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.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Note to Self: Invent Fake Boyfriend
Whoo boy. Do I have a story for you all. Here I am, on Wednesday evening, as I intended (for once) posting! Really something, eh?
Despite the fact that only a few days have passed, it seems like a lot has happened. First, Dwayne reconsidered his awful request for an additional 30-60 goshawk survey points, and as a result, I am officially finished with my goshawk surveys! This turns out to be An Even Better Thing than I initially thought, because Monday morning while I was out surveying I slipped climbing down a canyon and dropped (and shattered) our GPS unit. I was very glad not to have fallen myself, but without the GPS it would be extremely difficult to call for goshawks with adequate accuracy.
Luckily, Dwayne was (at least outwardly) phlegmatic about the incident, chalked it up to the rigors of fieldwork, and ordered a replacement. In the interim, I'll be making-do with a smaller, less fancy, borrowed unit. I feel like I murdered a good friend. Not to mention the fact that I just knocked down Dwayne's yearly budget by around $700. At least I'm no longer going after goshawk, and won't be out traversing canyons for a while.
The final count? 100 surveys, and one (that's right... 1, single) goshawk. Dwayne was thrilled. Go figure.
The relief of having finished the surveys is huge. Now I can move on to checking raptor nests, collecting vegetation data in key sage-grouse habitat, surveying prairie dog colonies for several threatened bird species, and setting up our bat detectors across the field office.
This week is the last week of the Upton project. Last night our active bat surveys went off without a hitch, but around midnight it started pouring down rain and didn't stop. Middle school students aren't quite mature enough to handle a day out hiking in the rain, so the teachers decided to shift the schedule and visit museums in Hill City today, leaving the wildlife hike until tomorrow morning. No skin off my nose... I'll gain credibility for being flexible. I had plenty to entertain myself for the remainder of the day.
This afternoon I returned home from a night of camping far less tired than I have been in the previous two weeks. I've been working a more 'normal' schedule lately, and without goshawk surveys on top of camping and the wildlife hike, I not tired at all. Fantastic!
Capone pitched a fit as soon as he saw me pull up to the apartment. The evenings I camp he doesn't get his walk, and cries all the louder the following day. I put my camping stuff away quickly and got out the leash to take him along our normal stretch before he tore a hole in the siding of the apartment.
About halfway through our walk a little hound mix puppy ran up to us and then took off as soon as Capone started sniffing his direction. As the puppy tore off, a guy appeared from behind an unkempt pickup, took one look at Capone, and swooned. Most guys drool over Capone, his beefy build, his block head, and, perhaps, his 'intact' nature. The guy laughed at his puppy running from Capone, and introduced himself as "Steve." It's not unnatural for people to introduce themselves in Newcastle. Perhaps it's a small town thing.
Steve admired Capone and asked if he always pulled. I explained that he only pulled that hard when he was really interested in something (in this case, the puppy). He suggested I use the leash as a harness, and I told him that I'd tried that several times and found the slip-lead method to be most effective. Then Steve asked what I did in Newcastle, and where I was from. I assumed he was making polite conversation.
Oh how wrong I was.
(Please note: the following text should likely be rated PG-13).
He laughed when I told him I worked for the BLM, saying I had a "real job." He asked what I did for fun, and I told him I spent most of my free time in South Dakota. Then he asked if I was available for dating.
I almost choked.
Steve, a guy who must be in his late thirties, wearing a cutoff t-shirt, balding, with cigarette stains covering his teeth, and toting a dirty puppy and a border collie who has had puppies of her own at least once, asked me if I was available for dating. Perhaps on some level I should have been flattered, but I was mortified.
I didn't choke, but I did freeze, and wasn't quick enough on my feet to adequately convince him that he was sniffing up the wrong tree. I danced around an outright rejection, but he kept trying- hard. He pulled the "we already have something in common" card, pointing to the dogs. He noted that he lived in South Dakota, a place I'd already said I spend a lot of my free time. He asked me if I liked riding horses, and if I enjoyed dancing.
(I do enjoy riding horses. Very much in fact. No! Don't lead him on! No!)
I jumped on the suggestion of dancing.
"No, I don't dance."
"Really? Do you know how?"
"Nope."
"Well, do you want to learn?"
"No."
"No?"
"No. Not something I'm interested in."
"Really? You don't want to learn? It's fun."
"Seriously. No. It doesn't do anything for me."
