I've got a plan with forward in my eyes.
So, I only have a week left at Cranberry. It's sort of sad; I enjoyed my time here. I just got back from the Adirondack Ecological Center, where I went for a week with my Wildlife Techniques class.
It was nice being at the AEC; I definitely learned a lot, but it's really nice to be back at Cranberry. It was great to be able to handle the animals (I ear-tagged a chipmunk today!!! You have no idea how terrifying chipmunks actually are until you're trying to poke a hole in an angry, angry chipmunk's ear), and talk to all these professionals, but it's a little stressful being immersed in it 24/7 for four days straight. Although each person there has a basic understanding of all the mega groups of flora and fauna, they each specialize on one particular thing, and there are problems with everything, which they have no problem educating you on. Normally, I don't mind, and I enjoy learning about important issues, but... day after day, it gets so depressing, I could cry.
Take white-nose syndrome, for instance. It makes them come out of thier caves in the middle of the winter, breaking hibernation, and they go nuts and freeze to death. They grow this white fungus on their nose; it's a primary symptom. It's already killed 400,000 bats in the past two or three years. It's considered one of the most terrible ecological disasters ever to hit cave communities. Hal Caverns is considered the ground zero of the disease; a lot of caves are closed to spleunkers and tourists now.
So, I've heard about it, but I never really thought too much about it. Well, it effects species of bats in the Myotis genus. We have little brown myotis at Cranberry and at the AEC. Last night, our job was to go out and check the bats. There was a spotlight nearby, and if they flew by it, we were supposed to look for tears in the wings (this is also a sign of it, because the bats try to wipe the fungus off on their wings and rip them from trying so hard).
At the site I was at, nearly 200 bats were flying around two years ago.
Guess how many my group counted coming out of their box nests?
Zero.
One of the other sites?
Zero.
Another site counted four, a fourth site came up with five. The woman that had us doing the counts was nearly in tears. She said that little brown myotis had been roosting in those boxes for 25 years; they don't just pick up and find somewhere else. They have a homing instinct. The only thing that would keep them from returning to their summer nests is dying off. The last group came back with a count of 64. We were just glad we had bats, but... out of nearly 1,000, we have a little more than 70 left? It was really horrible, experiencing firsthand what everyone's been talking about. The woman, Charlotte, was telling us that, in some giant caves, there are colonies of almost 200,000. If you go there today, there's just this big mat of dead bats lying all over the floor, so thick that you can't avoid stepping on them. It's really terrible. Not only is this terrible for the bat population, but the bats bring in nitrogen and other nutrients, which other species depend on. :(
The longer I'm here, the more I learn about what being in this field really means. It isn't all fun and games and playing with animals all day.
I've been hearing a lot of the same sort of stuff, over and over. If you don't know for sure that you really, really want to be in this field, get out now, because if you don't love it, you won't be able to do it. Some day, you're going to learn, you can't save everything. Sometimes, no matter how much you try, your animals will die. You'll come back to a relatively safe trap, and something will have died in it. You'll accidentally give the wrong dose to an animal to sedate it, even if you triple and quadruple check it, and it won't wake up. Or, it'll just react wrong and die, even if the dosage was right. At some point, you're going to have to put animals down if they're too hurt and can't survive. If you work with the DEC, the public won't believe you, won't trust you, won't listen to you, and won't like you. They'll make you do stupid things to animals that you know is going to hurt them (ie, tranquilizing a bear while it's still in the tree instead of giving the bear space to let it come down by itself, THEN tranq it. A lot of bears are seriously injured because of this). People will fight with you, and tell you that your job is stupid and unnecessary. People will question your goals in life. You're going to get pooped on, and scratched, bitten, and covered in pee, and you do NOT let that animal go, because it can do more damage to both you and itself than you can do to it, and you have a responsibility to that animal and its life. It's not always easy, it's not always fun, and occasionally, you'll go home tired, muddy, bleeding, and crying at the end of the day, and you need to be ready for it.
It's really scary to hear, but, really, I'm still looking forward to it. It's difficult, but if you really love working with animals, you'd never be able to imagine yourself doing anything different.
Listening to all these people in wildlife professions is really inspiring. The DEC employee that came to talk to us, and told us he had almost died once, before he worked with the DEC, doing a project in Alaska. He had tranq'd a moose, and it ran into a marsh before the drugs took effect, and started drowning. He and his team just stood there, waist-deep in marsh and muck trying to keep this animal's head above water until they could get a truck over to haul it somewhere safer. He said that, had that moose rolled over, he and everyone else on that side of the moose would have drowned.
But these people don't really seem to care. They're in this field because they want to make a difference, and you have a responsibility to those animals. The guy working with the pine marten project (I had no idea how fucking CUTE martens were before this week) was so awesome to watch. You could just tell by the way he talked that he really cared about them, and went the distance to make sure that the animals he caught were in minimal danger and distress. He really thought out everything, from boxes around the traps to protect them from rain and wind over night, to padding the bottom of the trap with ferns and leaves, to finding out that they had a sweet tooth and giving them some jelly to calm them down after he caught them. He said he never likes releasing them while they're hungry and dehydrated, so he gives them Gatorade (sweet and full of electrolytes!) and feeds them some jelly, and just squatted there by the trap, putting some jelly on a flat stick and feeding it to the marten patiently, over and over. You can really tell when someone loves what they do, and puts the animal's safety and happiness as a priority. With the way he treats them, I'm amazed more of the martens don't get trap-happy and end up as recaptures!
