Some National Geographic Sh*t aka Eider Banding

In August I had the opportunity to help out with banding male eider ducks off the coast of Nova Scotia - this is some real National Geographic Sh*t! I'm not kidding, this type of field work is why I became a biologist in the first place!

Some background: Eiders are the largest ducks in the northern hemisphere. They have several stages of plummage and moult twice a year. Females raise the young without any help from the males. For more detailed information about the common eider, check out the Hinterland Who's Who site here.

This sets the stage for catching eider ducks to band. In late summer, males create large "rafts" offshore and moult their breeding plummage. For 2-3 weeks they cannot fly as they grow back their flight feathers. This is when we target them because otherwise they would just fly away as we approached.

This is where it gets exciting. It's a big operation, including a fishing boat, two zodiacs and a helicopter. The helicopter flies to find the rafts, which can be seen from the air. Then the helicopter radios the fishing boat, which travels to the rafts (you can spot them on the water once you get in the vicinity).

Raft of ducks

Once the fishing boat finds the birds, the zodiacs deploy with two people each. They stay ~180 degrees from each other and circle the eider ducks, forcing them into a tight cluster.

Circling the ducks

Once the ducks are in a dense group, the helicopter flies over the fishing boat and zodiacs, and a gunman (harnessed to the helicopter) shots a net gun into the group, efficiently netting the birds. Each net is packed with an inflatable tube, which is triggered by water. Once the net inflates, a zodiac sweeps in and the person in front drags the net of birds into the boat. The birds are then brought to the fishing boat for processing.

Netting the ducks - they learn fast and start to dive!

On the boat the birds are untangled from the nets and packed into fish crates to await processing. Processing includes sexing (99% are male but you get a few immature females too) and banding birds, which are then released. The aim is to process as quickly as possible so the birds don't spend too much time out of water.

Picking birds from the net

We can learn a lot about eiders by banding them. Duck bands that are recovered elsewhere in the world can tell us what locations they migrate to and their flight paths. Age can also be derived from bands, some of which have been found 20+ years later!

My first banding!

Needless to say, it was an exciting two weeks, and I look forward to helping again next year :)

The states finally got something right!

And those things are USGS Webinar Courses for Natural Resource Managers. The United States Geological Survey has a "Status and Trends of Biological Resources Program" which is a great source of information for any biologist, especially those working in academia or government.

The courses are free, all you have to do is register for them. You can watch them live through an online webinar window, which is great because you can also ask questions at the end of each webinar. If the timing of the webinar is inconvenient, you can also watch the recordings at a later time - and all slides/notes/data are provided!

Upcoming courses are listed on the website (link below) - and many of them have been done before, so you can even review the notes before the course starts to see if the topic is one that will be useful to you. I've already completed the "Modelling Patterns and Dynamics of Species Occurrence" course, and am currently signed up for the "Learn R By Example" course.

You can access the website and register for courses here.

Care to go WAPing?

The first opportunity I had to do some fieldwork with my new position came about due to an agreement between Regional Services and the Wildlife Division. Due to staff changes, the Wildlife Division became responsible for checking a portion of the Regional Service's WAP (Wood Acquisition Program) submissions from private woodlot owners.

These WAP submissions indicate whether the wood buyer practiced silviculture or planted saplings on privately owned lands. It is Regional Service's responsibility to go out and check the sites (they are provided with maps and GPS coordinates). Sounds simple, right?

1. Go to site.
2. Check site for silviculture or saplings by counting trees on a grid centered on the affected site.

Piece of cake! Except...

Most forestry technicians do these in the fall, after the ferns die off, or in the spring, before everything (i.e. ferns and thorny plants) grow up. The technician who trained us to check these sites was incredulous at the thought of us doing them at the height of summer. He suggested it was as close to hell as we were ever going to get, and he wouldn't even consider doing them himself.

Both of which I was really glad to hear before we ever got started. There was an end-of-the-month deadline, so delaying them was not an option.

So we travel to the field camp (which is a fire station in central NS - great lodgings!) and got to work.

Calling it hell was being nice. I have never experienced something so awful as trudging through chest deep brush from a thinning operation, all the while getting dive bombed by horse flies that can bite through jeans. Or struggling through 6-ft tall trailing thorn vines, which wrapped around you and dug into you through jeans. Or pushing through thick, thick regrowth only to disturb a wasp's nest and get stung (5 times, through jeans). See a pattern?


The above image is me at one of our first sites... All geared up with my 1m measuring stick. I was still enjoying it at this point. That didn't last long.

