Lassie, the Spruce Chicken

Really need to remember to put bug spray in the van! Lauren and I went to pick up our traps at Zero Lake today and nearly got eaten alive. We also got led down the trail by a spruce grouse for awhile. We were told by a local while camping at Hidden Lake that most people here call these spruce chickens — wanting to blend as much as possible, so do we. This particular spruce chicken soon earned the name Lassie as it would settle on the trail some ten yards in front of us, then startle up as we drew close and settle on the trail another ten yards away. This continued for so long that we began to ask it, “What’s the matter, Lassie? Timmy fell down the well? Show us the way, Lassie the Spruce Chicken!” Er ... maybe you had to be there.

- Rachel

Speaking "A-lab-skan"

Late last night, the other half of our lab group flew in. They are all here to mainly work in UAA’s lab, using fish caught in the area. Matt Wund is the lab’s postdoctoral research fellow. His work is based around studying how different populations react to the selective pressures of new environments. Anna Mazarella, a junior biology and studio art major, is here to not only help out in the lab, but to take as many pictures as possible. Jeff is a junior psychology major and joins Sophie and me as a rookie to Alaska. His first few weeks, he’ll be working in the lab with Matt and Anna, but eventually he’ll be working with Kat Shaw, a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut who graduated from Clark with her fifth-year Master’s in 2005.

The four of us had to explain a few things to our new counterparts: we have developed our own peculiar language in the two weeks we’ve been up here. Lauren calls it “A-lab-skan.” For example, the night we got back into Anchorage we had some fortune cookies with our dinner and one of the lottery numbers on the back of someone’s fortune was 4. Lauren mentioned that it was mildly amusing because 4 is an unlucky number in Japanese culture, and I remarked that I had heard that was because the word for the number 4 was very close to the pronunciation of the word for “death.” Well, this was hilarious to us at the time. Who designs a language system where you count “one, two, three, death?” And ever since we do not say “four” anymore; we say “death.” So we became a “fearsome deathsome” with “death” chairs around our kitchen table… etc. That’s right. You can never take us too seriously up here.

Also decided to label ourselves using the military phonetic alphabet due to the street names surrounding Wolf and Kings Lakes, which are all named Echo, Sierra, Tango, and so on. Lauren and I are Alpha Team — making her Alpha Leader (Alpha One) and me Alpha Two. Jana and Sophie are Bravo Team — Jana being Bravo Leader and Sophie, Bravo Two. And because the other three are not in the field, we emphasized their difference by passing over Charlie and labeling them Delta Team. Matt is Delta Leader, Anna, Delta Two, and Jeff, Delta Three. This has led to some very interesting phone conversations. Especially because we spelled people’s names out using said alphabet and thought it was hilarious that Matt became “Mike Alpha Tango Tango.” Which quickly led to us calling him Captain Tango Tango.

Maybe you all didn’t need to know that. Poor Matt.

- Rachel

Other examples of the fun things the lab gets up to – sticklecookies! Here we see many nuptial-colored males courting a gravid female.

On Rabbits and Moose (Okay, Just One of Each..)

Here are some Alaskan pics I've taken so far. The top photo shows Anna and Jeff at Rabbit Slough. We saw the moose, 2nd photo below, at Whale Lake. He regarded us for a few minutes, and then plopped down to relax.

- Matt Wund

Blame It On the Rain

The weather treated us surprisingly well when we were down on the Kenai. It was cold in the mornings and at night, but for the most part we had sunshine.

Today it rained. All day. Not hard or anything, but enough to make life interesting.

Our first day in the Mat-Su was spent in a new car. Poor Pewter’s “maintenance required” light came on, so we took him back to the car rental and got a Highlander for the weekend. Unfortunately, this car had no roof rack, so Jana and Sophie had to leave the canoe behind for awhile. But that meant that we got to trap incredibly efficiently for a few days. Today we experienced the extreme bugginess of Irene Lake and the interesting trek via ATV trail and muskeg to Whale Lake.

- Rachel

A moose skull seen on the trail leading into Whale Lake.

