Fishin with a Mission

We went ice fishing once again! We took a friend of mine, Gwen who I get to work with in the Avian department, and her most amazing dog Rory on a trek through the woods and drilled a few holes to fish. This is a picture of Tyler with the auger, drilling the first hole. 

Close up of the drilling! The ice was about a foot thick that he was drilling through. It's quite a bit of work, so Tyler was Mr. Man and drilled holes for all of us. I believe it put a few unneeded chairs on his chest.  Fish on! Tyler and his little ice fishing pole bringing up a tastey lunch! And here's lunch! A beautiful rainbow trout. I think it might be the prettiest fish to come out of a lake, the tastiest too.  And this is Rory in her fleece sweater Gwen made especially for her. I never knew a dog could look so svelt in fiber.  The lake was in a very pretty location with mountains and spruce trees all over the place. The wind wasn't even blowing while we were out there, which is a rare thing indeed! It was a beautiful day in the woods, and quite the smashing time around Seward. 

I thought I would share more pictures of the pretty birds I've been working worth lately. Below is Sesi, an arctic tern. They breed in Alaska, then fly south to Antarctica for the winter, then fly all the way back for the summer again. She came from a rehab organization because she can't fend for herself in the wild. She's too habituated to humans unfortunately. 

This is Dory, the tufted puffin, in her winter plumage. She's a pretty bird who likes lots of attention in the summer time. This is the king eider. He has pintails on his back that make him look like a mac daddy 1950's cadillac. He also has a large yellow nose that's a salt resevoir. It allows him to drink and process salt water.  These are our red legged kittiwakes. They are found on only a few islands in the Berring Sea and the end of the Alleutians. The one in the middle with the black beak was a chick, born this summer. And this is one of the stars of the touch tank! It's a Heart Crab. Do you see its spiky legs?? I hope you enjoyed more animals!

Nanimals!

I thought I would share some animal adventures, since many of you are suffering the effects of my constant bird chatter. Below is a picture from work, it's actually my staff picture on the avian staff wall.  Kristen at work! Here I am with a horned puffin at work. This is Aleutian. He was born at the SeaLife Center and is still considered a juvenile. If I'm remembering right, he's about 4 years old, but puffins live for a long time-we have one tufted puffin that's 24. This summer will probably be the first time he gets breeding plumage. And yes, the white spot on my jacket is his poo. However, puffins can projectile poo up to about 4 feet, so he did poop more while he was on my shoulder, but it ended up far away on the floor where it was easy to clean.  Since it is winter, none of the puffins have summer breeding plumage. This is another horned puffin, Rain, in his winter plumage. 

   Below is a horned puffin with its breeding plumage. Pretty! In the background is a tufted puffin in breeding plumage. These are the two species of puffins in Alaska kickin back on some wood in our bird aviary this summer.  This is a tufted puffin taking a bath. Hooray for clean! This is a rhinoceros auklet. It's another species of puffin, but it was originally classified as an auklet. But since I'm talking about puffins: here's another!!!! Tyler's fishy fun lead to this animal encounter: Dolly Varden from an ice-fishing extravaganza! There's more of them in the Pyrex dish underneath his hands. We cooked these suckers up as our first fresh water Alaskan fish. We were going to take them to a party, but their flesh turned this grayish color we were embarrassed about, so we took little wieners instead. It was tasty the first day, but the next day this fish made the worst fish tacos I've ever had. And I was quite sad, because I really like fish tacos. 

A Long Time Coming

It's been quite a long time since last I posted, so here's our Christmas update! Festivities started with the tree hunt. We dawned the snow shoes and headlamps and tromped into the woods just outside of town. We called and whooshed, imitating the sounds of wild trees, hoping the perfect tree would show itself through the snowy moonlight. Sure enough, it did. The spruce tree shined in a beacon of moon glow, so Tyler commenced the cutting. After a few scrapes and vocal 'ouchies' from the poky nature of the spruce needles, the tree was ours! We dragged our conquered stick of wood home. 

Once home, we decorated it like a true Barenjager tree, complete with chili pepper lights on the top, and new LED lights below. The LEDs are pretty intense. Don't stare directly at the light.  

A few days later, I decided it was time for a festive cookies. These are holly cookies that some old biddy of Tyler's from back in Iowa used to make for him. I don't know who she is, I just know she's old, and still tries to send him these things every year. They didn't come this year, so to prevent saddness, I created! Shazam! They're pretty tasty. 

We made it to Colorado and back for Christmas, but sadly no digital pictures to share of the fun. We did manage to get stuck at the Seattle airport for the solstice. Damn Washington snow in December. I grew up wishing for a white christmas, hoping for snow, and the one year it comes it completely gets in the way. We spent a day and a half waiting on stand-by lists to get out of Seattle and actually see the family. Thank goodness we made it, after the most uncomfortable night's sleep we've ever had.

These are some post-solstice photos I took from the deck of the SeaLife Center a couple days after we got back. It's actually very windy and cold while I took these pictures, but the water's all steamy and weird, so you can't tell. It was a beautiful moment of sun for the day! And each day we're getting more of it! That's about as high as the sun gets right now, it rises over the mountains on the left, gets that high, then sets over mountains that are on the right. It makes for some beautiful bright pink colors on the snow. But it means you can't actually feel the heat from the sun's rays if you're standing in it. We have about a 1 degree difference in temperature from the middle of the night to the middle of the day. And we've had winds above 70 mph this week, so with the windchill factor, we're reaching the negative double digits in freezing temps. Adventure!