The Snow Returns

(Dated 3-8 May, yes I know I’m super behind) Thursday the weather was nice and I was switched to Kitefield. Jeff and I each took a side (I did the one I’d had before, which was good) and then we also had one of the new girls with us to train. It was so nice to be back on Kitefield after working at Hailstone, because I got to see all my old squirrel friends again and there was no crazy snow or wind or super steep hills. It was a little crazy, though, just because the other girls had basically never been to the site before and I was delayed a lot trying to help mine (Stephanie) learn how to scope and handle the squirrels. But we still dealt with some new squirrels and caught some of the females we were trying to trap (one unfortunately escaped while Stephanie was handling, but it wasn’t a super important one so it was okay, but she got nervous about her handling abilities after that and had to be persuaded to do the next one). The trick now is that even though most of the adult squirrels have already emerged, there’s still some yearlings out there, and they are especially confusing because a lot of them still have marks from last year (the juveniles get marked with symbols and some still show up a year later). We saw this one squirrel that looked like it had a bullseye mark on its back, which meant that we could tell that it was a new squirrel even though it had a mark, but other times it was trickier. I caught an adorable little yearling that had a question mark on its back, which was really cute (and got me singing the Taylor Swift song “I heart question mark” even though I don’t really know it). I turned it into “dot P dot,” or Penelope. I also marked a few other squirrels, but Stephanie has the data in her book so I don’t remember all of them. One of them was Heidi, though. I got to see my old lunch buddy “J” (Josephine) again, which was fun. I was scoping at the top of the hill and I noticed her grooming not too far away from me. It was pretty adorable, since she was sitting curled with her tail up in front of her face and she kept alternating pulling her paws down her face (super cute) and cleaning her tail. Awwwwww. Friday I went up to Hailstone with Jessica and Kaitlin to do a good day’s work and try to clear up some of the confusion of the finicky squirrels. As we were heading out of the park in the morning we saw a swoop and a great grey owl perched on the fence. Jessica and Kaitlin had seen it before, since it tends to hang out in the same stretch of road, but I hadn’t seen it yet and they still didn’t have a picture, so we pulled over and it was very obliging and kept flying to fence posts that were closer to us! Here’s one of it flying, and another with it posing, it has cool green eyes and was probably getting ready for bed haha.

It wasn’t actively snowing at Hailstone, but there was still a good 8 inches or so of snow on the ground, which made navigation pretty sluggish. I at least wasn’t on the meadow (aka steep hill) side this time, but I still had to wade through snow and up and down hills trying to catch and see my squirrels. The nice thing about the snow was that it made the squirrels super easy to spot, although it was frustrating in some areas because it made going up and down slopes more difficult so once I saw a squirrel on the cliff edge and just couldn’t get to it, because I might have slipped and fallen off a cliff (obviously not so good…). This is what it looked covered in snow, and this is what a squirrel looks sticking out of the snow.

I did trap and mark one new squirrel, 39, and it was so anxious to get away from me that it literally jumped off a cliff to get away! (well, it was actually just a slight ledge and it was only like a 2 meter drop, but still). The Hailstone squirrels tend to squirm and jump inside the pillowcase, and then they leap into the air when you let them go. Good times.

I did spend a bit of chill time when I was waiting for Kaitlin to finish to make a snow macaw, as promised to Carlos (one of the Peruvian researchers from last year who commented on fb on one of my snow pictures that I should make a snow “guacamayo”). It came out pretty good, as you can see, and I named it “Snow-basco,” after Tabasco, the chubbiest and most mischievous of the macaws at the Tambopata Research Center.

Here’s me scratching his head, which the real Tabasco would sometimes let you do, if he was in a good mood (you had to be careful so he didn’t bite your finger off).

