Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

We are preppring 2 (smallish) turkeys down here to cook in our brand new
smoker. There will also be mashed potatos, green beans with panchetta
(since there was some confusion and we got that instead of bacon), pecan
pie, pumpkin pie, pisco sours (drinks native to peru and chile), and I'm
sure lots more food. Our resident chilean also is making sopapillas
(spelling?). Not sure what they are exactly but I'm sure a few of you
might...

We did our second capture the other day, this time on a female with a pup.
It was pretty exciting and the pup was freakin adorable. It was large, but
still only weighed about 7kg (maybe 16 lbs). Somehow those little guys
withstand subfreezing temperatures with gale force winds. We recovered
whats called a GLS tag. I want to say GLS stands for Global Location Sensor
or something like that. I feel like I have already mentioned
these, but basically, its this tiny tag that is smaller than a die. We can
clip it onto a flipper (for penguins they attach it to their leg) and the
sensor calculates sunrise and sunset each day and uses that to calculate
approximate lat/long of the animal. Even with how small they are, they can
work for over a year. The only tricky part is you have to get them back,
but with animals like fur seals and penguins that come back to the same
area year after year, its not too hard. They are also relatively cheap, so
these tags are awesome tools that provide a ton of data with relative easy
for relatively cheap.

In other news, wednesday finally showed a break in some extremely bad
weather we had been having for a couple days. Monday we actually called an
official storm day because it was consistently blowing over 40 mph with
gusts up to 59 (highest I saw at least). Tuesday wasn't much better, but it
was only in the 30s with gusts to the 40s. 40 is our official "danger"
cutoff, though I will tell you the difference between 39mph and 41mph is
pretty minimal...

Because of the nice weather we had an explosion of female fur seals and
pups showing up. One of my survey beaches went from having about 7 females
to having closer to 15, now with at least 7 pups and there will probably be
more when I go back out today to check on them all. Median pupping is
usually around Dec 7, so we expect to get a lot more in the next couple
weeks. This will keep us very busy catching animals. Oh I also learned how
to milk a female fur seal yesterday! We take a small milk sample to test
for persistant organic pollutants and plastics, as well as to see fat
content and other things. These are very important to see not only the
health of the seal, but to analyze what she is passing on to her pup.

Ok thats it for now, more to follow soon. We have a busy day of cooking and
doing dishes ahead of us here.

Happy Thanksgiving, enjoy the food and family around you, or at least make
the best of wherever you are.