I've made the commitment to try and update this thing. Since there's no internet at the house, I'm going to keep the text short and sweet!
As most of you know, I went to the Yukon-Kuskoquim Delta to do 2 weeks of feild work with the USGS. That basically entailed me driving to Anchorage, flying to the remote town of Bethel, then flying to the very remote village of Chevak. From Chevak, we took open aluminum Lund boats and traveled down the rivers, touched the Bering Sea, and banded and bled geese. The first week, we had high-school age kids from Chevak with us to help. The kids made it interesting and frustrating all at the same time!
This was during one of our first drives for the birds. Basically, you find a penninsula, have everyone spread out at the top of the penninsula, which is usually a distance of about 3 miles, then everyone starts walking at once towards the tip. It's so flat on the delta that the birds can see your figure for miles and miles, so the idea is they keep walking away from you towards the tip, where we've already set up nets for our bird 'pot'. What you see behind the Chevak girl is one of these pots. She's holding a swan cygnet (baby swan) that ended up in our pot too. Swans are the biggest things on the delta, you can see there huge white bodies for miles!
I'm taking a chloacal (butt) swab. This is to test for avian influenza
Holding a sample! There's a cackling goose in my lap, which look a lot like miniature canadian geese.
I'm holding a cackler for a bleed. We bleed from the juglar, the large vein that runs down the neck. I'm pinching it off while Jen, my feild partner, is spraying the area with alcohol.
Doing my very first bleed! It's quite intimidating to do for the first time because if you do it wrong you can end up with air bubbles in the vein, or the bird can even bleed out and die because you're tapping into one of its main bloodways.
Swans running hurriedly away after we released them. You can see the flatness!
This was our first group of kids from Chevak. They all did a great job! Except for two of the boys who thought it was a great idea to harrass the birds they were throwing. They sort of ruined the entire experience for me at first. I've never readily screamed at kids so vehemenetly or so well!
Spectacled Eider mom with her ducklings! They're hard to see, but I was so excited! This is one of the species I work with at the center, but they're really rare to see in the wild because of where they live.
Flat but sunny. I got sunburned this day walking around on the delta!
Our second feild camp, thankfully without the kids this time. These are the boats that we spend hours traveling, rain or shine.
This is the toilet. It's so flat you either dip down to the river or use the bucket that's behind the tarp, otherwise everyone can see you.
One of my field partners with a red throated loon chick. We had GPS coordenence, no nets, and we were supposed to walk around the delta trying to catch these loon chicks on the lake. With no nets! So, we're wading around in the lakes trying to catch a bird that's evolved to be one of the best swimmers around. It took us 10 hours and we only caught 2 of the 3 we were supposed to. But at least it was a beautiful day on the tundra! We were sweating and sunburned. The next day a terrible storm blew in, which happened to be the day we had to pack up camp and leave. Needles to say, not many pictures of that storm. It was so bad while we we touching the bering sea that I was afraid our boat was going to flood. But we made it!
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