Time remaining in Alaska: 9 weeks, 3 days
New bird count: 5
I'm afraid I don't have any of my pretty pictures today, but I wanted to update despite that, before everything I wanted to write an entry about overwhelmed me.
Let me tell you specifically what I'm doing in Alaska this summer. Starting next Thursday, I'll be out in the field for approximately 2 and a half weeks, at a remote field camp. The whole purpose of this field work is to look at nesting birds on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The majority of the nests we'll be looking at
are waterfowl nests, but we'll be looking at shorebird, seabird, and other nests as we find them. The point of this research is to keep track of breeding activities in this very important area to sustaining the populations of these birds, including birds that only nest here, including the handsome bird to the left, the
emperor goose (not my picture).
For the remainder of my time here, I'm working on environmental education. Originally, I thought this would be involving education of elementary school kids, but a local school teacher was hired to work on the curriculum for the local schools. My job is to develop some "canned" PowerPoint presentations on conservation issues to be used with the native populations out on the refuge. Relations between the refuge and the
Yupik are interesting, and a bit delicate, and I hope to go into more detail about the situation later. When I first arrived at the bunkhouse, there were a number of special law enforcement agents, who had come to the refuge in assisting in delivering a ticket to a native individual using lead shot. This is just an example of the kind of issues involved, and actually added another presentation for me to prepare - one on the dangers of lead shot.
There are, of course, "other duties as assigned" as the Service puts it. Today was one of those other duty days. During this time of year, the refuge's airplanes are switched from typical landing gear to floats. Since the refuge is absolutely speckled with bodies of water, its easier to use the habitat as a natural landing strip. Today was the first day of the process of switching to floats. Since I'm here, and kicking around until my field work starts next week, I was sent out to work at the hangar. I was hesitant at first, since I agree with Jeremy Clarkson's statement of "My greatest fear is manual labor, you know that," b
ut the aviation crew was so grateful to have me there and so excited about teaching me about the planes, I actually enjoyed myself. My job was to first to scrub off the mineral staining on the sides of the floats with bleach, then wash and polish them. After that, I had to pump the antifreeze out of the floats, which had was there to prevent any water from freezing and damaging the pump. In my usual style, after one embarrassing accident I performed my duties with speed and accuracy. The accident in question was when I sat down on the edge of a trailer to scrub floats already attached to a
de Havilland Beaver (which you can see an example of on the right), and my meager weight managed to tip the trailer and plane backwards. I scrambled to brace it, and the plane very slowly came to rest of on the back of the floats, with no damage to the plane. This, of course, was within a few minutes of starting to work at the hangar. Fortunately tipping it back up right and holding the trailer in place with some boards was easy work, and I was very wary of tipping over trailers the rest of the day.
This week, I hope to go back to the hangar to finish up my handy work, and I'll take some pictures of the
Cessna,
Husky, and de Havilland that the aviation crew was so eager to teach me about.
As a reward for all my hard work, my boss took me out on a boat ride around the Kuskokwim River. But that will have to wait for another night, since my hard work today is catching up with me.
Note how the trailer is tipped over? It wasn't my fault this time. I think this is my favorite one. Not only is it the classic bush plane, but the orange and black color scheme is a reference to the paint job on Clarence Rhode's Grumman Goose airplane. Clarence was an important part of the development of the Service in Alaska, and went missing in 1959. The plane wasn't found until two women hiking in the Brooks Range came across the wreckage in 1978. I also got to "hold the leash" on this plane, i.e. keep the plane from floating away until our pilot got to the launch site.
This is one of our Cessna 206's. It's actually a U206, a utility model. It's the favorite plane of our supervisory biologist.
And here's our Piper Super Cub, a cute little plane. As I found out, the body is NOT made of metal, but of painted canvas. A few of the biologists told me they've seen it crumpled and crushed a number of times, and I said that if I was ever invited to ride in it, I would say, "No thank you."
