Oh, yeah... and I hiked up to the top of the mountain 8 times.

You would figure that keeping up with a weekly blog wouldn’t be that difficult but when you are working eight hours a day in front of a computer, opening up a laptop once you get home is about as tempting as…say… attempting to gargle porcupine quills. That said, here is another go at it.

The last week and a half has been a fair mix of busywork and adventure. I am currently acting liaison between thirty SCA students and the External Affairs office of the fish and wildlife service. The last few days have been all about making sure all of my interns are settled in and cozy at their various National Wildlife Refuges (I’ll link you to a few articles on the program once they get put up on the Region website). In addition to this I have been making factsheets, flyers, editing articles and teaching myself how to edit video and use Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Premiere. This may not sound like much but it is pretty frustrating to learn Adobe having grown up on Microsoft platforms. Upon mentioning this to my partner she immediately seized the opportunity to dissuade me from ever purchasing a Mac.

Once of my favorite tasks this week was to jump on board with a last minute adventure to Mount Mansfield near Burlington Vermont. I had the opportunity to go and film some biologists performing a study on the Bicknell's thrush, a migratory bird that lives only on mountaintops in the North east, that is of course when it is not in Haiti. I was able to participate in the capture of these creatures which entailed playing an angry recording of a male thrush next to a mist net and waiting for angry male thrush to fly into the net. Once caught the birds were placed into their own personal cloth sack, weighed, measured, processed and then hung up on a coat rack for the rest of the night. Bicknell's thrush are most active at dawn and dusk so once we were done processing them it was around 11 pm. Releasing the birds at this time would have most likely resulted in bird loss through predation as they would be unable to find a safe roosting site in the dark. What the biologists were really looking for were any of the 18 birds they set lose the previous year with geo-locators tied around their legs. Unlike a GPS, these small devices recorded information by keeping track of the length of any given day as well as the date. Because light levels in any place in the world are a known variable, when cross referenced with the time and date of the readings the biologists are able to tell exactly what route the Bicknell's thrush took to get to its winter home. The people who work for the discovery channel must get a real thrill out of their job, I felt like some rookie Steve Irwin wannbe out there with my little camcorder. I’ll get the footage up for you folks once I process it. Oh, and also note the picture of me handling the thrush, the biologists were nice enough to let me process and release a bird while I was there. And so what is the lesson of the day? When you are interviewing a biologist, make sure you turn your microphone on.