This week has been one of the longest I've ever had, and I honestly can't believe I still have to make it through Friday before I get a chance to sleep in and relax. My fieldwork the last four days has been anything but strenuous. Having finished raptor nest checks, I had no long hikes... In fact, I had little hiking at all. What I did have laid out was a series of surveys for burrowing owl and mountain plover at four prairie dog colonies. Perhaps you're starting to wonder why I'm worn out, but stick with me and you'll soon understand.
Prairie dogs are thought of as keystone species in grasslands, essentially meaning that even a relatively small population can have a disproportionately large impact on the surrounding ecosystem. As prairie dogs feed and burrow, they alter the landscape. The feed on grasses that they pull up (or down) by the roots, as well as certain forbs and shrubs. They're so tough on the grasses that they create an environment in which only certain species of plants can survive. Often these plants are the absolute best suited to the prairie environment: tough, water-conservative, and nutrient-rich. The surviving grasses are of such high quality that they attract other herbivores- pronghorn, deer, rabbit, mice, gophers, and birds. The herbivores, in turn, attract predators, and viola! Ecosystem extravaganza!
Since prairie dog colonies are generally species-rich, they're excellent places to look for burrowing owl (which, as the name implies, live in underground burrows), and the rare mountain plover. My job was to drive out to a prairie dog colony just after sunrise with a strong pair of binoculars and a spotting scope, sit out there, and watch. Easy, right?
Yes and no. Getting to the prairie dog colonies, of course, involved finding phone numbers and contacting land owners. It also involved an inordinate amount of driving. Two of the four colonies I had to survey are located far north in Crook county, not far south of the Wyoming/Montana state line. When the colony is located two to two and half hours from the field office and I need to get out there not long after sunrise, it makes for extremely early mornings. I've been getting up around 4:00 AM this week to be out on location between 6:30 and 7:30 AM. Suffice to say that tomorrow, when I go grousing, I'll be getting up at 6:30 AM, and I'll feel like I'm sleeping in.
It wasn't enough, however, for me to drive out to the colonies and check for birds. Outside of the long driving hours (followed by trying to sit still for a few hours while scoping out the towns), there wasn't much involved, so I decided last week that I would try to double up my duties each day and to set out our bat detectors after surveying. This decision was largely motivated by the fact that the northernmost location had four bat detector sites withing close proximity.
The thing about the detectors is that they have to be set up one day, left overnight, and retrieved the next. It was easy enough for me to set the detectors when I surveyed the nearby colony, but that took care of only two of four sites, and I had to retrieve them, too. This meant a week that looked like this:
Monday: 5:00 AM wake-up. Drive to far southern Weston county, survey Fred Draw dog town. Afterwards, drive to far northern Crook county, set up both detectors.
Tuesday: 5:00 AM wake-up. Drive to far northern Crook county. Survey Cedar Creek dog town. Move both bat detectors.
Wednesday: 4:00 AM wake-up. Drive to far northern Crook county. Retrieve bat detectors. Re-set one that didn't work the night before. Drive south to Cabin Creek dog town. Afterwards, drive further south near Carlisle to set up bat detector.
Thursday: 4:00 AM wake-up. Drive to mid-Niobrara county (near a town called "Dull"... how fitting) to County Line dog town. Afterwards, drive to Carlisle area to retrieve one detector, then to far northern Crook county to retrieve other detector.
After all the driving and surveying and driving and retrieval and driving, I've worked 11 hours days four days in a row now. I would love to take tomorrow off, but alas, I cannot. I have to go after grouse once a week, which means that if Friday rolls around and I haven't been out, I don't get to take the day off.
Was I successful this week? Sort of. Two of the four colonies I visited turned out to be prairie dog ghost towns. I haven't talked to Dwayne in more than a week, so I'm not sure how the sites I visited were selected, or how long it has been since someone has visited, if at all. They're easily visible on satellite photos, but the presence of burrows, sadly, does not guarantee the presence of prairie dogs. Both Fred Draw and the County Line dog towns were almost devoid of dogs. Each had only a handful of active coteries (a term for you to Google) surrounded by hundreds of acres of empty, unused burrows.
Prairie dogs, despite being ecological engineers, are susceptible to two things: ranchers and plague. Ranchers (and other random WY inhabitants) love to shoot and poison prairie dogs. The USFS tries desperately to stop people, through signs, patrols, and heavy fines. Shooting prairie dogs isn't allowed on BLM land, either, but I get the feeling that the BLM looks the other way for ranchers that lease BLM parcels to graze their cattle. Regardless of the culprits or the means, what's resulted is the extirpation of prairie dogs across the majority of their range, and several species are now endangered.