At this point I stared slowly edging my way down the street, away from him, letting Capone pull to his heart's content.
"We should do something sometime. You need someone to hang out with?"
"Um... I have friends in Buffalo." (Not necessarily a lie.)
"Well we should get together sometime."
(Well, gosh, Steve, I might really like that, if you were fifteen or so years younger, didn't chain smoke, and were ANYTHING like me.)
"Okay, well... I think Capone and I need to finish our walk. He's going to pull my arm off." (Hahahahaha... oh god get me out of here!)
"Well, I'll be around here for the next few weeks. Keep me in mind!"
(No chance in hell, buddy.)
"Well, it was nice to meet you, Steve." (Not so much, really.)
"You're lookin' good, Jax."
(Oh jesus... don't think about what he really means, don't think about what he really means, don't think about what he really means...)
I led Capone down the street, thinking I'd avoided a near disaster, only to have my hackles raised in alarm a few minutes later when I smelled diesel and heard his F-350 pull up alongside me.
"Can I call you sometime?"
"What?" (WHAT?)
"Can I call you sometime?"
"Uh... I don't have a phone."
"Seriously? You don't have a phone?"
"No. I get by with my phone at the office." (Oh man. Oh hell. Why can't I just tell him he's creepy and I'm not interested!?)
"Do you want one? I have an extra one." At this point, he reached into his pocket; evidently, to grab his extra cell phone and give it to me.
Who ARE you? What kind of person carries around an extra phone and offers it up to a complete stranger? Are you desperate?
"Oh, no, that's okay. I don't really need one."
"Well, here, then. Let me give you my number!"
"Uh... Um... Er....Sure."
Steve then proceeded to tear the back off a pack of Marlboros, write down his number, and hand it to me through the window of his trash-ridden pickup. Perhaps my repulsion showed on my face, because he then said, "I need to clean up a bit. You know- work an' all that."
"Um yeah. Heheheh..."
Thankfully, a cement truck pulled up alongside him, he was forced to return to work, and I was able to make my escape (relatively) unscathed.
I have to wonder, though. How old did I look to him? Or did it even matter? Why couldn't I just tell him to look elsewhere? Why can't a cute, twenty-something, well-educated guy take some interest? Do they even exist in this part of the country? Or anywhere?
I'm sure Steve may be a perfectly nice guy, but I was glad I at least had the sense to tell him I didn't have a phone. His intentions may have been innocent. Perhaps he's just as lonely as I've been out here and is just looking for a friend... someone to spend time with.
Yeah.
Right.
Now I suppose Capone and I will have to find a different route to walk... at least for a while.
Note to self: invent fake boyfriend. Convince the creepy older guys that hit on you that you're in a serious relationship. His name is.... Matt. Or Andrew. Or Patrick. Or.... Jack. Name doesn't matter. Just remember the name and don't get mixed up under pressure. He lives in Colorado. Or California. Or Oregon. Or Canada. Let's go with California... more liberal. Lots of schools there. He's my age. Or a couple years older. Going to school, for a PhD, just like I'm planning on doing. Soon. It's hard to be away from him, but this gig is temporary. Yeah. We're serious. Too serious for me to be messing around with a random guy in Wyoming. Right? Right!?
Next time, I'll be more prepared.
I made it back to the apartment, shut and locked the door, and said hi to my real boyfriends. Or at least the only boyfriends I plan on having here, lest some sort of miracle occurs.
I've finally given them names. So have a good laugh over my misfortune, and then say hello to:
Archer
Bokeh
and Rizzo!
Despite the fact that only a few days have passed, it seems like a lot has happened. First, Dwayne reconsidered his awful request for an additional 30-60 goshawk survey points, and as a result, I am officially finished with my goshawk surveys! This turns out to be An Even Better Thing than I initially thought, because Monday morning while I was out surveying I slipped climbing down a canyon and dropped (and shattered) our GPS unit. I was very glad not to have fallen myself, but without the GPS it would be extremely difficult to call for goshawks with adequate accuracy.
Luckily, Dwayne was (at least outwardly) phlegmatic about the incident, chalked it up to the rigors of fieldwork, and ordered a replacement. In the interim, I'll be making-do with a smaller, less fancy, borrowed unit. I feel like I murdered a good friend. Not to mention the fact that I just knocked down Dwayne's yearly budget by around $700. At least I'm no longer going after goshawk, and won't be out traversing canyons for a while.
