ON ROUGHING UP THE NATIVES

My 2.5 days of field work have been fulfilling. The sun has shone, the hills remain green, flowers of all description dot the landscape, and I get the primal (some might call it naive) pleasure of working with my hands. Staple guns, power drills (sorry, no De Walt, Dave), pick axes, mallets, and 4WD pick-ups have replaced PHP, emacs, ArcGIS, and Erdas as my tools du jour. I’ve spent the last two days on a large construction site, tragically converting many acres of rolling green hills and valley-hidden oaks to cookie cutter single-family houses and *shudder* a golf course. I now know that a scraper is a gigantic vehicle used to scrape up soil and move it somewhere else. Thus loaded they resemble off-road 18-wheelers that travel in convoys at 40 mph and stop very slowly. My last encounter with such technology was in the Tonka days. Strangely, the construction workers are all very friendly. Everyone waves to each other when passing by on the dirt roads. If you scream and wave at a tiny man atop a gargantuan bulldozer, he will actually stop, turn off the beast, and talk with you. I figured they’d resent the presence of any outsiders that get in the way, let alone a bunch of biologists, but they seem quite accommodating.

Today was my first day checking traps, which meant animals. I got bit by my first meadow vole, saw more skinks than I have in my life to date, and learned how to process a snake. We only got one, a ring-necked snake (a favorite of mine), but it was informative. To sex a snake, you stick a small metal probe up its poop-shoot to search for inverted genitalia. If it goes far in, you’ve got a male (more details with gross pics here). We also PIT-tag them, where PIT stands for Passive Integrated Transponder. That’s just a small pill-sized radio transponder that broadcasts a unique number, so that if we catch the snake again, we’ll know the species, sex, etc, without having to harass it further. You stick the PIT-tag in a syringe, apply antibiotic liberally, and stick it into the snake. Then you seal up the wound with super glue and set the snake on its not-so-merry way. The whole process seemed rather traumatic for our little snake, as it ejected musk, shit, and even a little venom (not dangerous to humans) in attempt to subvert our violations, but I’m told no lasting damage was done. When Homeland Security comes to inject an RFID tag into my belly, I hope I excrete with similar gusto. Can’t wait to do that to a rattlesnake.