Homeward Bound

So, yesterday we made some rune stones to help us make decisions. For example, the decision of who showered first when we got to our unit.

I won that one.

After pulling all our traps from the day previous, we headed home to Anchorage. We rolled into town around 9pm after a slightly harrowing ride on the highway due to high winds. Pewter handles well for a minivan, but he becomes a high profile vehicle in the wind with the U.S.S. Clifford tied on top. Tired, but excited to sleep in real beds, we got some dinner and the keys to our unit on the UAA campus.

Jana and Sophie batten down the hatches.

Showering for the first time in seven days was GREAT.

Our unit is fantastic; there are four single bedrooms and a very nice galley kitchen. This will be the main unit, so Jana, Sophie and I will move out into the second unit a week from now when our other lab members arrive. For now though, we have another week to enjoy being a fearsome foursome. And tomorrow we get to settle into our normal commute out to the Matanuska-Susitna area (also known as the Mat-Su). All is well with the world.

- Rachel

Lauren measuring the softness of the carpet in our unit.

The Shish-Kablog

This is our last night of camping. The UAA residence halls open tomorrow, so we’ll be traveling back to Anchorage and moving into our main unit tomorrow night.

Met some people today at Encelewski Lake who know Rich King! It is a small world, and very satisfying to know that the locals almost always remember the “stickleback people.” We make an impression.

Traveled down to the tip of the Kenai Peninsula today and threw some traps in Deep Creek and Anchor River, which require treks through salt marsh to get to. The beach was relatively unoccupied today, but we’ve been seeing the beginning of the Memorial Day campers and RVers. I don’t blame them for taking advantage of the time while they have it; despite the still chilly air, the ocean is gorgeous with the mountains as a backdrop and the sky yawns wide here, blue and inviting.

Took a brief trip down to the Homer Spit (“Spit Happens!” or “A quaint little drinking town with a fishing problem.”) for a souvenir run. Bought postcards and gifts for the poor people back home who are missing all of this.

Halfway through our drive off the spit to our next trapping site at Mud Bay, we spied a bald eagle. We’d been seeing eagles ever since we moved farther south, but this one was sitting on a signpost, just chilling. We drove right up to it without it ruffling a feather. Quietly dubbed him “Ebert” and went to drive away after taking about twenty pictures each. And then we spotted Ebert’s cousin not fifty yards down the road! More pictures. The wildlife and its proximity to human life up here is fairly mind-blowing.

We made our last night camping one for the books. Made an awesome campfire, sang all the camp songs we knew, cooked up some mouth-watering kabobs (and hot-dog-a-bobs), and rounded it out with some roasted marshmallows.

- Rachel

On the Road Again

As the title clearly states, another day of driving. Nothing terribly exciting until the end of the day when we left our Hidden Lake campsite and moved down to Ninilchik in order to trap farther south.

- Rachel

The Midnight Mud Attack of 2008!

Speaking of Skilak Road … We had quite the eventful night. After throwing all of our traps and picking up the water quality duo from their last lake, the four of us spent some time in the Soldotna McDonald’s charging our cell phones and the ATV battery we bought to use with the trolling motor on the canoe. (This was a fun four hours in which we sat in the back of the restaurant charging our equipment, using the wifi from the Safeway across the parking lot, and eating Subway sandwiches for dinner.) It had already been a long day, and Lauren and I still had twenty traps to throw back at Hidden Lake near our campsite. After seeing some of our first moose on the slowly darkening ride home from Soldotna (and what Lauren and Jana suppose was a great-horned owl in a tree off the side of the road), the three of us who weren’t driving drifted off to sleep. Lauren took it well, but Skilak Road is an adventure by itself even in the light. Nineteen miles long, it is entirely dirt and gravel – very fun in a minivan in the middle of May when things have been muddy and the vehicles with four-wheel drive who have been using it create large ditches down the middle and sides of their road by taking the mud puddles at good speed. Pewter takes these areas slowly and carefully, and Lauren had gotten through every bad patch just fine. Until…

The front left wheel slipped off a ridge of hard-packed mud that Lauren had been carefully navigating and fell down into a small ditch of mud. The rest of us woke up to see the sign for our campsite maybe fifty yards down the road. Sweet. So we got out to assess the situation. Lauren had her window rolled down to talk to us while we figured things out — so when we went to push and she went to accelerate… Well. Let us just say that Pewter and Lauren both were very artfully decorated with the plume of mud that fountained into the air as the front wheel escaped.