The other prairie dog killer is sylvatic plague. Sylvatic plague is the rodent version of bubonic plague, and the disease is transmissible to humans. Sylvatic plague can wipe out a prairie dog colony in a fairly short amount of time, and, unfortunately, studies have shown that colonies stressed by losses to ranchers and the intense grazing of cattle are more susceptible to external parasites, including plague-carrying fleas. In the end, ranching is a lose-lose situation for the dogs... If they're not exterminated by the ranchers directly, they'll often fall prey soon after to sylvatic plague.
Needless to say, a town devoid of prairie dogs means a town devoid of other animals, too, including burrowing owl and mountain plover.
I did manage to find some burrowing owl, at the Cedar Creek dog town, which also sported plenty of pronghorn, a ferruginous hawk, a golden eagle, a badger, and countless songbirds. Sadly, neither of the two active towns I visited were large enough to support the critically endangered black-footed ferret.
Yesterday I was talking on the phone to one of my friends from college. She asked what I'd been doing lately and I outlined the various things I've been engaged in at work over the past month. After listening she paused for a moment, then commented, "Your job is really weird."
I would be inclined to agree.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
My Pet... Crickets?
A few weeks ago I awoke, disoriented, to a very strange sensation. It was... something.... something like crawling... but not. I couldn't quite place it, especially in my sleep-induced haze. It took a few seconds of strained concentration for me to figure it out. Something was hopping around on my bed!
With surprising acuity for the middle of the night, I managed to snatch the hopping culprit, in the dark, from the surface of the comforter, roll over, and snap on the light. There in my hand was a dapper little cricket. Unlike the more frequently-seen house or field crickets, this was a type of camel cricket. The little female seemed nonplussed to find herself in my hand, but when I gently set her down on the floor she was none the worse for wear and hopped off to other adventures.
Since that time a whole slew of crickets have moved into the apartment and taken up residence. They spend most of their time in the shower, which doesn't drain properly, or tucked away elsewhere in the bathroom. Occasionally I'll transport them all outside, only to find them back in their respective places the following evening.
With surprising acuity for the middle of the night, I managed to snatch the hopping culprit, in the dark, from the surface of the comforter, roll over, and snap on the light. There in my hand was a dapper little cricket. Unlike the more frequently-seen house or field crickets, this was a type of camel cricket. The little female seemed nonplussed to find herself in my hand, but when I gently set her down on the floor she was none the worse for wear and hopped off to other adventures.
Since that time a whole slew of crickets have moved into the apartment and taken up residence. They spend most of their time in the shower, which doesn't drain properly, or tucked away elsewhere in the bathroom. Occasionally I'll transport them all outside, only to find them back in their respective places the following evening.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Meeting the Status Quo
As it nears the beginning of September I find myself increasingly less settled, constantly in anticipation of an event which, this year, will not occur. For the last four years, and for more than a decade before that, the culmination of August and the onset of the ninth month have coincided with the commencement of the school year. The constancy of this episode has become so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I often find my mind straying towards the idea that just another two weeks worth of work will secure my freedom from Newcastle. This autumn, I will have to get by on the hope that next fall will mark my reentry into the academic world. It seems a long way off.
In a strange way, my work has become almost quotidian. I say strange because no two days are ever alike. I'm always traveling to different places, seeing different things... But for some reason just the act of getting up every day and going to the office, driving the Durango somewhere, driving back, entering data... it's all begun to seem mundane. Yet even as I write that, it seems incomplete, inaccurate, because there is another side to my work that is never, can never be, rote.
Once I've driven as far as I can, once I've locked the car and stashed the key and shouldered my pack, the world opens up around me. As soon as I take off walking and drop out of sight of the road and the few, widely-scattered farmhouses, there exists only me and the earth and the sky and the wind and the prairie. I am often alone, or seem to be, until I chance across some denizen of the plains... a group of pronghorn blasting across the sage, a harrier searching for a meal, hundreds of tiny tadpoles in an ephemeral pool, a group of deer, bedding in the long grass alongside a creek, a bull snake, pretending to be a rattlesnake, a rattlesnake, who has no need to pretend.