The final count? 100 surveys, and one (that's right... 1, single) goshawk. Dwayne was thrilled. Go figure.
The relief of having finished the surveys is huge. Now I can move on to checking raptor nests, collecting vegetation data in key sage-grouse habitat, surveying prairie dog colonies for several threatened bird species, and setting up our bat detectors across the field office.
This week is the last week of the Upton project. Last night our active bat surveys went off without a hitch, but around midnight it started pouring down rain and didn't stop. Middle school students aren't quite mature enough to handle a day out hiking in the rain, so the teachers decided to shift the schedule and visit museums in Hill City today, leaving the wildlife hike until tomorrow morning. No skin off my nose... I'll gain credibility for being flexible. I had plenty to entertain myself for the remainder of the day.
This afternoon I returned home from a night of camping far less tired than I have been in the previous two weeks. I've been working a more 'normal' schedule lately, and without goshawk surveys on top of camping and the wildlife hike, I not tired at all. Fantastic!
Capone pitched a fit as soon as he saw me pull up to the apartment. The evenings I camp he doesn't get his walk, and cries all the louder the following day. I put my camping stuff away quickly and got out the leash to take him along our normal stretch before he tore a hole in the siding of the apartment.
About halfway through our walk a little hound mix puppy ran up to us and then took off as soon as Capone started sniffing his direction. As the puppy tore off, a guy appeared from behind an unkempt pickup, took one look at Capone, and swooned. Most guys drool over Capone, his beefy build, his block head, and, perhaps, his 'intact' nature. The guy laughed at his puppy running from Capone, and introduced himself as "Steve." It's not unnatural for people to introduce themselves in Newcastle. Perhaps it's a small town thing.
Steve admired Capone and asked if he always pulled. I explained that he only pulled that hard when he was really interested in something (in this case, the puppy). He suggested I use the leash as a harness, and I told him that I'd tried that several times and found the slip-lead method to be most effective. Then Steve asked what I did in Newcastle, and where I was from. I assumed he was making polite conversation.
Oh how wrong I was.
(Please note: the following text should likely be rated PG-13).
He laughed when I told him I worked for the BLM, saying I had a "real job." He asked what I did for fun, and I told him I spent most of my free time in South Dakota. Then he asked if I was available for dating.
I almost choked.
Steve, a guy who must be in his late thirties, wearing a cutoff t-shirt, balding, with cigarette stains covering his teeth, and toting a dirty puppy and a border collie who has had puppies of her own at least once, asked me if I was available for dating. Perhaps on some level I should have been flattered, but I was mortified.
I didn't choke, but I did freeze, and wasn't quick enough on my feet to adequately convince him that he was sniffing up the wrong tree. I danced around an outright rejection, but he kept trying- hard. He pulled the "we already have something in common" card, pointing to the dogs. He noted that he lived in South Dakota, a place I'd already said I spend a lot of my free time. He asked me if I liked riding horses, and if I enjoyed dancing.
(I do enjoy riding horses. Very much in fact. No! Don't lead him on! No!)
I jumped on the suggestion of dancing.
"No, I don't dance."
"Really? Do you know how?"
"Nope."
"Well, do you want to learn?"
"No."
"No?"
"No. Not something I'm interested in."
"Really? You don't want to learn? It's fun."
"Seriously. No. It doesn't do anything for me."
At this point I stared slowly edging my way down the street, away from him, letting Capone pull to his heart's content.
"We should do something sometime. You need someone to hang out with?"
"Um... I have friends in Buffalo." (Not necessarily a lie.)
"Well we should get together sometime."
(Well, gosh, Steve, I might really like that, if you were fifteen or so years younger, didn't chain smoke, and were ANYTHING like me.)
"Okay, well... I think Capone and I need to finish our walk. He's going to pull my arm off." (Hahahahaha... oh god get me out of here!)
"Well, I'll be around here for the next few weeks. Keep me in mind!"
(No chance in hell, buddy.)
"Well, it was nice to meet you, Steve." (Not so much, really.)
"You're lookin' good, Jax."
(Oh jesus... don't think about what he really means, don't think about what he really means, don't think about what he really means...)
I led Capone down the street, thinking I'd avoided a near disaster, only to have my hackles raised in alarm a few minutes later when I smelled diesel and heard his F-350 pull up alongside me.
"Can I call you sometime?"
"What?" (WHAT?)
"Can I call you sometime?"
"Uh... I don't have a phone."
