walking through the rain in khao sok rainforest, thailand

“we walked for hours through the tropical rainforest in what can only be described as …the rain.” – douglas adams

greetings from koh samui, thailand :)

coconut drink at the beach

about 30 degrees every day, REALLY cheap mango shakes (made from fresh mangoes, 60 eurocents at one restaurant), green curry (80 eurocents) and thai style cuisine w/ lots of coconut milk, little food-stands everywhere… i’m in heaven.
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with the heavy day-to-day thunderstorms, i kind of wonder why i didn’t try this earlier:

flashes of lightning in tirol

after a rather exhausting day of work, i can look back at an unexpected encounter:

en: lesser horseshoe bat (rhinolophus hipposideros), with pup
de: kleine hufeisennase (rhinolophus hipposideros) mit jungtier

in case you can’t tell which is which: the pair of pointed shapes in the lower right is the mother’s ears. its baby is clinging on tightly and makes up the left half of the furry ball.
like all young microbat babies, it’s hanging with its head up at first. later on, the preferred position will be head down.

this summer, i’m working in a project to support certain species of bat indirectly by aiding their respective habitats. although i didn’t expect to see one of the nursery roosts themselves, i did today. the number of bats in this colony is rising, and a high percentage of the females (such as the one in the photo) are currently raising their young.
it was clearly the highlight of the day.

i was supposed to be working in the field around hainzenberg (in the ziller valley), but for most of the day it was raining so hard, that i considered building an ark. thanks, thor!

yesterday, however, was a beautifully sunny day, and i’m hoping that the next days will be alike:

the ziller valley (or zillertal valley),
looking northwards from hippach

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little sidenote: it’s usually about the time when my friends wish me “nice holidays” that i realize i’ve cramped up almost the entire summer with all things work. will i ever learn to reserve a few days for relaxing time at home? probably not.

(i’m uploading this through a GPRS connection – it takes forever to something as simple as reloading a text page.)

this is one of my first attempts to use hugin in conjunction with autopano-SIFT:

panorama: view of innsbruck and the inn valley, as seen from patscherkofel

it seems like a good piece of (open-source) software.
i think i’m keeping it.

i wanted to write how today (in the morning) i was reminded of my kakapo experience in new zealand, and (in the evening) of that special hike to lake tagimaucia on taveuni .
i wanted to upload a few impressions from scheffau and the region south of the “wild emperor” (wilder kaiser) mountains.
i wanted to talk about the coolness of time dilatation and its role in (microbat) ultrasound recording.
i wanted to complete this sen… .

by now, i’m too tired for any of this.

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update 2008-06-13: imagine little check marks next to the first two sentences. ;-)

[view photos: impressions from scheffau]