Often I'll drop down into drainages, the far-reaching fingers of seasonal streams, to find little oases, wet and lush and green in a world baked dry by relentless wind and the strong summer sun. These verdant patches seem almost magical. Cottonwoods tower forty feet above the ground, their bases surrounded by chokecherries, oak, and sumac. Pools of water rest in hollows, extant only as a result of the shade provided by the steep, eroding walls of the drainage. The wind is tempered here, blowing as a cool, gentle breeze. I feel fortunate with each new discovery, and these are often the places raptors choose to build their nests.
Still, there is routine in it all. Drive a two-track, open a gate, close a gate, drive some more, park, walk out to a nest, record data, walk back, drive out, open and close the gate again, drive on to some other nest in some other place. Though I often wish to spend time in the secluded cottonwood groves, I cannot. I quickly found that it takes ten- or eleven-hour days to effectively check nests, all the while going as fast as I can.
So I'm doing my best to meet the status quo. My performance in this internship will be measured by my completion (or not) of a long list of tasks. Every day when I return from the field I check off those things I've accomplished... the nests I've visited, the sites I've sampled, the locations I've placed bat detectors. The list seems impossibly long, but I must do what I can for fear of disappointing, of even underwhelming, my superiors.
Today I was planning on marking off the last two nests in Niobrara county, only to be met this morning with a locked gate on private land and an unresponsive contact. I have one other nest I have not visited, located just south of the Montana/Wyoming state line, far out of the way of my other charges. I told Dwayne when I returned to the office that I'd made it to 35 of 38 nests. (We'd discussed earlier in the week that I should only continue to check nests through today). He seemed pleased, but I have trouble reading him, and I was unsure if he wasn't unhappy that I hadn't made it to them all.
I wonder now just how much I'll be able to accomplish during the remainder of my time here. I have four prairie dog colonies to survey for burrowing owl and mountain plover, 14 locations at which to leave bat detectors overnight, 80 spots scattered far and wide across all three counties in our field office (Crook, Weston, and Niobrara) at which to sample vegetation, and a resource management plan to write for the side-saddle bladderpod (Oooh... so much fun, right?). What will happen if I can't get it all finished? Probably nothing, but if I disappoint Dwayne, or don't meet his expectations, it could set me back if I wish to extend my internship or continue with the BLM at another field office.
I'll do what I can, I suppose.
Things outside of work, however, are looking very promising. Ayme, a 25-year-old substitute teacher from Upton that chaperoned during the BLM/Upton project in July, and I hit it off during the limited time we spent together on Bat Nights and Wildlife Wednesdays. After a few weeks of conflicting plans we've finally worked out a day to get together, and I'm not sure which of us is more excited about the prospects of spending the day with another twenty-something, college-educated, childless person. This Saturday we're headed to Rapid City for farmer's markets, Target, lunch, a movie, and, if I can convince her, a visit to Cold Stone. It will be great to break away from the montony and confines of Newcastle and spend some time in a decent-sized town. The one downside? Rapid City does not have a Chipotle. Sadness. I suppose I can't have everything, though, right? : )
In a strange way, my work has become almost quotidian. I say strange because no two days are ever alike. I'm always traveling to different places, seeing different things... But for some reason just the act of getting up every day and going to the office, driving the Durango somewhere, driving back, entering data... it's all begun to seem mundane. Yet even as I write that, it seems incomplete, inaccurate, because there is another side to my work that is never, can never be, rote.
Once I've driven as far as I can, once I've locked the car and stashed the key and shouldered my pack, the world opens up around me. As soon as I take off walking and drop out of sight of the road and the few, widely-scattered farmhouses, there exists only me and the earth and the sky and the wind and the prairie. I am often alone, or seem to be, until I chance across some denizen of the plains... a group of pronghorn blasting across the sage, a harrier searching for a meal, hundreds of tiny tadpoles in an ephemeral pool, a group of deer, bedding in the long grass alongside a creek, a bull snake, pretending to be a rattlesnake, a rattlesnake, who has no need to pretend.
Often I'll drop down into drainages, the far-reaching fingers of seasonal streams, to find little oases, wet and lush and green in a world baked dry by relentless wind and the strong summer sun. These verdant patches seem almost magical. Cottonwoods tower forty feet above the ground, their bases surrounded by chokecherries, oak, and sumac. Pools of water rest in hollows, extant only as a result of the shade provided by the steep, eroding walls of the drainage. The wind is tempered here, blowing as a cool, gentle breeze. I feel fortunate with each new discovery, and these are often the places raptors choose to build their nests.
