Kelsey says, “Hi Mom!” So does Thomas, I suppose. 🙂

Right now our crew is spending a night in Chevak thanks to Obama.

Apparently since we’ve been in the field there’s been some change made to Obamacare that applies to this bio tech position, and we have to decline the coverage that’s been offered to us for whatever nonsensical reason. We couldn’t do this over the phone; it required logging into some random account through UNR… so we were forced to come to town. Honestly, is it possible to disappear to avoid this rubbish in this day and age? If someone knows the secret, please enlighten me.

On the upside, we’ve

• showered for the first time in almost 3 months
• deleted hundreds of e-mails
• watched “The Magic Schoolbus” and “Reading Rainbow” while lounging on beanbag chairs in the Special Ed room of the Chevak School where we’ll be sleeping tonight

On the downside, we still haven’t managed to fight our way through the proper passwords, user names, IDs, websites, etc. to actually accomplish that which we came here for. Typical, eh? Next time you can keep your shower opportunity, Mr. President. A sauna + a jump in the river work just fine and keep us from useless hassles associated with boating the 2+ hours to town.

Without a doubt this season has flown by much faster than last summer. As we knew going in, the timing of winter’s end and spring’s beginning were drastically different this year. Last summer the Tutakoke River broke on 4 June; this year I won the early season betting with my guess of a 30 April break-up. We had floating icebergs a full month earlier! (I still need to find what I won besides bragging rights.) Last year the first brant was spotted on 18 May; this year we saw the first brant hardly a week after our arrival around 22 April. Obviously we were on a completely different schedule this year.

Fortunately the 800+ nests that our crew found were not threatened by any floods like the one that destroyed over 50% of last year’s. No, this year the majority of nests made it to hatch, and we now have hundreds of little black brant broods running around. We’ll start our banding drives this weekend after Dr. Sedinger – the project’s PI – arrives with about 4 volunteers. For these drives we use human intimidation to push brant families in a certain direction across meadows, lakes, and mudflats toward the river’s edge, where we have boats waiting to scare the birds from swimming away. Then we set up pens to hold the birds before proceeding to do all sorts of horrible scientific things like sex them, weigh them, measure them, and place colored and metal bands on their legs. To be fair, they do poop on us…

Since I don’t want to leave the field, I’m trying to hop on a crew out of Utah State and the University of Alaska Anchorage that’s been out here all summer with us. They’re studying something along the lines of brant feeding ecology and how that impacts the vegetation and nutrients released………. and how it may be linked to climate change. Clearly I have a brilliant understanding of their project. But the people are nice, and if I can volunteer with them, I’ll stay in the field until late August, thereby delaying a return to civilization! So if everything works out, you won’t be hearing from me for awhile longer.