"Seriously? You don't have a phone?"
"No. I get by with my phone at the office." (Oh man. Oh hell. Why can't I just tell him he's creepy and I'm not interested!?)
"Do you want one? I have an extra one." At this point, he reached into his pocket; evidently, to grab his extra cell phone and give it to me.
Who ARE you? What kind of person carries around an extra phone and offers it up to a complete stranger? Are you desperate?
"Oh, no, that's okay. I don't really need one."
"Well, here, then. Let me give you my number!"
"Uh... Um... Er....Sure."
Steve then proceeded to tear the back off a pack of Marlboros, write down his number, and hand it to me through the window of his trash-ridden pickup. Perhaps my repulsion showed on my face, because he then said, "I need to clean up a bit. You know- work an' all that."
"Um yeah. Heheheh..."
Thankfully, a cement truck pulled up alongside him, he was forced to return to work, and I was able to make my escape (relatively) unscathed.
I have to wonder, though. How old did I look to him? Or did it even matter? Why couldn't I just tell him to look elsewhere? Why can't a cute, twenty-something, well-educated guy take some interest? Do they even exist in this part of the country? Or anywhere?
I'm sure Steve may be a perfectly nice guy, but I was glad I at least had the sense to tell him I didn't have a phone. His intentions may have been innocent. Perhaps he's just as lonely as I've been out here and is just looking for a friend... someone to spend time with.
Yeah.
Right.
Now I suppose Capone and I will have to find a different route to walk... at least for a while.
Note to self: invent fake boyfriend. Convince the creepy older guys that hit on you that you're in a serious relationship. His name is.... Matt. Or Andrew. Or Patrick. Or.... Jack. Name doesn't matter. Just remember the name and don't get mixed up under pressure. He lives in Colorado. Or California. Or Oregon. Or Canada. Let's go with California... more liberal. Lots of schools there. He's my age. Or a couple years older. Going to school, for a PhD, just like I'm planning on doing. Soon. It's hard to be away from him, but this gig is temporary. Yeah. We're serious. Too serious for me to be messing around with a random guy in Wyoming. Right? Right!?
Next time, I'll be more prepared.
I made it back to the apartment, shut and locked the door, and said hi to my real boyfriends. Or at least the only boyfriends I plan on having here, lest some sort of miracle occurs.
I've finally given them names. So have a good laugh over my misfortune, and then say hello to:
Archer
Bokeh
and Rizzo!
Friday, July 24, 2009
A Few New Friends
Hello there! I know, I know... it's been a long time since my last post. Too long, in fact. My intentions have been to update every Wednesday or Thursday evening, since those are generally my least-busy days. Obviously that hasn't happened, but I've had a lot going on.
First, an update on Capone. Although he hasn't really improved, per say, he's come to the point where our walks are manageable. I'm sure it's the consistency more than anything that's done it. Every afternoon around 4:30 PM (assuming I'm home around four) I take him on the same walk around the block. He knows what to expect and what places we'll be visiting, and thus doesn't pull quite as hard once we get started. He's also found several spots of grass along the way in which he loves to roll (lacking any semblance of greenery in his own small pen).
Second, work. I'm desperately trying to finish my goshawk surveys so I can move on to something different. I like being out in the Black Hills, but honestly, these surveys are getting tedious and repetitive. Not to mention the fact that they often take quite a bit of technical hiking and bushwhacking. For those of you who are familiar with the deceptive ploys of a certain "Smokey" the bear, you'll understand when I say that every day I think about how much easier my job would be were it not for fire suppression. I need a machete.
I've been working hard to try and finish the surveys before the end of this month, and up until today I thought I could wrap them up by the end of next week. Unfortunately, however, I came in to work this morning to find a map and a note on my desk with instructions for at least thirty additional surveys... and it's taken me nearly two months to finish the first 100! I was so frustrated with Dwayne this morning I worked up a tension headache. He knows the amount of work he's given me to complete before the end of October. It will be a tall order and take a lot of long days for me to get through everything. Adding another three or four days-worth of goshawk surveys might really be pushing it.
Aside from that little grievance, however, there have been better work-related things going on. As I mentioned in a previous post, for three weeks in July the BLM hosts three small groups of middle school students from Upton, and I've been in charge of the wildlife portion of their course. Every Tuesday evening (after a full day of, you guessed it, goshawk surveys), I meet the new group of kids and their teacher, Luke, at the Beaver Creek Campground just past the state line (I'm generally in South Dakota two or three times a day!). I'll help them start a fire and fix dinner, and then once it gets dark I'll take them out on a short night hike to a nearby pond to do some active bat monitoring.