Still, there is routine in it all. Drive a two-track, open a gate, close a gate, drive some more, park, walk out to a nest, record data, walk back, drive out, open and close the gate again, drive on to some other nest in some other place. Though I often wish to spend time in the secluded cottonwood groves, I cannot. I quickly found that it takes ten- or eleven-hour days to effectively check nests, all the while going as fast as I can.
So I'm doing my best to meet the status quo. My performance in this internship will be measured by my completion (or not) of a long list of tasks. Every day when I return from the field I check off those things I've accomplished... the nests I've visited, the sites I've sampled, the locations I've placed bat detectors. The list seems impossibly long, but I must do what I can for fear of disappointing, of even underwhelming, my superiors.
Today I was planning on marking off the last two nests in Niobrara county, only to be met this morning with a locked gate on private land and an unresponsive contact. I have one other nest I have not visited, located just south of the Montana/Wyoming state line, far out of the way of my other charges. I told Dwayne when I returned to the office that I'd made it to 35 of 38 nests. (We'd discussed earlier in the week that I should only continue to check nests through today). He seemed pleased, but I have trouble reading him, and I was unsure if he wasn't unhappy that I hadn't made it to them all.
I wonder now just how much I'll be able to accomplish during the remainder of my time here. I have four prairie dog colonies to survey for burrowing owl and mountain plover, 14 locations at which to leave bat detectors overnight, 80 spots scattered far and wide across all three counties in our field office (Crook, Weston, and Niobrara) at which to sample vegetation, and a resource management plan to write for the side-saddle bladderpod (Oooh... so much fun, right?). What will happen if I can't get it all finished? Probably nothing, but if I disappoint Dwayne, or don't meet his expectations, it could set me back if I wish to extend my internship or continue with the BLM at another field office.
I'll do what I can, I suppose.
Things outside of work, however, are looking very promising. Ayme, a 25-year-old substitute teacher from Upton that chaperoned during the BLM/Upton project in July, and I hit it off during the limited time we spent together on Bat Nights and Wildlife Wednesdays. After a few weeks of conflicting plans we've finally worked out a day to get together, and I'm not sure which of us is more excited about the prospects of spending the day with another twenty-something, college-educated, childless person. This Saturday we're headed to Rapid City for farmer's markets, Target, lunch, a movie, and, if I can convince her, a visit to Cold Stone. It will be great to break away from the montony and confines of Newcastle and spend some time in a decent-sized town. The one downside? Rapid City does not have a Chipotle. Sadness. I suppose I can't have everything, though, right? : )
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The Halfway Point
Tomorrow marks the halfway point of my work here in Wyoming. I will have worked at the BLM for 2.5 months, and thus will only have 2.5 months left! Looking back it seems as if the time has gone by quickly, but when I look forward, it feels like I have a long way to go.
Lately, work has seemed to be rolling along at a strange pace, somewhere inconsistently between too fast and too slow. I've been out checking raptor nests this week. After the labor of tracking down landowner's phone numbers and making countless (many of which were unsuccessful) calls, I managed to start visiting the nests in earnest. I mentioned last week the difficulty finding the correct nest location amidst a endless sea of grass, sage, and unmarked two-track roads. This week was no exception.
The great thing about finding nests is that they're almost always in live cottonwood trees. Cottonwoods, as you might imagine, really stick out in a prairie landscape. Unless the hills become particularly steep, it's generally easy to pick out trees. They almost always grow in drainages and draws, and are usually very tall.
The not-so-great things about finding nests is that they're nearly all in Niobrara county, more than 70 miles south of here, and they're infrequently near roads. The roads I need to be on in order to get somewhat close to a nest are a tangled mess of overgrown and under-used two-tracks that are 1) generally on private land, 2) often near houses which may or may not be occupied by suspicious and/or unhappy landowners, 3) poorly maintained, 4) washed out in several locations due to recent rains, and 5) nearly impossible to navigate.
So this week, I worked on having faith. Faith in the tolerance of landowners, faith in my navigational abilities, faith in the shocks on the Durango, faith in the universe. Sometimes my faith seemed misplaced, particularly when I was trying to find a turn off a county road. I'm fortunate enough to have access to decent maps, courtesy of the BLM, as well as a rudimentary working knowledge of GIS (or Geographic Information Systems), an information database and map-making program which has a myriad of cool features and uses.
GIS will get me a self-made map showing some roads, which I can lay over a satellite photo. Only some of the roads have been recorded on our GIS program, most of them highways, county roads, and oil-well access roads. The satellite photos help (somewhat) in finding the other roads (the mess of two-tracks on which I need to drive), because they're often visible from the sky. The problem is that cow trails, certain drainages, and dried-out creek beds also look like roads from the sky. So I may plan out a route to access a nest only to find (after spending half an hour trying to find a nonexistent two-track) that my route was based mostly on cow trails, and that I'll have to hike the additional two miles from the county road.
