field

Today i went to the field to see how my spiders were doing. Havent been visiting them very frequently, mainly becasue i was running a set of experiments over here in Sede Boqer,and also the weather hasnt been very good. But today the heat of the Arava valleywas a welcome change from the freezing temperatures in SB. There were rumours of snowfall in Mitzpe Ramon, a town some 30 mins away, but it turned out to be just that. It snowed in Jerusalem though.
Anyway, Efrat (girl who is in my lab- she works on spiders in agricultural systems) and me drove down. The best part about today's ride was the desert was blooming rampantly. Normally we see only scattered vegetation, but today almost all the plants were decorated with splashes of colour. It is something special to see flowers in the desert, and only when you see drabness for so long you suddenly appreciate the value of such small events. Even the grass was flowering. As we drove through one of the wadis, we passed a herd of camels being tended by a bedouin on an All Terrain Vehicle (or as they say in hebrew-tractaron). it was eerily similar to a safari- imagine an african safari scene and replace giraffes with camels and you get the picture. The bedouin guy had tied the forelegs of some camels together to prevent them from wandering off, i guess. i remember once we met a bedouin chap asking us if we'd seen any camels there:). The spiders were doing well, i discovered two new colonies of cyrtophora where previously there were none, and so added a couple of more points to the data set :)
Saw "confessions of a dangerous mind"; review- worth watching