When I woke up this morning it was windy, and I thought we might not get much done. I was wrong.
After breakfast I had a little time to retreat to my room, and I called my grandma. I usually call on Sundays, but I'm still getting used to the schedule here, as well as being three hours behind her rather than 7 hours ahead. Afterwards, the team had an orientation for the snowmachines. Cory has a lot of experience on them, and Helen spent a couple weeks up here in February helping on a different project, and most of the work was done by snowmachine, so the orientation was mostly for me. There were only two machines to borrow, so I rode behind Cory while he showed Helen the Toolik ground squirrel sites, since we won't be trapping there before she leaves on Wednesday, and she needs to have an idea for when she comes without him next spring. The ride? Terrifying. I am clearly not an adrenaline junkie. But luckily, neither is Helen. Less than halfway through, Cory's machine started acting up, and I switched to ride behind Helen. It was far more relaxing, and I felt better about having to drive one later on afterwards. Next time I will have to wear my big gloves and the bunny boots, as my hands and feet were frozen when we finished.
Can you spot the caribou?
Next stop was the Atigun field site. We drive there in about fifteen minutes. We brought back our squirrel from yesterday to release, and we looked for new animals to trap. We are basically looking for squirrels that are up and about, and then set the traps in the area they were or next to the borrows they went into. Some of my students may be wondering why we weren't randomly sampling. In this case, we are basically sampling the whole population, rather than a subset as you would do to estimate population size, for example. It is a long term study, and we are trying to gather as much data as possible on all of the squirrels in the area.
How about now?
We were there for a few hours and while we were there, the wind died down and I actually became really warm by the end. I had to unzip my coat, fleece jacket and half-zip running shirt to get some fresh air and cool down. Towards the end of the day we saw some more caribou. Can you spot them in the first picture?
This is with the 24x zoom.
We had a good catching day, with a total of five squirrels, including our first female and a male that hadn't ever been caught before. We even re-caught the male we had just released, but we sent him on his way again. Back at the lab, we processed each of the males, one before dinner and three after. Today we started collecting cheek swabs, minuscule ear tissue samples, and fleas (parasites), which we found on one male. We will process the female tomorrow, as she will need more time to get the collar with the accelerometer as well as the temperature sensor implant.
Today I remembered to take a picture of a centrifuged blood sample.
I snuck away at 8:30pm to start writing while they finished up processing the blood work in the lab. It's been a good day and I'm looking forward to trying to get to bed early tonight. I'm exhausted, but I'm also setting my alarm for 1:00am to look for the Aurora Borealis, the northern lights. It should be just dark enough at that time to see them if they are visible, and the forecast for tonight is good. Check out the forecast if you get a chance. It's a cool site.
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/Alaska
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