I’ve been in Walden since the 4th, and today we got hooked up to the internet. Yeah! It’s been fun and interesting so far out here in the west..and let me just say that Chicago has nothing on Walden as far as the wind goes, it’s insane.
I flew in on several planes to get here on Wednesday, including a prop plane from Denver to Laramie that had a grand total of two other passengers; we sat in the back of the aircraft to balance the weight. Riding in a plane that small is fun, but the wind bumps and are sort of violent, especially over the mountains:)
On Thursday we started the set up of our research stations, which took a total of two days to complete. Essentially, the bases are composed of painters scaffolding, with a wooden box set on top. The scaffolding took one day to set up, and the next a forklift came, placing the boxes on top. We have a total of five stations, one for each researcher.
Saturday was our first real day of watching the (or in our case for) prairie dogs. We’ll be switching towers for the first few days just to see which one we’d like to spend the season in. While I did not see a single prairie dog, I did observe a red tailed hawk, seven geese, three crows, and several (i.e. I think approx. 50 horned larks). If this seems a little extreme as far as observations go, just remember I was in the tower for 4 hours.
Just to take a little leap here…we mark the burrows with cattle ear tags on wire stakes. They’re numbered, and while they flap, well flail, in the wind they’re very easy to read. We do this because when a dog submerges, we have an idea of where to set traps….let me segue into briefly into marking/trapping dogs. We keep track of all dogs by marking them with black dye on their backs. Simply: males are numbers under 50, and females are numbers over 50. We watch to see if a dog comes up, check if its marked, if not we place traps around the burrow it goes down so we can catch it to mark it.
Okay, moving on, Sunday we switched towers, and I actually saw a dog! He was marked as number 30, and seemed to be mentally impaired…he would forage, and then run in aimless circles..we’ll have to see how successful he is as the season continues…..Nother quick jump…all dogs up now are males, the females are not yet out of hibernation..
I’ll post another note about today to keep this one from getting ridiculous:)
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