That cool equipment I mentioned that records bat echolocation? It can be used to actively track bats as they feed, and you can hear their calls out loud. Calls are species-specific, so it's really neat (for me and the kids) to set up some spotlights and watch different species of bats forage over the pond while listening to their echolocation.
We don't finish until late, so I've been camping with the kids, because Wednesday mornings I'm in charge of an additional four hours of their program. The past two weeks we've done some bird watching at camp, then taken a drive to a nearby stock pond where we help them make plaster casts of various animal tracks. We finish the morning with a brief hike along a trail to talk about animal habitats, adaptations to different environments, feeding styles, etc. Then after lunch I usually leave and go off to do even more goshawk surveys. It makes for two extremely long days, and I've been wiped out on Wednesdays and Thursdays (thus my excuse for my lack of posts.... sort of).
There's only one more week of the Upton program, though, and then it will be back to my typical schedule. I've really enjoyed it, however. I'm not terribly fond of kids, particularly younger kids, but when they're really excited about what they're learning/I'm teaching, it's fun. Everyone likes sharing his/her expertise, right?
Interestingly, I've started to attract crowds at my evening bat sessions. The first week it was just me, the kids, and Luke. Last week it was me, the kids, Luke, our office's range management intern, one of our petroleum guys, and our recreation planner. This coming week I'm expecting myself, the kids, Luke, two other teachers from Upton Middle School, the recreation planner, two petroleum guys, one of the petroleum guys' daughters, and who knows who else. I guess word gets round about how neat it is to hear the bats. It's hard to explain, but it's a really unique experience.
So all that's work. And I'm sure by now you're wondering where these "new friends" come in to play. Surely I couldn't be talking about the middle schoolers, right?
Right.
Last weekend I decided to make a trip to Rapid City. I desperately needed groceries from a real grocery store, not one of these "food centers" that we have here in Newcastle. Second, I was bored nearly out of my mind, and there really isn't anything for me to do here during the weekends. The drive to Rapid City isn't necessarily short, although it usually only takes about an hour and half. Nonetheless, any trip made there needs to be made worthwhile, and worth the gas money. So I thought I could kill some weekend time by visiting the Rapid City mall before my grocery store trip.
The mall was small (Rapid City itself isn't terribly large), but they did have a few familiar stores. While there, however, I proceeded to make a series of bad decisions, although they very may well have been preordained. The first of these mistakes was to visit the pet store. The second was to make my way to the corner of the pet store that housed rodents. The third was to send my mom a text message with a picture of some of these rodents.
I'm sure you can see where this is going.
I abhor mall pet stores. I really loathe them. They're typically unkempt, filthy places that sell animals from mills for exorbitant prices, with no care for the social welfare, health, or breeding history of the animal. If you ever need to get really pissed off and passionate about something, start reading about puppy mills.
What initially attracted me to the store was the massive quantities and species of fish they were selling (in fact, I believe the store was called something like "Fish Here Pet Center"). I simply went in to look at the fish. From here I can partially blame the rest on my mom (although I'll hear it from her after she reads this). I made my way back to the rodent section and found, of course, two fish tanks full of rats, one with four females and one with around 12 males. I sent my mom a picture message of two of the males sitting together on an exercise wheel, and she replied "Aww... are they yours?"
And that's all it took, really, to plant the seed. I've been aching for the loss of Cassie. I spent a ridiculous amount of time with my previous two rats, Cass and Gems. Whenever I was home, they were out of the cage and exploring and interacting with me. If they weren't running around doing ratly things, they were cuddled up on my lap or in my sweatshirt. I'd become very accustomed to having them around. When I saw those fishtanks full of rats doing rat-like things, it really tore at me. So I stood there and watched them for a good fifteen minutes. And sent my mom a picture.
When she responded "are they yours?" I thought I'd essentially been "given permission" to pursue a few new rats. I'd previously pushed the idea out of my mind. After all, I have no idea where I'm going to be after I finish my internship here at the end of October, and who would I get to look after them if I end up getting a sweet job in the neotropics for five or six months?
