Um. Yeah.

I must admit when I get out of the rhythm of blogging 'regularly' and reading blogs to find out what you are all up to, I feel like something is missing. My 'excuse'? I'm making a big push to defend this semester...nuff said. I hope I can soon catch up with blog reading and commenting since I've neglected it the past 2-3 weeks. But I can make no promises until after April 7...defense day. So bear with me a bit longer. And as usual, some pretty elk pictures to distract you.


I spent the last week in Wyoming on a capture...winter has not released it's hold on Wyoming yet let me tell you. For parts I was trudging around in thigh-high snow with wind chills well below zero. I must admit though that life is different in Wyoming. We had a couple sunny days and by about noon, though it was only mid-20's, the sun made it feel ridiculously warm...I feel cold easily and even I was stripping down to only a thin long-john shirt. In the wetter northwest climate, I'd be bundled up with 4 layers and still shivering at those temperatures.


This capture effort was fairly unique...we were working out of the Pinedale area and were doing a mix of feed-site captures and winter range captures. For the former, darting off a hay sled, and for the latter, using a helicopter. If you know that area, this may not surprise you, but Wyoming feeds hay to 25,000 elk in the winter. I can't even wrap my brain around that. A third of these animals are fed on the National Elk Refuge site at Jackson...which was initiated in the early 1900's. Since then, feeding has grown to more and more sites mostly because of political reasons (prevent starvation, keep elk off agriculture areas, and most importantly to prevent inter-mingling of elk and cattle since there is a high prevalence of brucellosis among elk in the state) and the state spends 1.4 million annually on hay to feed these animals. Once one starts these feeding programs, it is hard to turn back. Anyway, we were working with a graduate student doing some comparisons.

In order to access anything this time of year, the targeted feed-sites included, one must snowmobile. Our first ride, bright and early Saturday morning was a 60 mile round trip ride through some beautiful country but also fairly rugged. Oh yeah, it was about 10 degrees when we started which is warm for this time of year apparently (I didn't get cold amazingly enough even with my helmet visor up since it was so scratched I couldn't see anything out of it down but the grad student got frost-bite on her face)! I've not been on snow mobiles much and after spending hours and hours on one this past week I have to say I still don't see the attraction. So much noise, so many fumes...sure they may be fun, but I'd like to see the country the old fashion way...quiet, fresh air, and without an engine.

Once to the sites though, we are ferried around in a way that I can appreciate. Each site has a pair or two of draft horses that pull the sled around for feeding. Beautiful animals.

Back in a bit...

Oh--if you want to see something pretty cool...check out the following two live cams. One is on a bald eagle who just hatched one of her eggs and the other is on a pair of barn owls with a number of white snowball, cute babies!

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Now playing: Tangled Up in Blue by Mary Lee's Corvette

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