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!

Sunset a la Seward

We had a beautiful sunset in Seward this afternoon! I took this picture just after 3:00pm, as the last beams of sun were hitting the side of Mount Alice in front of our apartment. My camera doesn't do the scene justice-it looked like a tropical fruit explosion on that mountainside, complete with oranges, yellows, pinks, and reds. Perhaps a rather large passion fruit had sliced itself sledding down those icy slopes. Our temperature has warmed as well--a downright balmy 36 degrees during the peak of the day. We had the sun out today, so the day lasted quite a bit longer than it usually does with the heavy light-dampening clouds around here. If those clouds had been in, I would not have been able to take a picture at 3:00 from the simple lack of a light source. We have about a 4 hour window of actual daylight right now, so the sun itself doesn't do much heating. Today, for example, we had a high of 36 degrees and a low of 34 degrees in a whole 24 hour period. It is nice to have the warmer weather coming off the Gulf of Alaska, though. It means the streets have slightly melted, so we can drive to the grocery store again!

This is an example of what the pavement looks like. This was taken this afternoon, in warm weather, so the ice isn't as thick as it has been for the past few weeks. But you can see the white line on the pavement from where the ice begins. This is what all the roads around town are like, as well. Complete sheets of ice. I wish I had ice skates and the proper ice skating skills to just get around town with, it would be much quicker and safer. As it is, everyone walks very slowly and we all wear special metal grips on our shoes so we don't fall face first onto the roadway. They plow around here, but with all the thawing and re-freezing we get being at sea level, the whole town turns into one big ice skating rink. And since the four-wheel-drive doesn't work on our truck and we live on a slight incline, that means we can't really drive around town now, even though we have a working vehicle again. Ah, such is a poor-couple's life. Good thing it's pretty to look at so we can enjoy it!

Squirrel on my Counter!

Our Thanksgiving weekend held many new adventures, including the rambunctious ice-fishing/sledding in the last blog. The latest shenanigans, however, were purely Tyler's. Tyler made his first squirrel taxidermy attempt last night, which was quite fun to watch. Here is Tyler, matching the eye of the dead squirrel to the glass eye in his hand, ensuring proper size and fit. He had to shave down the mount in order to make it the right size for the squirrel hide. Then, he had to cover the inside of the hid with an antimicrobial to kill anything that would cause it to rot. He ran into a problem, however, when the antimicrobial material caused the hid to shrink by about 50%! It consequently would not fit over the mount (although he tried--the face fit and it looked really cute, because you could give it facial expressions!). Also when he went to turn the hands right-side-out after coating them in the material, they shrunk so fast that the wrists ripped off during the flipping because they shrunk so much the hands wouldn't fit through them! He learned many lessons during this taxidermy attempt, and unfortunately all that is left are these pictures--no squirrel mount! I didn't even save the bones, since I've got too many bone projects going on at work with bird skeletons right now. We even have flesh-eating beatles at work to clean the skeletons for us! So, I get to use them for any skeleton articulation I need to do at work, but I can also bring in any roadkill/taxidermy garbage to have the beatles clean it off for me. Super fun. 

P.S. I took down the much niftier, but apparently exponentially grosser, picture of a close-up of the skinned little dead squirrel. It was cool. You could see all its little muscles and tendons. But after a few complaints, I thought it best to refrain from a prominent public viewing of said picture. 

Festivals of Feasting

Today was a glorious Sewardian Thanksgiving, with much merriment to enjoy. The day started as pictured below: ice fishing on Grouse Lake. Tyler, having grown up a native Iowan, was our expert fishing guide, showing us all the proper use of an auger, which drills a hole in the ice as shown below. Being a Washingtonian, it was my first time walking across a solid lake and drilling a hole in the ice to the cold waters below. After Tyler drilled his hole, it was my turn. I was very proud of my hole, and drilled into 10 inch thick ice almost as well as the hubby. I felt like a Weddell seal--quite possible the saddest of all marine mammals. They live in the Antarctic and have a very short lifespan. This is not due to predation or disease, but rather to the fact that in order to breathe, they have to scrape open holes in the ice with their teeth. Their entire life (between the random fish hunt) is spent scraping these breathing holes with their teeth so they don't ice over. Consequently, Weddell seals all die from starvation: their teeth get too stubby to actually catch fish with. And yes, I felt like a Weddell seal, scraping at the ice to get what I needed. However, I was quite happy in the process.

