Lying on the floor next to his own severed head
... a head, which at this time has no name...
... I know his name...
It was Captain. He was a young muskrat. Happy, carefree, as young male muskrat are wont to be. Until the day that some coyote took him down, carried his poor body out into the woods, and ate him.
OK, so this is a back-notice, because I have been far too busy to actually post about it in a timely fashion.
Some of the moments I enjoy most about my job is the retrieval of dead bodies. Yeah, a bit gruesome, but this is the moment of truth: did the collar slip off, or is there a body? What killed it? When, by what? How can I find out? It is fulfilling childhood detective dreams. The radio signal from the muskrat I had named Captain (because I caught him next to one of our boats) was on mortality signal (a change in the rate of pulses, activated if the collar hasn't moved in 8 hours). It was raining lightly, but mortality signals are not to be ignored. I was bundled up, my radio was tucked into a water-proof pouch. The principle is simple: keep moving in the direction of the signal until you find the source. I knew I didn't have far to go - the woods doesn't extend for more than 200 meters before the road. If you have never tried walking through dense underbrush before, you may have trouble understanding how slowly one ends up moving. This was a young stand of cherry saplings; there was about 6 inches of clearance between stems. I'm pretty small, but encumbered with a yagi antenna (luckily folding) and radio, it was pretty slow. Did I mention it was raining? Move forward a meter by stepping over this branch, while holding that stem sideways, and ducking under these others. A game of limbo in multiple directions at once. Bend and contort around branches to unfold the antenna and check the direction to the transmitter. Refold. Decide on a bearing a little off from where you want to go, but is not as fraught with horizontally tangled branches and vines. Move forward. Repeat. It took about a half-hour of this to move about 50 meters, to a small clearing under the canopy of a tall pine tree. The first thing I found is a leg. Not the leg of my muskrat, though; it belonged to an equally unfortunate rabbit. Within reach from the rabbit remains, I found the transmitter I had been looking for. The collar had been chewed, rather enthusiastically, by something that had also chewed, well, the rest of the muskrat. Six inches from the collar, I found Captain's head. Or at least, I assume that a decapitated muskrat head six inches from a collar belongs to the muskrat bestowed with the collar. Hence the title to this post, which is what promptly popped into my head. I debated: do I take the muskrat head back with me? It can't have been dead for more than 48 hours, because it has barely begun to smell of decay. I considered the logistics. One hand is already full carrying the antenna and radio, the other is needed to clear a path. My choice is to put Captain's bloody head into my pocket.
And I consider it.
Unfortunately, I didn't really have a storage space for the head if I brought it back, unless I held it for two days, including five hours in the car, to bring it home (where I have a Dead Things freezer). So sadly I let it lie.
The whole event was particularly sodden, especially as half-way back I stepped down and there wasn't in fact land, but standing marsh water, and I went in to my knees. Friggin cold, that was.
Since then, one more trip to the field to close up shop and meet with colleagues, and two grant proposals (one submitted, the other chucked to said colleagues for comments). In teaching, I've been introducing some really cool new material that I learned in a seminar just a couple of weeks ago (genomic imprinting), running a new fruit fly genetics lab despite the fact that I neither work in fruit flies or genetics, getting a chemical allergy to the agents used to clean the floors in our building, administering exams whose results will make me cry, and generally panicking over the rapid denouement of the term. Somewhere in there I managed to have a real life, like a lovely time out to dinner with friends last night (see sushigrade).
Turkey Day represents a few days of not having to drive.
BioGeek Fact of the Day: G is for Gulo gulo, the wolverine. Because each wolverine requires an extremely large territory (up to 2000 square kilometers!), these animals occur at very, very low densities even in undisturbed habitat. They are primarily restricted to arctic areas (more southerly distributions having been wiped out by humans). The ecology of this mesocarnivore (mid-sized meat-eater) remains little studied. Its reputation for cunning and ferocity is perhaps well earned; it appears to be good at evading traps, and has been observed to defend kills against the much more massive wolf.
