I
have become a Jr. Squirreler. I hope one day to get my Acorn Badge and graduate
to a Sr. Squirreler,
but this is far in the future and will require much training and mental
preparation. For now, I wander (AKA trip and generally bumble my way through)
the forest wearing my khaki vest equipped with peanut butter and listen for the
sweet calls of my scansorial friends with feeble, uneducated ears.
I
didn’t just have a strange outdoorsy fever dream – I am a field technician in
the Yukon Territory for the summer this year, working for a project that
studies squirrels in Kluane National Park. The study, called the Kluane Red Squirrel Project
(KRSP), has been running since 1987 and collects pedigree data for a huge
population of squirrels. We monitor four grids that are ~1 km2 each,
amounting to a total of about 5000 squirrels. One of my friends (let’s call him
Burt) took a Community Ecology class last year that referred to such a project
with the acronym LTER: Long Term Ecological Research. This acronym is so
pretentious and unnecessary, and my doubt that it actually gets used in
practice is so great, that I will persist in using it throughout this post.
So
with this kind of LTER there is a lot of training associated. I started work on
May 1st, and since then I have learned such a huge quantity of
information in such a short time period that my brain feels weighted with the authority
of this knowledge. I now know how to set tomahawk traps, handle live squirrels, navigate a
grid, use radio telemetry equipment, climb spruce trees, tag ears, identify and
interpret squirrel behaviour, perform stomach palpations to determine pregnancy
status, express nipples of lactating female squirrels (yes, I know how to milk
a squirrel), handle all the data generated by these procedures, and most
importantly, play with baby squirrels (called pups). Playing with the babies is of critical
importance, and all senior staff at KRSP recognizes this.
I
have also encountered a few minor hiccups along the way in my squirrel
adventures. To start with, an adult squirrel died as I was handling it. This
apparently only happens once or twice a year, but it happened to me on my
second day of independent work. This is a rare moment in my blogging where I
will allow seriousness: it was really sad, and very shocking. We hold the
squirrels in handling bags in order to read their ear tags to identify the
individual and feel the stomach if it is a female to determine pregnancy
status. I was doing a stomach palpation and the female I was handling had been
quite stressed, but seemed to be calming down. Little did I know, she was most
likely entering cardiac arrest. I finished my palpation and put her down on the
ground to record the information quickly, and she seemed suspiciously still. I
checked her immediately, and found she was dead. I radioed a senior member who
came along and although she comforted me to assure me it probably wasn’t my
fault, she also informed me that the squirrel had a litter and those babies
would die too.
So
THAT was great. But the next day would be better, right? You already know that
since I said that, something worse is coming. I need to be a little less cliché here. Ok, let’s try
this: the next day was an improvement, because I didn’t kill any squirrels. I
myself had a fancy brush with death though, falling out of the next tree I
attempted to climb. This has only
happened to two other squirrelers in the history of the project. I was
completely uninjured, because I was lucky enough that both branches I was
supported by broke at the same time. I slid all the way down the tree and
landed neatly on my bottom. I then proceeded to shake for the next 20 minutes
and ceased climbing trees. I haven’t climbed a tree since, so hopefully this
has not become a deep-seeded (ha, ha,
ha) fear in my heart. The thing is though, overall, I prefer that my heart
continues to beat. Such are the risks of LTER, however, and we simply have to
face them.
No comments:
Post a Comment