As were driving back we came to this stretch where there were lots of cows and some marshy area on the right. All of a sudden up ahead of us a moose decided to cross the road and disappeared into the brush. Fortunately it wasn’t very close to us and we were slowed down anyway, but it was crazy to see this giant moose casually cross the street. I haven’t seen any with antlers yet, I don’t know if they’re not in season or what, but it was fun to see closer up than the last time (maybe the third time I see a moose I’ll get a picture). Storytime continued through much of the ride on Friday, with the addition of Jessica in the car. I had finished the intro during the snowy day on Wednesday, and so I then I made it through the first chapter (The Bride, which is all about Buttercup and the “farm boy” etc through the pirates’ attack), giving all the characters various British accents, which seemed appropriate, and then proceeded through the second chapter (The Groom) although that one is really short and only a few paragraphs about Humperdinck and the Zoo of Death. It was a mutually beneficial storytime, since everyone enjoyed listening (although the illegal version I have on my kindle is kind of annoying and I have to pause a lot because the pages change really slowly, the worst pause was right in the middle of Buttercup’s long “I-love-you” monologue to Westley) and I enjoyed reading all the different voices. Saturday we were supposed to divide our forces and conquer Kitefield and Hailstone, but we woke to snow again, which kind of changed the day. Jeff went out alone to confirm that nothing was going on at Hailstone (it was blizzarding again, so no squirrels there) and we were supposed to wait until the snow cleared before checking in on Kitefield. This didn’t really happen, though, since it snowed and/or rained most of the day and then not much was going on at the site late in the afternoon (we couldn’t trap anyway, because it was too wet). So we sort of got a snow day, which was nice, and I went back to sleep in the morning and then had a leisurely quesadilla lunch (it was Cinco de Mayo, after all). Most of the other researchers came to the kitchen too and we hung out chatting for much of the rest of the day. Along with the two new girls, there’s also a guy, Jesse, who’s working on red squirrels and I think is finishing up his PhD (or maybe this is his last year of research, I’m not sure). Anyway it was pretty chill, although we felt bad when Jeff came back since we had been relaxing most of the day and he had had to wait at the other site for a while because he couldn’t get back through the gate until the end of the day. But it was nice that he let us stay at the camp since he knew that probably the squirrels wouldn’t be doing anything anyway. It was Kaitlin’s day off and she made some nice bread that poofed up nicely, and we ate some of it with the cheese sauce that Jessica was making for mac and cheese that evening. We also finally played Spot-it, which I had brought with me and is an awesome game of noticing matching symbols on cards. We felt a bit bad when Jeff came back, since it had been a pointless day for squirrels all around, but at least we got to hang out. I started making bread in the evening since I was going to get a day off on Sunday (also felt a bit bad for Kaitlin, since it’s always better to have a day off when no one else does, and since everyone basically was free, it was like having a snow day on the weekend for her). Sunday I slept in and spent most of the morning finishing reading The Princess Bride for the umpteenth time (we haven’t gotten any farther in the read-aloud version, though). I then made some yummy leftover lunch out of Jeff’s peanut sauce and rice and watched one of my old episodes of Doctor Who (I actually just got all the rest of the seasons from this guy, Johnny, who just got here and is studying the sheep with this couple who live in the trailer place and have two teeny babies, anyway but he has Doctor Who and Dr Horrible and the Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother plus other cool shows I haven’t seen so I should be set on TV shows for a while, though I will continue to save them for special occasions). I took a little walk in the afternoon. We had been working so hard that none of us really wanted to hike or anything on our days off, since we needed to rest our legs. But since we basically had off the day before I decided I wanted a little walking time, since it was so nice (it keeps alternating between crazy snowy days and super nice sunny days, I don’t quite understand mountain spring weather). I walked up the road in the opposite direction of our site, since I’d been wondering what was around the corner. I didn’t get too far (the road is super long, anyway) but I did get some nicer views of the mountains, passed by one of the other ground squirrel research sites, startled a few deer, and discovered a funky marshy lake bit nestled between some trees. Here’s a pic of Canadian geese, actually in Canada.

On the way back I ran into some cyclists, who asked me the way to the waterfalls, but of course I told them that I was a researcher and had no idea where anything was and that this was my first day to go anywhere outside the site. The guy had a super cool accent, though, either Scottish or Irish (he didn’t say enough for me to tell for sure), so that was fun. In the evening I went to check on my bread, which was in the oven to rise, partly because it’s warmer in there and partly so that no mouse or anything would run over it. Unfortunately when I came back in the kitchen some of the other researchers were preparing leftover night, and had preheated the oven without checking to see what was inside (I’m so used to doing this, that I didn’t even think to put a note on the front, I will definitely leave a note next time!). So then when I was taking my bread out of the pot, I noticed that the bottom was kind of crumbly and partly cooked. The bread hadn’t been working out great anyway, it didn’t rise well, so I was a bit depressed that it had been, quite literally, “half-baked,” but I finished making it anyway, and it didn’t taste too bad. It was kind of flat and dense, but nice and crunchy and olive-oily, and people finished it up at the next day’s breakfast, so it must have been decent. Monday Jessica, Jeff, and I spent the majority of the day on Kitefield, setting off for Edmonton in the afternoon because Jessica and I had to take driving evaluations at the University of Alberta so we could drive the 4-wheeler truck. The day was pretty successful, I caught 9/14 females that I was supposed to target, although I was also a bit spacy for part of the day (I kept getting stuck checking traps and didn’t eat lunch until pretty late). At various points in the day I misplaced my peanut butter and my scale, which wasn’t too bad since I could just retrace my steps and find the stuff in the last place where I had checked traps, but it was kind of silly because I wasted time wandering around looking for my stuff instead of finishing with the traps and eating lunch. Oh well. There were also some females that were just not showing up to the traps, which was a bit frustrating, especially since some had been on the list to be caught for multiple days, but what can you do?