Between the heat, the sweat, the blood, and the exhaustion, we managed to get the WAPs completed before the deadline. And now that I know what doing WAPs is all about, if the same opportunity comes up next year - the summer students can have at'er (unless it's in the spring, of course - then I'm game) :P

Back at it!

So it's been a loooong time since I wrote about science... that's because I was doing a bunch of short contracts, and none of them had little, if anything, to do with biology (or fieldwork). Luckily, all that has changed!

I submitted my thesis to my thesis committee at the beginning of December and ran off to Australia to explore while my committee did their thing. I got back in January, completed revisions, submitted in January and defended in February. I cranked through revisions, got my thesis in by the March 1st deadline and got back 1/2 of the winter semester's tuition. Whoot!

Andrea, Master of Science. It has a nice ring, don't you think?

Shortly thereafter, I applied for an internship with the provincial government of Nova Scotia. I interviewed (and was very sincere about my desire to work in wildlife management) and got the job! My specific position is "Population Ecologist", and I'm responsible for modelling population dynamics from harvest data for furbearers and large mammals. This information will help guide management decisions.

I also get to help out with the other programs, and assist with fieldwork when people need help... so I have interesting things to talk about again :D I'll save them for another post, but I'll leave you with a picture of one of the first places I helped out with some fieldwork (a pond near some cut overs).

The semester comes to a close

It's been a while! I've been busy busy busy this semester teaching first year Environmental Science. It was a fun course to teach, we read three books, Silent Spring (Rachel Carson), A Short History of Progress (Ronald Wright), and Shovelling Fuel for a Runaway Train (Brian Czech).

The first addressed the increasing contamination of our environment with synthetic chemicals. The second addressed historic society collapses and highlighted how we are on a similar path. The third speaks of a different approach to economics, one that strives for a steady state and not economic growth.

The students had to complete a term project that investigated the Saint Mary's University Campus and suggested ways to improve sustainability. The projects ranged from reducing waste from Tim Hortons Cups to reducing the impact of water coolers by replacing them with hydration stations (water bottle fill-up sites) to powering the campus gym with energy harnessed from stationary bikes.

Today my students are writing their final exam (in fact I'm sitting here moderating it currently... perhaps I shouldn't be typing). I cannot believe a whole semester has went by. It feels like I've only just started - too bad I don't have a course to teach next semester! I really enjoy telling people about something really interesting (to me) and then seeing that knowledge come up at a later point (on an exam or in an assignment) - it shows that they were actually listening (and that I can actualy teach!).

Now it's onto the dry stuff, marking finals, marking term projects, inputting marks... I almost don't want to do it, because then it will really be over. I guess this means it's time for me to start a new chapter, and hope that my students move on from here with a positive attitude about the environment and continue taking courses in Environmental Studies (one can hope) :)

Continuing on a new path

Sorry for the second hiatus. To get you up to speed: I moved back to Halifax, started teaching, am continuing writing, and just picked up a 2nd part-time job doing program-related research for a Geography prof...

I don't think I'll be writing on fieldwork any more for a while, mostly because I haven't done any in almost a year. What I can write about is teaching while writing your thesis while doing research.

Teaching is actually much more fun than I thought it was going to be (don't tell my students I said that!). I teach a first year course, and I enjoy shaping developing minds (the students take everything I say as absolute truth, which is nice for a change after being a grad student). The prep isn't fun, but I like to talk, so the lecture part is relatively painless.

The writing is going well. I'm finishing up the first draft of my last chapter, and my first chapter is almost ready for submission (to a journal, not to my committee!). If I can get it accepted before I submit to my committe, then I won't have to do any revisions! At the same time, my supervisor just went away for a month, so I'm not sure how soon I'll be getting his edits back...

And enough of the hiatus

I've been back from the east coast for two weeks now. My computer was fixed as soon as I got back. It's all shiny and new with a new keyboard (I was previously missing the Esc key) and everything. The pink screen cover is even a nicer pink, more of a rose, than the original salmon.

I haven't written anything for the past two weeks because I have been working day and night writing, editing, and packing. I'm moving back to Halifax next weekend. I have a sessional lecturer position for the fall semester teaching 1st year Environmental Science (Environmental Challenges) at Saint Mary's University.

The position was difficult to get as I am techinally not finished my M.Sc. yet, but as I am nearing the end I had to get my supervisor to write me a letter confirming that, as well as submit a recommendation from the professor who regularly teaches the course (he's going on sabbatical this year).

As a SMU alumna, the professors and administration are familiar with me (which likely gave me an advantage). Either way, now I'm in the process of writing and editing a thesis WHILE prepping for a course (which starts in less than a month). As far as I can tell, I'm a sucker for punishment!

