Did You Ever See A Stickleback Asking For His Money Back…?
On Wednesday, June 10th, Kat Shaw (you can read her field blog here)and Jeff Huenemoerder arrived for their summer field season in Alaska. Both study behavior of male threespine stickleback, so they are well-suited for collaborating in the field.
Noffer (our Forester) took a turn for the worse. His taillights wouldn’t turn off, so we traded him in for a beautiful powder-blue Toyota Highlander that immediately became known as “the sexy beast.” The Beast seats four people plus all of our equipment rather more comfortably than Noffer could have, so all is well with the world.
With more people around (Lauren and I no longer have to make dinner every night – woo hoo!), we have a little more incentive to go out and do fun things together. Lauren and I are an efficient trapping machine, but as our collecting winds down we’ve been looking for other things to fill our time. So we all took a trip up to Talkeetna!
Of course we’re good scientists; we did our fair share of work up in Talkeetna while we were there. Re-trapped two Benka Lake and Trouble Lake (much to Jeff’s mosquito-prone chagrin) and did observations in Y Lake. (Yes, there is an X and a Z.) And then we rewarded ourselves with a walk through the tourist traps and a fabulous dinner at the West Rib Pub and Grill.
Of course, we just wouldn’t be us without a funny story to tell. So when Lauren and I showed up at the access to the trail leading out to Trouble Lake and saw some conscientious citizen’s posted sign about two grizzly bears seen in the area… We decided to be very loud as we walked down the trail. Which is how we ended up singing multiple stanzas of “Down By The Bay” with biology-related lyrics. (See title of this entry.)
I promise we didn’t cook any fish. It was peaches and blueberries.