... I know his name...
It was Captain. He was a young muskrat. Happy, carefree, as young male muskrat are wont to be. Until the day that some coyote took him down, carried his poor body out into the woods, and ate him.
OK, so this is a back-notice, because I have been far too busy to actually post about it in a timely fashion.
Some of the moments I enjoy most about my job is the retrieval of dead bodies. Yeah, a bit gruesome, but this is the moment of truth: did the collar slip off, or is there a body? What killed it? When, by what? How can I find out? It is fulfilling childhood detective dreams. The radio signal from the muskrat I had named Captain (because I caught him next to one of our boats) was on mortality signal (a change in the rate of pulses, activated if the collar hasn't moved in 8 hours). It was raining lightly, but mortality signals are not to be ignored. I was bundled up, my radio was tucked into a water-proof pouch. The principle is simple: keep moving in the direction of the signal until you find the source. I knew I didn't have far to go - the woods doesn't extend for more than 200 meters before the road. If you have never tried walking through dense underbrush before, you may have trouble understanding how slowly one ends up moving. This was a young stand of cherry saplings; there was about 6 inches of clearance between stems. I'm pretty small, but encumbered with a yagi antenna (luckily folding) and radio, it was pretty slow. Did I mention it was raining? Move forward a meter by stepping over this branch, while holding that stem sideways, and ducking under these others. A game of limbo in multiple directions at once. Bend and contort around branches to unfold the antenna and check the direction to the transmitter. Refold. Decide on a bearing a little off from where you want to go, but is not as fraught with horizontally tangled branches and vines. Move forward. Repeat. It took about a half-hour of this to move about 50 meters, to a small clearing under the canopy of a tall pine tree. The first thing I found is a leg. Not the leg of my muskrat, though; it belonged to an equally unfortunate rabbit. Within reach from the rabbit remains, I found the transmitter I had been looking for. The collar had been chewed, rather enthusiastically, by something that had also chewed, well, the rest of the muskrat. Six inches from the collar, I found Captain's head. Or at least, I assume that a decapitated muskrat head six inches from a collar belongs to the muskrat bestowed with the collar. Hence the title to this post, which is what promptly popped into my head. I debated: do I take the muskrat head back with me? It can't have been dead for more than 48 hours, because it has barely begun to smell of decay. I considered the logistics. One hand is already full carrying the antenna and radio, the other is needed to clear a path. My choice is to put Captain's bloody head into my pocket.
And I consider it.
Unfortunately, I didn't really have a storage space for the head if I brought it back, unless I held it for two days, including five hours in the car, to bring it home (where I have a Dead Things freezer). So sadly I let it lie.
The whole event was particularly sodden, especially as half-way back I stepped down and there wasn't in fact land, but standing marsh water, and I went in to my knees. Friggin cold, that was.
Since then, one more trip to the field to close up shop and meet with colleagues, and two grant proposals (one submitted, the other chucked to said colleagues for comments). In teaching, I've been introducing some really cool new material that I learned in a seminar just a couple of weeks ago (genomic imprinting), running a new fruit fly genetics lab despite the fact that I neither work in fruit flies or genetics, getting a chemical allergy to the agents used to clean the floors in our building, administering exams whose results will make me cry, and generally panicking over the rapid denouement of the term. Somewhere in there I managed to have a real life, like a lovely time out to dinner with friends last night (see sushigrade).
Turkey Day represents a few days of not having to drive.
BioGeek Fact of the Day: G is for Gulo gulo, the wolverine. Because each wolverine requires an extremely large territory (up to 2000 square kilometers!), these animals occur at very, very low densities even in undisturbed habitat. They are primarily restricted to arctic areas (more southerly distributions having been wiped out by humans). The ecology of this mesocarnivore (mid-sized meat-eater) remains little studied. Its reputation for cunning and ferocity is perhaps well earned; it appears to be good at evading traps, and has been observed to defend kills against the much more massive wolf.