Update

I know I've been a stranger for a while so here is an update. First of all, for Columbus Day weekend 10 of us rented an old hatchery cabin for 3 days near Ashton, Idaho. Since New York lived in and went to school in Montreal, she thought we could have a Canadian Thanksgiving while we were at the cabin. As it has been the tradition at my thanksgiving at home, I took charge of the yams. However, I did not make yams flambe. The wood stove took a while to get the hang of but not fast enough to put chard marshmallows in the yams. You can see my yams on the back of the stove . While waiting for the turkey quarters to cook, we all went to the Mesa Falls which are double Falls. The picture is the river at the very bottom of both the lower and upper falls. The mounted bear picture is from the museum at the upper falls. I am happy to report all had a blast! Now on to what I am doing at work now that we aren't trapping anymore. We are performing browse surveys. This is done by starting at a point in the big game and ACEC ranges of the field office then taking 4 steps to either the east or west. After the 4 steps we choose the nearest shrub in the 180 degrees in front of us. We record the age, form class and % of utilization, then take another 4 steps and repeat the process until we have 100 hits. This is actually a quite interesting job since by looking at the individual shrubs we can see not only it's history but the history of the area and the interaction with the neighboring micro habitats. I put a picture of us learning this a couple of weeks ago and one of me all ready to go and yes that is snow on the ground.

The End of Trapping

We are officially done trapping as of today. Last week was the last week trapping and my team caught absolutely nothing. Yesterday and today we went around and took apart all the reptile arrays. Tomorrow we will be going out to see what we are to do for the next month or so. I will be able to give you more of an update when I know more. As far as I know it has something to do with surveying California Big Horn habitat and seeing how grazed certain areas are. I have finally posted the pictures of the last rapids we went through on our rafting trip and one last picture of me measuring a deer mouse. Also there is a picture of New York being silly while we were collecting the arrays yesterday.