Then there's the opposite side, wherein I spend half an hour trying to find a two-track, decide there must not be one, and hike the additional two miles in only to find that there was a two-track, but that it's infrequently used and thus has become overgrown and difficult to see from the county road.
Such is life.
Ultimately, this week has been a mix of good and bad. Ferruginous hawks, golden eagles, northern harriers, loggerhead shrike, a pronghorn mother with triplets, deer, and an incredibly rare sighting of five bull elk out on the prairie. On the bad side lies the incredible challenge of finding my way around, the long distance between the field office in Newcastle and the nests I have to find, and two gorgeous coyotes I happened across on BLM land that had been shot and killed by a sheep rancher.
Additionally, I told Dwayne I'd have the nests all checked and my surveys of prairie dog colonies finished before the 1st of September, which puts me on a tight schedule. I initially wanted to check six or seven nests a day, but with the challenges of navigation I've fallen short. I've had to work three 10+ hours days just to visit the first 15.
What it all boils down to is this: the last five days (last Friday, and then this Monday through today) I've worked anywhere from 10 to 11 hours each day. The last three days (since this Tuesday), the weather has been hot, with temperatures of 94, 94, and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot becomes hotter when hiking around the prairie all day, where shade is virtually nonexistent. My nerves are frayed from hours spent trying to find a single tree in a sea of sage. And I'm tired of driving 140 miles or more round-trip to get to the BLM land in Niobrara county.
I so badly felt in need of a break today that I decided to go grousing. I generally go after sage-grouse on Fridays, but today I couldn't convince myself of a good reason to wait. It's amazing how palliative grousing can be. It's incredibly familiar, requires no navigation (since I memorized the routes long ago), occurs far closer to the office than nest checks, and can be very rewarding. Even moreso today, as I finally found one of my two lost females, a hen I haven't located for nearly a month and a half. Although I'm still missing a grouse, I found four of five today, a far better score than I've achieved previously.
I was feeling so good when I got back to the office this afternoon that I decided to keep the streak going and take tomorrow off. I haven't had a day off in almost two months, and working long hours I've accumulated more than five days-worth of flex time. So this evening when I left work I borrowed a movie from the library, came home, walked Capone, ordered that pizza I've been craving since last Thursday, took a shower, and crashed on the couch. Tomorrow I'll sleep in, relax, and work with the rats. Who knows... maybe I'll even take the camera out somewhere or hit up the black hills for a hike.
I hope you all are doing well.
Lately, work has seemed to be rolling along at a strange pace, somewhere inconsistently between too fast and too slow. I've been out checking raptor nests this week. After the labor of tracking down landowner's phone numbers and making countless (many of which were unsuccessful) calls, I managed to start visiting the nests in earnest. I mentioned last week the difficulty finding the correct nest location amidst a endless sea of grass, sage, and unmarked two-track roads. This week was no exception.
The great thing about finding nests is that they're almost always in live cottonwood trees. Cottonwoods, as you might imagine, really stick out in a prairie landscape. Unless the hills become particularly steep, it's generally easy to pick out trees. They almost always grow in drainages and draws, and are usually very tall.
The not-so-great things about finding nests is that they're nearly all in Niobrara county, more than 70 miles south of here, and they're infrequently near roads. The roads I need to be on in order to get somewhat close to a nest are a tangled mess of overgrown and under-used two-tracks that are 1) generally on private land, 2) often near houses which may or may not be occupied by suspicious and/or unhappy landowners, 3) poorly maintained, 4) washed out in several locations due to recent rains, and 5) nearly impossible to navigate.
So this week, I worked on having faith. Faith in the tolerance of landowners, faith in my navigational abilities, faith in the shocks on the Durango, faith in the universe. Sometimes my faith seemed misplaced, particularly when I was trying to find a turn off a county road. I'm fortunate enough to have access to decent maps, courtesy of the BLM, as well as a rudimentary working knowledge of GIS (or Geographic Information Systems), an information database and map-making program which has a myriad of cool features and uses.
