Just a few notes from the continuing planning meetings, yesterday and this morning...

The designer of this building was clever, and savvy about how humans function in a group.

There is a thermostat for the meeting room. But it's a dummy, and doesn't control or change anything. Just gives people something to fiddle with when they think the room temperature is uncomfortable.

The real thermostat is hidden up above a ceiling tile at one end of the room.

That's what the step ladder is there for.

When talking about managing ecosystems, it is hard to define whether or not the system you've got out there on the ground functions the way you want it to. Just because you've got clean water and vegetation covering the ground, doesn't mean you'll be able to support sage grouse, or cattle, or anything else, all year round. So in attempts to describe a system that works the way it is supposed to, rather than just having a few of the parts scattered around here and there (with gas wells in between), folks often tried to set goals regarding "maintaining the integrity" of whatever system we were talking about.

"Can you manage integrity?" was one woman's question.

"I know some people who have trouble managing integrity," was the response from the man at the next table.

One of the issues being discussed was how to take care of an endangered penstemon found in a small part of our state, a species found in only one other place, in Nebraska.

Given that proper care of these plants was going to cause a few minor headaches for some folks, one woman tried to make the claim that our population of this species was probably not even native, and didn't deserve any special care. That they must have come "from a seed dropped by the Hayden Expedition."

Her suggestion went nowhere.

Today's session started with plans for the only cave in the area which supports significant populations of bats. There was an abundance of the expected jokes about the "bat cave".

Like, the document doesn't provide a detailed map to the cave, "because it's a secret. Otherwise, people will find our Batmobile."

When discussing whether the cave is a hibernaculum (place where bats hibernate for the winter), or maternity cave (where females raise their young), the biologist expressed her unscientific surprise that almost all the bats found in the cave are "boy bats". Only a handful of "girl bats" found to date.

To which the question was asked, "Is this cave on Brokeback Mountain?"

As you would expect with two dozen people of differing expertise and interests in the room, there were a few issues on which the whole group could never agree. Some issues that others didn't even wish to consider. These would then be tabled, until we knew what to do with them.

So, near the end of the five days of meetings, one fellow asked the arbiter about an earlier contentious issue "That we have to table..."

"Until we decide where to stick it," came a loud female voice from across the room.