That's what I told myself over and over again as I stood there watching them. I eventually left the store to finish my tour of the mall, but, of course, found myself back in the exact same spot less than half and hour later, just watching them wrestle and run and play. I tried to will myself to leave, but settled for engaging in a text-message conversation with my mom about whether or not I should get some. This turned into a fiasco of sorts, because, on the one hand, I knew it wasn't a good idea, but, on the other hand, I couldn't convince myself it was an entirely bad idea.
I left the store again, left the mall, and walked out to my truck, telling myself over and over again that I couldn't have them, yet all the while devastated at the idea of returning to my empty apartment in Newcastle. I turned the truck on and started to drive away, only to find myself parked in a different spot, adjacent to the mall entrance nearest the pet store. I went in again, and, again, watched them play.
Then I made the final of my stupid errors. I started naming them. Now it wasn't a bunch of rats that would grow up 12 to a fishtank with poor, non-nutritious food, dirty floors and walls, only to be sold as live snake food. It was Henry, and Stanley, that would soon either die from some disease or be fed to a constrictor. How could I stand there and let that happen to Henry? To Stanley?
So, though you've likely guessed long before now, I left the store carrying a cardboard box containing three, 8-week-old male rats. They still have their baby fur and they're ridiculously soft. On the way home I thought about my decision, and the commitment it means. I thought about how long they might live, and all the problems they may develop, and the chances that I may have to find someone to keep them for long periods of time to go off and do fieldwork, as well as the limits I may end up imposing on myself in terms of jobs if I become too attached and don't want to leave them. It was almost overwhelming. (It's also called "instant buyer's remorse," and it's genetic, and it runs in my family. Seriously.)
This certainly hasn't been helped by the fact that, as intended snake food, my new little guys are completely unsocialized, and view me as a very large, scary monster who is certainly just biding her time before she snatches a rat and swallows him whole. They dart away and hide at nearly any fast movement or loud noise, and have been cowering in corners or their plastic tunnel when I come near.
Still, this week, though slowly, we've been making progress. First it was a short sniff of my finger through cage bars, then an acceptance of treats through cage bars. Then it was poking their heads out while I passed, followed by sleeping exposed on the shelves of the cage while I worked on the computer. Finally, today, our biggest breakthroughs yet. This morning they came out from their hiding spots when I got up and got ready for work, and remained vulnerable while I opened the cage door and inserted my hand. This was followed by a lengthy sniffing session. This evening they came out of the cage to investigate when I sat quietly and offered bits of corn.
They're currently running wild in a small play area I've constructed around their cage out of cardboard boxes and duct tape. As I write this, I'm realizing that it won't contain them for long... as they become more brazen they're realizing that some of the walls are pathetic obstacles when matched against a young rat's jumping skills. I need the 3'-high plywood rat pen I built when Cass and Gems were young. Hopefully it won't be too much longer before we start to trust one another and they learn to come when called.
Their names? For some reason, I've struggled with the decision. I knew I was getting Cass and Gems weeks before they came to live with me, and I had a long time to consider my options. These guys were a little unexpected, so even now my decision isn't finalized. I'm torn between my initial choices of Gus, Henry, and Stanley, and the more unique - and less human - names Archer, Bokeh, and Rizzo. (Archer for his nifty arrowhead-shaped mask, Bokeh for his creamy-smooth greyish-brown fur, and Rizzo, short for Rizado, Spanish for 'curly', for his wildly curly tail.) I like both sets equally well, and can see where each name would fit. Therein lies the problem... One set hasn't really taken edge over the other. So until I can get past my indecisive hurdle, I am stuck with nameless rats.
I'll be sure to post pictures once the schizoid side of their natures being to ebb and I can obtain a clear shot or two.
First, an update on Capone. Although he hasn't really improved, per say, he's come to the point where our walks are manageable. I'm sure it's the consistency more than anything that's done it. Every afternoon around 4:30 PM (assuming I'm home around four) I take him on the same walk around the block. He knows what to expect and what places we'll be visiting, and thus doesn't pull quite as hard once we get started. He's also found several spots of grass along the way in which he loves to roll (lacking any semblance of greenery in his own small pen).
Second, work. I'm desperately trying to finish my goshawk surveys so I can move on to something different. I like being out in the Black Hills, but honestly, these surveys are getting tedious and repetitive. Not to mention the fact that they often take quite a bit of technical hiking and bushwhacking. For those of you who are familiar with the deceptive ploys of a certain "Smokey" the bear, you'll understand when I say that every day I think about how much easier my job would be were it not for fire suppression. I need a machete.
