the grass and yes, that too, is frowned upon by Park staff. These poor people had arrived late so they were unregistered on top of everything else. About the only rule they didn’t break was to allow a dog to run free. I mentioned this to Carl and he laughed, commenting they couldn’t have had room in the two cars which already held 10 adult individuals.
When all was clean, the officer followed the people to the office to ensure they paid for their night of “camping”. We hope they give camping another shot in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment