Sunday, October 21, 2012

July 8 - final day


Five of our shadows cast by the midnight sun after dinner one night

If the weather co-operates tomorrow this will be my last night at the Canning River Delta. It is pretty strange whenever you move from one stage of your life to another, it always seems like a partially unfathomable concept until it happens. I won’t put waders on every morning, no more huddling around the heater in the cook tent, and no more toting shotguns and bear spray when away from camp. For that matter, no camp! No more wilderness either though, living among stark beauty untouched by the hand of man.

Not as many grizzly bear tracks in civilizations, such as these ones that I found in the muddy margin of a pond today

Today was your average foggy and windy day here, mercifully bugless, and nice to have a few more nests hatch. All in all it has been an incredible season and I have learned so much about a large variety of things, from how to do complicated formulas in Excel to the best way to find Pectoral Sandpiper nests.

This was the back of my field notebook for the season, with the pencil scrawl on the left the numbers of the nests I found, and the categories on the right being the different habitat classifications that we had

After we get back to civilization I hope to write a scientific paper with Scott on some of the data collected this year, likely studying how faithful to the nest site birds are from year to year, quantifying it using our nest data from the past three years! We’ll see how it goes. 

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