A Weekend of Rest

“A hunting cabin at the study site” – that was all I knew about my new home. I kept my fingers crossed for heat, grabbed what I thought might be my last shower in a good while in Interior, and dug out my no-rinse soap from my backpack and headed to Lower Brule, fully expecting a shed with a porter john out back.

And here I am writing this blog post on the kitchen table in my cabin on the plains, with a pitched roof, a loft, a wood stove, central heating, a washer/dryer, a clawfoot tub, views of the Missouri River, and a basement lab for pit tagging and processing ferrets. Mule deer and wild turkey mill around the cabin, and there’s a dog town no more than a 100 meters away.

I also seemed to have adopted two kittens and discovered that my slight allergy to cats has gotten much, much worse in the last year. There’s even a television that took me two days to figure how to use it … kinda. DVD (check), regular television news and programming (not so much). And after three days of puzzlement, I’ve confirmed that I’m back on central time even though I'm technically west of the Missouri.

I spent the last 2+ days eating when I was hungry and sleeping when I was tired. I hiked out to the river and checked out the PD towns looking for surface plugging, indicative of ferret presence. I cooked and froze food, setting myself up for the next 10 days. I read a book. I found wi-fi access. I made my first cell phone call from my place of residence for the first time in months.

I rested. I feel whole again. Good thing work’s started.

Goodbye P. Dogs

The summer of 2009 is possibly the hardest I have worked in my life. At last count, we trapped some 1,270 individual black-tailed prairie dogs in four months and three trapping sessions. And then there were the nights spent spotlighting, initially for fun, then to help out, and then because two people were needed to hand spotlight out both sides of the truck.

I was entrusted with a research project to call my own. I stuck a leaf blower down 238 burrows, and hiked across PD colonies all over Buffalo Gap National Grasslands and Badlands National Park, with northern harriers, ferruginous hawks and bighorn sheep for company, plus the occasional perplexed tourist or cranky PD hunter.

I learned to make naan and bake two desserts. I played mini golf on National Talk Like A Pirate Day, and hosted a Malaysian makan in my trailer. I dye marked a ferret and trapped a badger, a handful of burrowing owls, a 13-lined ground squirrel, a rattlesnake, and several cottontails. I only mildly molested a large male PD weighing in at a 1490g(!), and scraped road kill off Highway 44 to get hair samples for a flea study. I drove from Wall to Interior with five gallons of gasoline in water jugs the night we found out that our one gas station in “town” started closing early for the Fall. I memorably got cozy with the crew on our second to last night – five in a trailer barely built for three – because both trailers ran out of propane 24-48 hours before the end of the season.

And in my free time, I’ve delved dangerously into André Gide, Joan Didion, David Quammen, David Eddings and Ayn Rand.

I’ve lived a lifetime this summer.