The drive up to Edmonton was long (over 4 hours), but uneventful. We stopped at a pita place (“Extreme Pita”) which was pretty good and chatted a lot of the time about random things. I’m still trying to figure out my side project topic. I thought I had a good idea about dispersal, because I’ve noticed that a lot of the squirrels seem to wander a lot (although sometimes they are following me to get the peanut butter – J and B are culprits) and Jeff had said that no one has looked at their data for that yet (even though we’re constantly recording it when we catch and then release a squirrel so we know where it is) but then when I was talking to him it seemed like lots of stuff had been done on that. I’m having trouble finding an interesting topic that hasn’t been done, though I also haven’t spent much time reading the articles, but hopefully soon I will think of something. We got to Jeff’s place around 9 and were greeted very enthusiastically by his two black dogs. The Lab was named Evening, and the border collie (who was especially jumpy and excited) was named Cricket (because she jumps like a cricket, apparently). They were sweet and it was fun to interact with animals that were pleased to see you, instead of annoyed that you were flipping them up and down and painting their backs with weird symbols. Shawna, Jeff’s girlfriend, had made chocolate cheesecake that was very tasty, and we learned that it had been Jeff’s birthday on Friday, but he hadn’t told us, so we were sad about that and decided that when he comes back to the station we’ll have to at least make him a cake or something. We also enjoyed taking showers and using the (very fast) internet, so that was nice. Tuesday we took our driving evaluations, which took about an hour each and weren’t a test as much as they were a check on our observational skills and car maneuvering. We learned how to get back on the road if we have 2 wheels go off one side, and how to properly get back on the road from a hill through turning the car at right angles. The car we used was a sort of van thing, and wasn’t quite as big or awkward as the truck we would be eventually driving, but was still good to learn to use. The only thing I got reprimanded about from the guy (who was pretty chill, if overly enthusiastic about traffic law) was for stopping too close behind someone at a stoplight, which was mostly because I hadn’t learned how the brakes worked in the car even though I had been slowing down for half a block to prepare for the stop. Both Jessica and I passed fine, and went out to eat lunch while we were waiting for the official permit to come through. The place that Jeff recommended was closed, unfortunately, and everywhere else around there was really expensive, but there was a poutine place nearby, so we decided to try that and then see if we were still hungry. We got the traditional variety (vegan gravy and cheese curds over fries) and it was pretty good. I was glad that I had the chance to try it in a decent place. Then we wandered around looking for some more food, but couldn’t really find anything except fast food. I did end up getting a bubble tea at this random place (kiwi, with real fruit) that was pretty sweet, but good. We checked in with Jeff that we had got our certification, and then set off again for the long ride back. I drove most of the way, switching in Calgary for our epic shopping venture. We spent over 2 hours shopping for the camp (fruit, veggies, dry good staples, toilet paper, cheese, etc) and for our camping trips, which go in a separate budget. We also got some goodies for ourselves, like some chocolate, and I got some ricotta cheese so that I could make lasagna next time I cooked (it came out really good, but that happened later in the week). It took way way longer to shop than we had expected, so we didn’t get back to camp until around 10:30, which was pretty crazy. Storytime is becoming the thing to do while driving, which is perfectly fine with me, as long as the others don’t mind driving so that I can read for them. I had gotten Artemis Fowl for my Kindle so I read that while Jessica drove back from Calgary, since we didn’t want to continue the Princess Bride without Kaitlin. It was pretty fun to read, although we didn’t get very far (just a little bit into the first Holly chapter) but I enjoyed doing my Irish accent for Artemis, a deep voice for Butler (which would turn out to be rather similar to my Fezzik voice, but we’re not there yet), and trying to decide what voices the fairies should have (Root was particularly fun, of course). That’s all for now, I actually haven’t had time to write anything more current, but I’ll get on that as soon as possible, although I can’t guarantee that I’ll have any better photos. Here's a last one of me at snowy Hailstone.