Well, bein's as Cheryl asked: Travis T. Traveler here. I've been to a number of MVORs...even had my picture in the guidebooks. That's where I won this nifty helmet. It's a whole lot easier seeing crawdads in the dark with this light, and the switch is so easy I can turn it on all by myself.
We go deep in caves because we smell food. Now, most raccoons are content with crawdads and fish out of the pond or the river, but some of us...we'll, we're picky about what we eat. I like those cave animals like grotto salamanders, and Ozark cavefish, and cave crayfish, um, crawdads. They taste different than the sunburned ones. Sort of like people will grow asparagus in the dark so that it is white and not green, and they eat blind cave broccoli. Did you ever wonder why those white cave animals are all rare or endangered or threatened. Yep. It's because of us. We like tasty treats. We can smell them, but they're hard to find in the dark, so I think the NSS should take up a donation and buy all the raccoons in North America headlights.
You know, there aren't many animals that can type. We can. And we'd be happy to map those little passages...just get us some stubby pencils and little bitty clipboards, and a backpack with velcro straps so it will be easy to get in and out of it. I can even write cursive. We'll map for free and clean those animals out of those caves, and then we'll be so proud, we'll leave a little survey station to mark what we did. You can find fishbones in them if you look real hard. I heard a story from my Aunt Rascal that in the 1960s when they was mapping Fantastic Caverns they had some Ozark cavefish in an underground pool and they'd take tourists in there, until one day they looked and the fish were gone. For a while they thought a little baby had gotten loose and ate them, but it turned out it was my Uncle Homer. We need a moment of silence here...Uncle Homer met his demise when he didn't hear the jeep-tram coming. He stopped and looked at the bright light, and that was the last thing he saw.
Well, I hear Teresa coming, so I better scat. But just remember: that light down that little passage might not be another human. It might be me. C Ya.
Trav
P.S. Someone asked about bat fur and bones. I Hate to admit it, but the powdered sugar on bat noses these days just doesn't taste very good, so we're going back on the fish and amphibian diet.