Made it back to Hidden by 12:45, grabbed our twenty traps, and threw them before heading off to bed. Nothing brings a good field researcher down!

Today, we made a friend at Longmere Lake, a place Lauren has tried and failed to trap for the past two years. Very nice people, but talkative! Alaskans are great for conversation. They will tell you their life’s story and expect yours in return. Also very curious about what we do — but the questions are fantastic. Especially when we meet kids. They ask the most random, pointed questions about what we’re doing. It’s a great deal of fun.

- Rachel

Hazy Shade of Winter

Lauren, left, and Rachel take a moment

Water quality girls still figuring things out. Today, I learned how to count and preserve fish in the field. It’s so crazy and amazing to actually see this fish in the wild after studying them for years in a classroom. It’s very early in the season; we’ve talked to a few locals who’ve told us that most of the lakes around here only just iced out a few weeks ago. Apparently, it was an unusual winter weather-wise. We heard that Anchorage had a few feet of snow only two weeks before we arrived!

And yet … the sun was beating down on us enough today that Lauren and I actually turned on the air conditioning in Pewter for the time we spent riding between lakes. Oh, the humanity.

Also! Saw a black bear today while driving down Skilak Road. It stood on the side of the road for a moment, nonchalantly watching us as we exclaimed and scrambled for the video camera before trotting off into the woods again.

- Rachel

On Trapping Lakes and Flagging Tapes

First day! Lauren taught me how to set traps in about two minutes while standing on the muskeg at Watson Lake. Muskeg is great stuff; generally, one can refer to it as bogland or marsh. It consists of sphagnum moss and other vegetation in various states of decomposition and is home to all sorts of interesting plants — like berry bushes (cranberry, blueberry, cloudberry, crowberry), carnivorous pitcher plants, wild calla lilies, and Labrador tea plants. Can one tell that we have been trying hard to identify every new plant and animal we stumble across out here?

Sophie works in the field

Trapping the threespine stickleback sometimes requires the skills of a ninja warrior. In general, it is as easy as putting together a small minnow trap, throwing it out into the water, and tying it off to vegetation at the water’s edge. We usually throw about ten traps in a lake and leave them overnight before coming back the next day to count and preserve the fish we’ve caught. Where we trap at a lake is a matter that becomes more delicate. Some lakes do not have public accesses, or the public access is so well-traveled that we wouldn’t want to throw traps there because curious Alaskans and/or tourists might pull them up to check them out. Or worse, think we’re doing something wrong and remove our traps completely! Our ninja skills include finding isolated spots to throw traps, hiding our flagging tape and ropes from inquiring eyes, and making friends with nice homeowners who might let us throw traps off their property.

Traps, field notebook, and a jar of preserved fish. What more could you need?

To throw a stickleback trap: tag them (with permit number, Lauren’s name and contact info, and a line indicating that the trap is for research purposes), flag them (with the same information), toss them out parallel to shore, tie the rope off to nearby vegetation and discreetly hide the flagging tape. Our waterproof notebook (rightly labeled “Collector’s Bible 2008 Part 1”) gets a sketch indicating where each trap is, air and water temperature, GPS coordinates, and directions to the lake if we don’t currently have them. All of this information, as well as the counts we get for fish collected the next day, later gets copied neatly into a notebook for future referencing available to anyone using the collections from 2008.

The water quality girls had their first run today. They managed to set up their canoe with necessary equipment, but unfortunately have forgotten the chlorophyll filter in the lab in Massachusetts! Lauren and Jana have attempted to “MacGyver” a replacement filter, but the sponge that was supposed to be the filter got damp and the sealant hasn’t properly sealed. No worries. John will send the real piece of equipment a.s.a.p. to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge for us to pick up on Tuesday.

- Rachel