Full Swing

It feels like it's been a while since I updated this. In reality, it's only
been about a week. However, a lot has happened in that week. We've
officially gone from very slow with only occasional action to all action
and pretty much no slow.

As I mentioned last week, we've started perinatal captures, which really
are the heart of the pinniped program for the AMLR program (see links for
what that is if you don't know already). Our mandate is to track trip
durations and dive behavior for 30 female fur seals and to track the growth
and survival of their pups. In recent years, we have upped it to 32 females
because we lose so many pups these days we just could not get enough data
to show anything really.

These 32 captures all take place around the peak of pupping, which often is
around Dec 7-9, but this year we think is later. Apparently South Georgia
island, where a TON of fur seals breed, is also experiencing a delay. It
still means doing all these captures typically over about a 2 week span.
That's 14 days to do 32 captures, which isn't terrible in the grand scheme
of things, but when you start adding in crappy weather days, phocid and
other survey protocols, oh and just general having other things like
cooking and cleaning and showering, it means you stay very busy.

Today (Tuesday) I took my first shower since last Saturday. That's Saturday
November 28… So, officially first shower of December! I got the mixture of
boiling and ice cold water just right this time around too so it was pretty
amazing. I definitely needed it. I've been up until nearly 1am the last few
nights entering and reviewing data, prepping capture gear, and setting up
instruments (time-depth recorders) for fur seals. These days its pretty
much non-stop work from about 9am until at least 11pm, often longer. I
managed to sneak in the shower today because everyone just tried to get
moving early and worked extra fast throughout the day.

I did get to do some laundry yesterday, but really that just meant quickly
washing my long underwear tops and bottoms (we use a bucket with hot water
and a plunger type deal), rinsing them, wringing them out with our fancy
old-school clothes wringer, dumping all the left over water back in the
original bucket (now mostly a light brown color), then throwing most of my
dirty socks into said bucket and letting them soak all afternoon. I say
most because I had to make sure I would have a few dry socks to wear over
the next couple days. I'm not sure if the socks actually got "cleaned" at
all or if I just redistributed the dirt and grime, but I threw some
peppermint scented body wash in there with them and now they smell lightly
of peppermint, so I am pretty pleased about that. I will probably do a more
thorough cleaning once perinatals end. We will still be plenty busy, but it
wont be quite the same organized chaos.

And just to give you an idea of why its so busy, I'll explain the day a
little more. Everyday after breakfast we (the pinniped team) go out and do
our resights just to see who is on the beaches and who has pups. This is
part of our season-long monitoring, but also helps us decide who to capture
on any given day. After resights its usually a quick lunch and then
prepping for the captures. This year one of my goals has been to reorganize
some of the gear, particularly to make it easier for the penguin biologists
who help us by working up the pup while we work on the female (they don't
exactly suffer or complain when we ask them to spend 10 minutes working on
the pup followed by 20 minutes of playing with it and letting it nap in
their laps…). We have also been trying to assimilate more capture
information and behavior data on the females before and after we catch them
to get a better idea of how they react to gas anesthesia and just the
experience overall. This means that once we figure out who we want to go
after, there is a bit of a scramble to look up past data on those animals
and just see what we are working with. It also helps us decide who should
get the time-depth recorders or not.

When the gear has been organized and past data collected, I repack up all
the capture gear, mix bleach for marking pups, heat water for epoxy, load
up my backpack with about 60 lbs of gear and nets, and head to the site.
Once we reach the site, we scout out the target females, determine our best
line of approach, distribute jobs (there is usually one netter, one person
on the pup, and 2-3 people controlling surrounding bull fur seals to make
sure the other 2 don't get bitten), and set up the gear in the best
location available. Recently most of the beaches have been more knee-high
slush than anything, so "best" location becomes a bit relative. Capture
then commence, often with us having to relocate in between. That includes
not only moving my gear, but also moving bamboo bull poles, oxygen tanks,
slings for weighing animals, and a 50+ lbs wood box that we use to let the
females recover from anesthesia in peace.

So if that alone isn't exhausting enough, you then get to haul all the gear
home (at least leaving the boxes and poles at the beach), unpack it all,
clean it up, and set it out to dry because its inevitably going to be wet.
Oh and then you get to also restock everything you just used, which
includes pulling out more sample collecting vials, swabs, bags,
transmitters, etc. You also have to draw up more drugs, prep the next day's
instruments, oh and you now also have a pile of samples from the current
day that need to be processed and put away. Plus there's then all this data
that must be entered into various spreadsheets and the database along with
your other daily data like resights and censuses, which we do everyday on
pups and females to help determine the peak of pupping. Its not just me
doing this work of course, the other pinniped tech helps enormously, but
even then it's a lot of work. Of course every few days one of us also has
to cook dinner and do the dishes for everyone, so that just adds to the
whole process.

Overall, despite the craziness, these captures are pretty amazing. Not only
do we get tons of useful data, we also just get to be hands on and up close
with the animals. When you run your hands through fur seal fur, you
understand immediately why they were hunted so heavily. It also is a time
to test your knowledge and ability to read the animals on the beach. I've
gotten pretty good at predicting how each animal will act, but occasionally
one will surprise you. Its not always good to have a bull suddenly come
charging at you over the helplessly waved bamboo pole to try to steal the
female you are currently moving in a net, but it happens occasionally. The
second you take things for granted or get complacent, something happens to
remind you that these are wild animals. Big, wild animals with minds and
agendas of their own. If nothing else, you get to play find the asshole
bull on the beach. There's always at least one who likes to just cause
trouble.