I've been working hard to try and finish the surveys before the end of this month, and up until today I thought I could wrap them up by the end of next week. Unfortunately, however, I came in to work this morning to find a map and a note on my desk with instructions for at least thirty additional surveys... and it's taken me nearly two months to finish the first 100! I was so frustrated with Dwayne this morning I worked up a tension headache. He knows the amount of work he's given me to complete before the end of October. It will be a tall order and take a lot of long days for me to get through everything. Adding another three or four days-worth of goshawk surveys might really be pushing it.
Aside from that little grievance, however, there have been better work-related things going on. As I mentioned in a previous post, for three weeks in July the BLM hosts three small groups of middle school students from Upton, and I've been in charge of the wildlife portion of their course. Every Tuesday evening (after a full day of, you guessed it, goshawk surveys), I meet the new group of kids and their teacher, Luke, at the Beaver Creek Campground just past the state line (I'm generally in South Dakota two or three times a day!). I'll help them start a fire and fix dinner, and then once it gets dark I'll take them out on a short night hike to a nearby pond to do some active bat monitoring.
That cool equipment I mentioned that records bat echolocation? It can be used to actively track bats as they feed, and you can hear their calls out loud. Calls are species-specific, so it's really neat (for me and the kids) to set up some spotlights and watch different species of bats forage over the pond while listening to their echolocation.
We don't finish until late, so I've been camping with the kids, because Wednesday mornings I'm in charge of an additional four hours of their program. The past two weeks we've done some bird watching at camp, then taken a drive to a nearby stock pond where we help them make plaster casts of various animal tracks. We finish the morning with a brief hike along a trail to talk about animal habitats, adaptations to different environments, feeding styles, etc. Then after lunch I usually leave and go off to do even more goshawk surveys. It makes for two extremely long days, and I've been wiped out on Wednesdays and Thursdays (thus my excuse for my lack of posts.... sort of).
There's only one more week of the Upton program, though, and then it will be back to my typical schedule. I've really enjoyed it, however. I'm not terribly fond of kids, particularly younger kids, but when they're really excited about what they're learning/I'm teaching, it's fun. Everyone likes sharing his/her expertise, right?
Interestingly, I've started to attract crowds at my evening bat sessions. The first week it was just me, the kids, and Luke. Last week it was me, the kids, Luke, our office's range management intern, one of our petroleum guys, and our recreation planner. This coming week I'm expecting myself, the kids, Luke, two other teachers from Upton Middle School, the recreation planner, two petroleum guys, one of the petroleum guys' daughters, and who knows who else. I guess word gets round about how neat it is to hear the bats. It's hard to explain, but it's a really unique experience.
So all that's work. And I'm sure by now you're wondering where these "new friends" come in to play. Surely I couldn't be talking about the middle schoolers, right?
Right.
Last weekend I decided to make a trip to Rapid City. I desperately needed groceries from a real grocery store, not one of these "food centers" that we have here in Newcastle. Second, I was bored nearly out of my mind, and there really isn't anything for me to do here during the weekends. The drive to Rapid City isn't necessarily short, although it usually only takes about an hour and half. Nonetheless, any trip made there needs to be made worthwhile, and worth the gas money. So I thought I could kill some weekend time by visiting the Rapid City mall before my grocery store trip.
The mall was small (Rapid City itself isn't terribly large), but they did have a few familiar stores. While there, however, I proceeded to make a series of bad decisions, although they very may well have been preordained. The first of these mistakes was to visit the pet store. The second was to make my way to the corner of the pet store that housed rodents. The third was to send my mom a text message with a picture of some of these rodents.
I'm sure you can see where this is going.
I abhor mall pet stores. I really loathe them. They're typically unkempt, filthy places that sell animals from mills for exorbitant prices, with no care for the social welfare, health, or breeding history of the animal. If you ever need to get really pissed off and passionate about something, start reading about puppy mills.
What initially attracted me to the store was the massive quantities and species of fish they were selling (in fact, I believe the store was called something like "Fish Here Pet Center"). I simply went in to look at the fish. From here I can partially blame the rest on my mom (although I'll hear it from her after she reads this). I made my way back to the rodent section and found, of course, two fish tanks full of rats, one with four females and one with around 12 males. I sent my mom a picture message of two of the males sitting together on an exercise wheel, and she replied "Aww... are they yours?"
