Hi @mudbugecology,
It appears that the error:
is being caused by special characters (i.e. †) in your data files. When I open your file n Excel I see:
Which looks like this in my Raw Text Editor BBEdit. I am also showing the invisible text like tabs (triangles) and spaces (dots):
I would highly recommend that you always use a raw text editor like NotePad, Atom, BBEdit, etc... to view the files prior to importing them. Tools like MS Word & Excel can sometimes hide these characters which will cause problems later.
-Cheers!
-Mike