Once the holes were drilled in the ice, it was time to pick the proper bait and/or tackle. Pictured below is: Tyler in the bright orange life preserver coat (yes, there really is a built-in life preserver made of foam in that jacket), Chad (one of our new found Sewardian friends) in white on the left, and my boss Nikki on the right. Tyler, of course, is showing everyone how to properly bait their line. We were all quite grateful for his expertise. Chad and his girlfriend Sara (who is my friend from the SeaLife Center) are from L.A. Nikki (my boss) is from Texas. We are all sharing our first Alaskan winter together, and Tyler has become our expert to lead the way. It gets colder in Iowa, but our wind is worse. Pictures can't describe the force we had to deal with upon this lake. The wind was clocked at 72 mph in Seward's harbor yesterday.

Once the lines were baited, we dropped them in the hole. I never knew ice fishing poles were so tiny! The handle to the pole in the picture is literally right where the picture ends. What you see is the complete length of the rod. So miniature! Nikki and myself each got a bite from a fish, but none of them hung on long enough to reel in.

Once ice fishing was finished, we tried to find a place to sled. We drove up and down the Seward Highway looking for a place multiple people had recommended, but no one in Alaska seems to be able to give adequate directions. We ended up in Sara and Chad's backyard and made quite possibly the best snow run I have ever been on in my life. There were a myriad of airborne takeoff points, and by the end of the day, we had the thing so smooth you shot out of it like a Jamaican on a bobsled! (Cool Runnings, anyone??) We have decided to have a weekly sledding/potlatch night complete with a sledding code of ethics. It shall be quite enjoyable, perhaps comparable to the next Free Mason club.

Once the Bobbsled Snowathon was finished, we retired to a wonderful Thanksgiving feast with some friends from the SeaLife Center. The meal was wonderful, complete with a Peppermint ice cream cake and more food than any of the 10 of us could eat. It was definitely the next best thing to my Dad's home-cooked meal (nothing could have replaced that, of course). Food, Friends, and Fun, the best thing there is about the holidays!

We wish you all a happy Thanksgiving! Love to you all as well! We wish you were all here to share our adventure. We're enjoying ourselves in this beautiful, sparsely populated land!

Oh--by the way--I have a new position at the SeaLife Center! Starting on Saturday, I will be working part time in our bird department, feeding birds, cleaning bird poo, and learning all about animal training! I'm so stoked--It's exactly the experience I want to gain to put on my resume, and it'll be so much fun! Hoorays! (and yes--I work at an aquarium, and these are seabirds, much like seals and whales are marine mammals, these are marine birds. Raddness!)

Harvesting the Whale

We had our holiday party at the SeaLife Center last night, full of good food (although, coincidentally, no seafood was present at the long harvest feast buffet table) and shananegins. The above picture is from my shared cubicle at work: the interpretation department (that is, my friend Sara and I) entered the centerpiece competition for the night. We were given a little bag of goodies-a wicker cornicopia, red and yellow leaves, some plastic gourds-that we had to incorporate into a Harvest Feast centerpiece for the tables at the party. We wanted to keep with the harvest theme of the party, so we titled our piece "Harvesting the White Whale: Ahab's failed attempt". We made Moby Dick out of paper mache (he even had red googly eyes) and utilized a cheap Prince Charming Ken doll to create a proper Ahab, complete with a whaling spear. The bright neon blue is a Jell-O ocean, welling forth from our cornicopia. We had looks from everyone at the party, but we won't find out the winner until later. There was some formidable compition: a pilgram scene made completely out of chocolate and cookies, a bird coming out of a pie, an octopus battling a cornicopia. Apparently, I have quite a reputation at the center already. Everyone automatically assumed the centerpeice, with a Ken doll stabbing a whale, was my creation. Hooray. I'm a radical. At least Ahab doesn't actually win in the end--it was really a piece for animal rights. Win, Moby, win!

    I was even able to take Tyler on a flashlight tour of our aquariums we keep behind the scenes. The fish look so much creepier in the dark when they're spotlighted by a flashlight. I think one of the rockfish thought the flashlight would have been a tastey treat, too. It was attempting the heave itself toward the light at the surface. Silly rockfish.