And that's all it took, really, to plant the seed. I've been aching for the loss of Cassie. I spent a ridiculous amount of time with my previous two rats, Cass and Gems. Whenever I was home, they were out of the cage and exploring and interacting with me. If they weren't running around doing ratly things, they were cuddled up on my lap or in my sweatshirt. I'd become very accustomed to having them around. When I saw those fishtanks full of rats doing rat-like things, it really tore at me. So I stood there and watched them for a good fifteen minutes. And sent my mom a picture.
When she responded "are they yours?" I thought I'd essentially been "given permission" to pursue a few new rats. I'd previously pushed the idea out of my mind. After all, I have no idea where I'm going to be after I finish my internship here at the end of October, and who would I get to look after them if I end up getting a sweet job in the neotropics for five or six months?
That's what I told myself over and over again as I stood there watching them. I eventually left the store to finish my tour of the mall, but, of course, found myself back in the exact same spot less than half and hour later, just watching them wrestle and run and play. I tried to will myself to leave, but settled for engaging in a text-message conversation with my mom about whether or not I should get some. This turned into a fiasco of sorts, because, on the one hand, I knew it wasn't a good idea, but, on the other hand, I couldn't convince myself it was an entirely bad idea.
I left the store again, left the mall, and walked out to my truck, telling myself over and over again that I couldn't have them, yet all the while devastated at the idea of returning to my empty apartment in Newcastle. I turned the truck on and started to drive away, only to find myself parked in a different spot, adjacent to the mall entrance nearest the pet store. I went in again, and, again, watched them play.
Then I made the final of my stupid errors. I started naming them. Now it wasn't a bunch of rats that would grow up 12 to a fishtank with poor, non-nutritious food, dirty floors and walls, only to be sold as live snake food. It was Henry, and Stanley, that would soon either die from some disease or be fed to a constrictor. How could I stand there and let that happen to Henry? To Stanley?
So, though you've likely guessed long before now, I left the store carrying a cardboard box containing three, 8-week-old male rats. They still have their baby fur and they're ridiculously soft. On the way home I thought about my decision, and the commitment it means. I thought about how long they might live, and all the problems they may develop, and the chances that I may have to find someone to keep them for long periods of time to go off and do fieldwork, as well as the limits I may end up imposing on myself in terms of jobs if I become too attached and don't want to leave them. It was almost overwhelming. (It's also called "instant buyer's remorse," and it's genetic, and it runs in my family. Seriously.)
This certainly hasn't been helped by the fact that, as intended snake food, my new little guys are completely unsocialized, and view me as a very large, scary monster who is certainly just biding her time before she snatches a rat and swallows him whole. They dart away and hide at nearly any fast movement or loud noise, and have been cowering in corners or their plastic tunnel when I come near.
Still, this week, though slowly, we've been making progress. First it was a short sniff of my finger through cage bars, then an acceptance of treats through cage bars. Then it was poking their heads out while I passed, followed by sleeping exposed on the shelves of the cage while I worked on the computer. Finally, today, our biggest breakthroughs yet. This morning they came out from their hiding spots when I got up and got ready for work, and remained vulnerable while I opened the cage door and inserted my hand. This was followed by a lengthy sniffing session. This evening they came out of the cage to investigate when I sat quietly and offered bits of corn.
They're currently running wild in a small play area I've constructed around their cage out of cardboard boxes and duct tape. As I write this, I'm realizing that it won't contain them for long... as they become more brazen they're realizing that some of the walls are pathetic obstacles when matched against a young rat's jumping skills. I need the 3'-high plywood rat pen I built when Cass and Gems were young. Hopefully it won't be too much longer before we start to trust one another and they learn to come when called.
Their names? For some reason, I've struggled with the decision. I knew I was getting Cass and Gems weeks before they came to live with me, and I had a long time to consider my options. These guys were a little unexpected, so even now my decision isn't finalized. I'm torn between my initial choices of Gus, Henry, and Stanley, and the more unique - and less human - names Archer, Bokeh, and Rizzo. (Archer for his nifty arrowhead-shaped mask, Bokeh for his creamy-smooth greyish-brown fur, and Rizzo, short for Rizado, Spanish for 'curly', for his wildly curly tail.) I like both sets equally well, and can see where each name would fit. Therein lies the problem... One set hasn't really taken edge over the other. So until I can get past my indecisive hurdle, I am stuck with nameless rats.
I'll be sure to post pictures once the schizoid side of their natures being to ebb and I can obtain a clear shot or two.
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