GIS will get me a self-made map showing some roads, which I can lay over a satellite photo. Only some of the roads have been recorded on our GIS program, most of them highways, county roads, and oil-well access roads. The satellite photos help (somewhat) in finding the other roads (the mess of two-tracks on which I need to drive), because they're often visible from the sky. The problem is that cow trails, certain drainages, and dried-out creek beds also look like roads from the sky. So I may plan out a route to access a nest only to find (after spending half an hour trying to find a nonexistent two-track) that my route was based mostly on cow trails, and that I'll have to hike the additional two miles from the county road.
Then there's the opposite side, wherein I spend half an hour trying to find a two-track, decide there must not be one, and hike the additional two miles in only to find that there was a two-track, but that it's infrequently used and thus has become overgrown and difficult to see from the county road.
Such is life.
Ultimately, this week has been a mix of good and bad. Ferruginous hawks, golden eagles, northern harriers, loggerhead shrike, a pronghorn mother with triplets, deer, and an incredibly rare sighting of five bull elk out on the prairie. On the bad side lies the incredible challenge of finding my way around, the long distance between the field office in Newcastle and the nests I have to find, and two gorgeous coyotes I happened across on BLM land that had been shot and killed by a sheep rancher.
Additionally, I told Dwayne I'd have the nests all checked and my surveys of prairie dog colonies finished before the 1st of September, which puts me on a tight schedule. I initially wanted to check six or seven nests a day, but with the challenges of navigation I've fallen short. I've had to work three 10+ hours days just to visit the first 15.
What it all boils down to is this: the last five days (last Friday, and then this Monday through today) I've worked anywhere from 10 to 11 hours each day. The last three days (since this Tuesday), the weather has been hot, with temperatures of 94, 94, and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot becomes hotter when hiking around the prairie all day, where shade is virtually nonexistent. My nerves are frayed from hours spent trying to find a single tree in a sea of sage. And I'm tired of driving 140 miles or more round-trip to get to the BLM land in Niobrara county.
I so badly felt in need of a break today that I decided to go grousing. I generally go after sage-grouse on Fridays, but today I couldn't convince myself of a good reason to wait. It's amazing how palliative grousing can be. It's incredibly familiar, requires no navigation (since I memorized the routes long ago), occurs far closer to the office than nest checks, and can be very rewarding. Even moreso today, as I finally found one of my two lost females, a hen I haven't located for nearly a month and a half. Although I'm still missing a grouse, I found four of five today, a far better score than I've achieved previously.
I was feeling so good when I got back to the office this afternoon that I decided to keep the streak going and take tomorrow off. I haven't had a day off in almost two months, and working long hours I've accumulated more than five days-worth of flex time. So this evening when I left work I borrowed a movie from the library, came home, walked Capone, ordered that pizza I've been craving since last Thursday, took a shower, and crashed on the couch. Tomorrow I'll sleep in, relax, and work with the rats. Who knows... maybe I'll even take the camera out somewhere or hit up the black hills for a hike.
I hope you all are doing well.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
A Change of Pace
Do you ever go through phases in which you feel you have all the time in the world and yet no time at all? Here I am, with my only true obligation being work, which occurs daily Monday through Friday but rarely lasts past 5:00 PM. Otherwise my time is my own, and I may choose to spend it in whatever way I wish.
And yet, this week, I've started to feel pressure, as if the free time I do have just isn't enough. Why? Graduate school applications. Technically, I won't begin applying to grad school until October or November. But in the interim I'm responsible for contacting hordes of graduate advisers. With most schools' ecology and evolutionary biology programs (as well as, I'm sure, most other scientific fields), students must "apply" to an adviser before applying to a school. In short, when the formal application is sent to the school, a professor must already have agreed to serve as the applicant's adviser throughout his/her course of study.
There are schools at which the adviser isn't chosen until the end of the first year, but for the majority of schools the adviser must come before admission. This presents a problem of sorts, in that a graduate adviser is someone with which I'll end up spending a great deal of time, and it's difficult to judge an individual's true personality without direct interaction.
So for the past few weeks I've been researching- both graduate schools and graduate advisers- and now I must initiate contact. Every professor I feel may have interests even remotely similar to mine is a potential candidate. I have to craft a unique email to each, one that adequately summarizes my experiences, highlights my skills and potential for graduate study, and addresses why the recipient of the email may be a good fit for my intended course of study and the specific areas of ecology wherein my (and, usually, the adviser's) interests lie.
Some parts of these emails can be copied and pasted and used and reused. After all, my interests are the same, regardless of the professor. But each potential adviser studies a different organism, taxa, or ecosystem, so I must convince him/her that I understand the types of research he/she is doing, and that his/her interests will integrate well with my own.