There are many benefits to this turn of events:
A) I get to move back to Halifax (I'm not the biggest fan of Peterborough)
B) I get a job in September
C) I get teaching experience
D) I get to drop down to part-time and pay less tuition :D

D is especially important, because if I didn't get this job I would have had to stick around Peterborough and pay full-time tuition in the fall. There is just no way I'll be written, revised, submitted to committee, defended, revised, submitted to the grad student office before Sept. 26th (the tuition cut-off date).

So all in all, it's a good thing! And I'm looking forward to moving :)

Heading east

This week I'm heading back to Newfoundland (where I'm from) for some much needed summer vacay. I figure I don't have much time left to take vacation when I want, for how long I want so I might as well take advantage while I can. Once I get a 'real job' and stop living in this fantasy world called grad school days off become a thing of the past (though a real paycheck will be nice).

So, between flying half way across the country and sending my computer back to Dell, I may be internet challenged for the next two weeks or so. Consider this my warning: I may post half as often (given my current rate of 1 post a week).

I'm both looking forward to the break in writing and dreading it. I don't particularly enjoy writing, but I'm at the point where it's going to slow me down to have to stop for two weeks... and it will be hard to get back into the swing of things when I resume.

Update: Finished first draft of chapter 1 (of 3) and have received it with editing from my supervisor. Working on first draft of chapter 2 now :)

The worst possible thing happened to me... with not so bad results

This past weekend, as I'm starting to feel the pressure of my thesis looming, I decide to take papers home and work. On the weekend. Now I know many of my fellow grad students do this - all the time - however I do not. I made a deal with myself to not work evenings and weekends, and to treat my graduate degree as a job (and a low paying one at that) after the torture of completing my undergraduate honours thesis while doing six courses (in an effort to go to vet school, which I didn't even end up doing).

But now, with deadlines looming and the aspect of paying ANOTHER semester's tuition, I have decided to get my ass in gear. So I brought home papers and set myself up in my desk, upstairs in the house I am house sitting for a prof. Perfect office, with windows all around and a great breeze, a comfortable chair and lots of light. The only thing is it's as far away from everything else in the house as you can get. Mind you, this is just a two-storey house, so it's not that far, but when you're in the middle of reading/writing/searching, the walk to the kitchen seems like forever.

It was in the afternoon when I decided to take a break and do some laundry. As the TV and laundry are both downstairs, I balanced my laptop precariously in the laundry pile and walked down the stairs. On the very last step I shifted my weight and tipped the laundry pile... spilling my laptop onto the hard floor. I heard cracks and saw plastic fly.

Want to make a grad student have a meltdown? Throw their computer. My computer, with all my pictures, data, chapter files... I couldn't breathe. I picked it up (gingerly) and ran to the kitchen to plug it in. I PRAYED it would turn on. It did. The screen lit up. I signed in. Apparently the only damage was to the casing. I sighed a huge sigh of relief and IMMEDIATELY plugged in my external harddrive and backed up all my data/writing/music/pictures (something I had been lax about for the past few months).

Then I called Dell. Since I have complete care, they will fix all the broken bits. I just have to send my laptop to them. Unfortunately, that means 10 business days without my computer. Luckily I'm going on vacation next week, which makes up at least 5 of them. And I will borrow an old laptop from my supervisor until I get mine back. So after two years with my computer, it's going in for an overhaul and will come back (hopefully) like new.

Not too bad for throwing my whole life on the floor.

To graph or not to graph, that is the question...

I have generated most of my statistical graphs in Systat, the statistics program I use predominantly (learning R was too hard (read: time consuming), though I realize its MANY great advantages). The problem with these graphs is that they are not easily edited and often appear jumbled together.

I am preparing my thesis in manuscript form, which means ready to submit to journals for publication. I've been sending my supervisor bits and pieces, and the terrible Systat graphs were one of the things he pointed out as needing to change. Just regraph them in Excel, he says, no big problem. And it wouldn't be, if I could find my spreadsheet with all the data. Apparently I generated it in Systat, and then accidently only saved the graph, not the data sheet.

So after spending two hours searching through every data sheet I had on my computer (in Systat, Statistica AND Excel form), I come to the conclusion that I definitley do not have it. So I'll have to start from scratch. Redo it. The most dreaded of all stats problems (at least for me).

And then I did it... took all of 30 minutes! Some quick calculations and a pivot table and I'm done like dinner. I could have saved myself two hours if I had just done that to begin with. Sometimes I think it's subconcious procrastination. My mind knows it will be faster, so it convinces me that it would be more work... and then I go about it the roundabout way (usually with distractions).