So, even though it is a kind of depressing field, especially now, there's still so much good, and so much that you can get out of it. I really can't think of anything I could do more rewarding.
^American Marten
It was nice being at the AEC; I definitely learned a lot, but it's really nice to be back at Cranberry. It was great to be able to handle the animals (I ear-tagged a chipmunk today!!! You have no idea how terrifying chipmunks actually are until you're trying to poke a hole in an angry, angry chipmunk's ear), and talk to all these professionals, but it's a little stressful being immersed in it 24/7 for four days straight. Although each person there has a basic understanding of all the mega groups of flora and fauna, they each specialize on one particular thing, and there are problems with everything, which they have no problem educating you on. Normally, I don't mind, and I enjoy learning about important issues, but... day after day, it gets so depressing, I could cry.
Take white-nose syndrome, for instance. It makes them come out of thier caves in the middle of the winter, breaking hibernation, and they go nuts and freeze to death. They grow this white fungus on their nose; it's a primary symptom. It's already killed 400,000 bats in the past two or three years. It's considered one of the most terrible ecological disasters ever to hit cave communities. Hal Caverns is considered the ground zero of the disease; a lot of caves are closed to spleunkers and tourists now.
So, I've heard about it, but I never really thought too much about it. Well, it effects species of bats in the Myotis genus. We have little brown myotis at Cranberry and at the AEC. Last night, our job was to go out and check the bats. There was a spotlight nearby, and if they flew by it, we were supposed to look for tears in the wings (this is also a sign of it, because the bats try to wipe the fungus off on their wings and rip them from trying so hard).
At the site I was at, nearly 200 bats were flying around two years ago.
Guess how many my group counted coming out of their box nests?
Zero.
One of the other sites?
Zero.
Another site counted four, a fourth site came up with five. The woman that had us doing the counts was nearly in tears. She said that little brown myotis had been roosting in those boxes for 25 years; they don't just pick up and find somewhere else. They have a homing instinct. The only thing that would keep them from returning to their summer nests is dying off. The last group came back with a count of 64. We were just glad we had bats, but... out of nearly 1,000, we have a little more than 70 left? It was really horrible, experiencing firsthand what everyone's been talking about. The woman, Charlotte, was telling us that, in some giant caves, there are colonies of almost 200,000. If you go there today, there's just this big mat of dead bats lying all over the floor, so thick that you can't avoid stepping on them. It's really terrible. Not only is this terrible for the bat population, but the bats bring in nitrogen and other nutrients, which other species depend on. :(
The longer I'm here, the more I learn about what being in this field really means. It isn't all fun and games and playing with animals all day.
I've been hearing a lot of the same sort of stuff, over and over. If you don't know for sure that you really, really want to be in this field, get out now, because if you don't love it, you won't be able to do it. Some day, you're going to learn, you can't save everything. Sometimes, no matter how much you try, your animals will die. You'll come back to a relatively safe trap, and something will have died in it. You'll accidentally give the wrong dose to an animal to sedate it, even if you triple and quadruple check it, and it won't wake up. Or, it'll just react wrong and die, even if the dosage was right. At some point, you're going to have to put animals down if they're too hurt and can't survive. If you work with the DEC, the public won't believe you, won't trust you, won't listen to you, and won't like you. They'll make you do stupid things to animals that you know is going to hurt them (ie, tranquilizing a bear while it's still in the tree instead of giving the bear space to let it come down by itself, THEN tranq it. A lot of bears are seriously injured because of this). People will fight with you, and tell you that your job is stupid and unnecessary. People will question your goals in life. You're going to get pooped on, and scratched, bitten, and covered in pee, and you do NOT let that animal go, because it can do more damage to both you and itself than you can do to it, and you have a responsibility to that animal and its life. It's not always easy, it's not always fun, and occasionally, you'll go home tired, muddy, bleeding, and crying at the end of the day, and you need to be ready for it.
It's really scary to hear, but, really, I'm still looking forward to it. It's difficult, but if you really love working with animals, you'd never be able to imagine yourself doing anything different.
Listening to all these people in wildlife professions is really inspiring. The DEC employee that came to talk to us, and told us he had almost died once, before he worked with the DEC, doing a project in Alaska. He had tranq'd a moose, and it ran into a marsh before the drugs took effect, and started drowning. He and his team just stood there, waist-deep in marsh and muck trying to keep this animal's head above water until they could get a truck over to haul it somewhere safer. He said that, had that moose rolled over, he and everyone else on that side of the moose would have drowned.
But these people don't really seem to care. They're in this field because they want to make a difference, and you have a responsibility to those animals. The guy working with the pine marten project (I had no idea how fucking CUTE martens were before this week) was so awesome to watch. You could just tell by the way he talked that he really cared about them, and went the distance to make sure that the animals he caught were in minimal danger and distress. He really thought out everything, from boxes around the traps to protect them from rain and wind over night, to padding the bottom of the trap with ferns and leaves, to finding out that they had a sweet tooth and giving them some jelly to calm them down after he caught them. He said he never likes releasing them while they're hungry and dehydrated, so he gives them Gatorade (sweet and full of electrolytes!) and feeds them some jelly, and just squatted there by the trap, putting some jelly on a flat stick and feeding it to the marten patiently, over and over. You can really tell when someone loves what they do, and puts the animal's safety and happiness as a priority. With the way he treats them, I'm amazed more of the martens don't get trap-happy and end up as recaptures!
So, even though it is a kind of depressing field, especially now, there's still so much good, and so much that you can get out of it. I really can't think of anything I could do more rewarding.
^American Marten