HedwigtheStrange

I can't believe it's been nearly a year since I my last entry! It's been a busy and most excellent year. This summer, I've had the pleasure of working with the US Forest Service, which has been exhausting and brilliant. I've been hiking all over the Pike National Forest getting attacked by goshawks, hooting to owls (a legit survey method!), tracking Abert's squirrels, hugging Ponderosa Pines (to putting flagging around them mostly, but I've been known to hug a tree just because), netting bats, watching the caterpillar of a threatened butterfly species hatch from its egg (which could be the first time anyone has ever observed this), and watchi

I'm in Minnesota for just one more month and that fact has put me in a bit of a reflective mood. I can't wait to go back to the mountains of my home, but coming to Minnesota was exactly what I needed - a new place with new people and new things to learn. And I've learned SO much! Like the kind of intense concentration it takes to sit at a microscope hunched over one sample for an entire day and find ALL of the mangled insect bits. And how to wash bees and then dry them such that their hairs pouf up and you can see the exoskeleton beneath for identification purposes. And how to trap small mammals and what shrews smell like (a sort of sweet fer

Minnesota: so much more than snow and Michelle Bachman and snow! In fact, Minnesota has been all-around awesome so far! Today I went out to explore the bogs, walking on wooden boards out to see pitcher plants (!!), Labrador tea, marsh marigolds, tamarack, pine, and of course, lots of sphagnum moss. It's an eerie environment with the dark water and the unsteady ground and stunted trees. It's strange to me that there is so much water here, very very different from the arid area where I was before. There are lakes everywhere you look and so there are also frogs and turtles all over the place! Today we rescued a rare Blanding's turtle from the m