This requires a lot of research, reading papers the professors have authored, going through their websites (assuming they have them), looking at the research his/her current grad students are doing.... As of now I have around 25 individuals on my "to contact" list, but I feel as if that list needs to grow. Many I'll likely never hear from, others won't be accepting new students for the 2010-2011 school year. Several I'll hear from but will dislike based on their response. So perhaps you can see why I feel a little pressured... the research will take a great deal of time, and everything needs to be as well-crafted as possible, since, in many cases, no adviser = no admission.
Otherwise things have been... neutral, I suppose. Work is work. I started checking raptor nests this week, which is good for a change of pace but not necessarily fantastic. Most, if not all, of the birds born this summer have already fledged (left the nest) so I'm visiting nests to look for feathers and poop as opposed to young raptors and their parents. The former isn't quite as thrilling as the latter.
Accessing these nests turns out to be a huge problem as well. Most of the BLM land managed by our field office lies in bits and pieces spread out over hundreds and hundreds of miles. Imagine a patch-work quilt where the individual squares are of differing sizes. Most of those squares are white (private), some are green (USFS), a few are blue (state-owned), and the rest are yellow (BLM). All those yellow pieces are typically small (often only between 40 and 200 acres) and surrounded by seas of white. Thus, to access any of the little pieces of BLM land it becomes necessary to contact every private landowner between the scrap of BLM land and the nearest county road to let them know I'll be crossing their "private surface" (fun fact of the day: all of the minerals in WY, regardless of location, are federally owned and managed by the BLM).
Sometimes I'll have to cross six or seven different parcels of private land to get to the nest site. This means calling six or seven different private landowners. Just tracking down the numbers is a task; one that, for the 35 nests I need to visit, took two and half days in the office. Then I have to call! Many ranchers don't see a need to own answering machines, so I can either a) call before or after my working hours, when they're most likely to be in the house, b) keep calling throughout the day in the hopes that someone will be around, or c) call a few times and if no one answers, cross the land anyway and hope that no one is around to become confrontational.
Today was my first field day going out to check nests. I set myself up to visit seven, but only managed to hit five, and just those five took an 11-hour day. Without my trusty GPS unit (RIP, GPS... RIP), I'm forced to try and navigate a myriad of county roads and two tracks with a topographic map and a compass, a nearly impossible task in the face of countless unmarked roads and the endless, open landscape.
Still, I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. Despite it being long, it was still a good day. I brought my camera today, and found several great opportunities for photography. Prairie toads, a baby mouse, prairie falcon, red-tailed hawk, loggerhead shrike, pied-billed grebe, a large mule deer buck, and a pronghorn with her two babies all made my list of sightings today (and were captured by camera) as well as two rattlesnakes, several northern harriers, countless other pronghorn, and a very far-off golden eagle (which did not end up on my SD card).
Apart from work, there's just home. I'd love to say that the rats are coming along nicely and have begun to snuggle, but it's not happening. It seems their progress has plateaued. Although they'll accept food from me and will occasionally crawl up on my lap to explore, they still dart away at any fast movement, hide in the hammock when I walk by the cage, freeze in terror when I reach towards them, and prefer to spend their free time under the bookcase as opposed to hanging out with me.
I know that it didn't take Cassie and Gems more than a week or two to trust me, to get to the point where I could easily find them and scoop them up and carry them around, and for them to look forward to getting out of the cage to explore. At this same stage in my relationship with the girls, there were already scratches up and down my legs from their little attempts to crawl from ground level to my shoulder. They were well socialized from birth, though, so I suppose I'm not really sure how long it might take for the boys to come round, assuming they ever do.
So at least on the home front, I've been a little disheartened.
I'll live to fight another day, another week. Hmm.... maybe I'll get a pizza tomorrow after work. Mmmmm.... pizza.
And yet, this week, I've started to feel pressure, as if the free time I do have just isn't enough. Why? Graduate school applications. Technically, I won't begin applying to grad school until October or November. But in the interim I'm responsible for contacting hordes of graduate advisers. With most schools' ecology and evolutionary biology programs (as well as, I'm sure, most other scientific fields), students must "apply" to an adviser before applying to a school. In short, when the formal application is sent to the school, a professor must already have agreed to serve as the applicant's adviser throughout his/her course of study.
There are schools at which the adviser isn't chosen until the end of the first year, but for the majority of schools the adviser must come before admission. This presents a problem of sorts, in that a graduate adviser is someone with which I'll end up spending a great deal of time, and it's difficult to judge an individual's true personality without direct interaction.
So for the past few weeks I've been researching- both graduate schools and graduate advisers- and now I must initiate contact. Every professor I feel may have interests even remotely similar to mine is a potential candidate. I have to craft a unique email to each, one that adequately summarizes my experiences, highlights my skills and potential for graduate study, and addresses why the recipient of the email may be a good fit for my intended course of study and the specific areas of ecology wherein my (and, usually, the adviser's) interests lie.
Some parts of these emails can be copied and pasted and used and reused. After all, my interests are the same, regardless of the professor. But each potential adviser studies a different organism, taxa, or ecosystem, so I must convince him/her that I understand the types of research he/she is doing, and that his/her interests will integrate well with my own.
This requires a lot of research, reading papers the professors have authored, going through their websites (assuming they have them), looking at the research his/her current grad students are doing.... As of now I have around 25 individuals on my "to contact" list, but I feel as if that list needs to grow. Many I'll likely never hear from, others won't be accepting new students for the 2010-2011 school year. Several I'll hear from but will dislike based on their response. So perhaps you can see why I feel a little pressured... the research will take a great deal of time, and everything needs to be as well-crafted as possible, since, in many cases, no adviser = no admission.
Otherwise things have been... neutral, I suppose. Work is work. I started checking raptor nests this week, which is good for a change of pace but not necessarily fantastic. Most, if not all, of the birds born this summer have already fledged (left the nest) so I'm visiting nests to look for feathers and poop as opposed to young raptors and their parents. The former isn't quite as thrilling as the latter.
Accessing these nests turns out to be a huge problem as well. Most of the BLM land managed by our field office lies in bits and pieces spread out over hundreds and hundreds of miles. Imagine a patch-work quilt where the individual squares are of differing sizes. Most of those squares are white (private), some are green (USFS), a few are blue (state-owned), and the rest are yellow (BLM). All those yellow pieces are typically small (often only between 40 and 200 acres) and surrounded by seas of white. Thus, to access any of the little pieces of BLM land it becomes necessary to contact every private landowner between the scrap of BLM land and the nearest county road to let them know I'll be crossing their "private surface" (fun fact of the day: all of the minerals in WY, regardless of location, are federally owned and managed by the BLM).
Sometimes I'll have to cross six or seven different parcels of private land to get to the nest site. This means calling six or seven different private landowners. Just tracking down the numbers is a task; one that, for the 35 nests I need to visit, took two and half days in the office. Then I have to call! Many ranchers don't see a need to own answering machines, so I can either a) call before or after my working hours, when they're most likely to be in the house, b) keep calling throughout the day in the hopes that someone will be around, or c) call a few times and if no one answers, cross the land anyway and hope that no one is around to become confrontational.
Today was my first field day going out to check nests. I set myself up to visit seven, but only managed to hit five, and just those five took an 11-hour day. Without my trusty GPS unit (RIP, GPS... RIP), I'm forced to try and navigate a myriad of county roads and two tracks with a topographic map and a compass, a nearly impossible task in the face of countless unmarked roads and the endless, open landscape.
Still, I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. Despite it being long, it was still a good day. I brought my camera today, and found several great opportunities for photography. Prairie toads, a baby mouse, prairie falcon, red-tailed hawk, loggerhead shrike, pied-billed grebe, a large mule deer buck, and a pronghorn with her two babies all made my list of sightings today (and were captured by camera) as well as two rattlesnakes, several northern harriers, countless other pronghorn, and a very far-off golden eagle (which did not end up on my SD card).
Apart from work, there's just home. I'd love to say that the rats are coming along nicely and have begun to snuggle, but it's not happening. It seems their progress has plateaued. Although they'll accept food from me and will occasionally crawl up on my lap to explore, they still dart away at any fast movement, hide in the hammock when I walk by the cage, freeze in terror when I reach towards them, and prefer to spend their free time under the bookcase as opposed to hanging out with me.
I know that it didn't take Cassie and Gems more than a week or two to trust me, to get to the point where I could easily find them and scoop them up and carry them around, and for them to look forward to getting out of the cage to explore. At this same stage in my relationship with the girls, there were already scratches up and down my legs from their little attempts to crawl from ground level to my shoulder. They were well socialized from birth, though, so I suppose I'm not really sure how long it might take for the boys to come round, assuming they ever do.
So at least on the home front, I've been a little disheartened.
I'll live to fight another day, another week. Hmm.... maybe I'll get a pizza tomorrow after work. Mmmmm.... pizza.
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