playing: songs from a ghost town by trampled by turtles
it's been a while since my last update.
I’m at the lab right now with jake sleeping under my desk. Should be
working on my bat conservation international proposal but ... a blogpost
sounded better.
I had my last presentation for the semester on November 29th:
Which built on this presentation the week previously, which was the history of my field before 1940 - dating all the way back to Aristotle in 350 BCE.
Current topics in my field of sociobiology without talking about bats.
This was a really cool project and I got to learn cool things like warthogs
live in complex fission-fusion societies, and despite the many similarities
between badgers and martens, badgers are more social and this may be because
they are chubbier and can go into torpor (short hibernation).
I also had to write a paper for this project – only 8 pages, but had to
be super comprehensive (I ended up having about 40 references); and then for
another class an annotated bibliography for 30-50 journal articles. This caused
a lot of stress and loss of sleep, but it’s all over and I did well.
Last week I went with a couple people from my lab to do field work. We went out to do hibernation site counts for three days – where you go in and basically count how many bats are present, which species are there and how much white nose fungus is around. I got to see my fifth nova scotia species of bat – a tricoloured bat – and so the only one I haven’t seen is the silver-haired bat. The first day we did one small abandoned mine by the bay of fundy, I was the safety person so I hung outside and walked along the ocean shore, it was beautiful. The next site was another abandoned mine, but this one took a lot longer (over 2 hours) and was neat because it was a site we had been visiting since May, so it was neat to finally see the inside. The numbers in both of these sites were down, especially the second one – from 1200 last year to about 400 this year. That’s ~65% decrease in numbers since white nose hit late last winter. The second day we went out to this huge cave which took about 4 hours – we counted about 16000 bats (same as the previous year) although the bats were often far away over a river or high up on the ceiling, making it nearly impossible to count accurately. It was super draining – but at the same time neat, because we had to get up at 5am to leave home by 6am, and then spend 4 hours being silent and concentrating on counting bats – it was a different head space to be in. After this we went to a small site of an old tiny cave which only took about 30 minutes – so a couple of us just stayed outside. It was quite beautiful, about a 20 minute hike into the woods. Last day we went out to an old gold mine by a lake. It was beautiful out – I hung out by the lake, wondered through the woods and then read a bit in the sunshine. Then I went in to count bats, and there were a lot – over 3000, but there was a lot of white nose present as well.
I’ve been getting out a lot, music and stuff, and it’s been great. We had a couple friends over and played catan the other night, then went out to an open mic, and it was super fun. My roomie and I are getting along better than (ever) before, we’ve finally learned how to interact with each other and it’s great.
I’ve been swimming, and I’m kinda terrible at it. I just do the
backcrawl because I hate putting my face in the water. I’ve been doing the
aquasize class which is just like aerobics but in the water, and it’s really chill, relaxing, and super fun – end up laughing most of the time because
balancing on a noodle or coordinating your arms and legs can be pretty
hilarious.
Boardgames night tonight with laura and her friends, so it should be
good times. Might go hiking on Saturday, or maybe paint because I haven’t done
anything artistic in a long time.
I went to a friend’s poetry reading the other night and it was
beautiful. 6 people read parts of their long poems and it was like going on a
trip in their memories. I feel more inspired to write now.
After having a super social week or two, I’m thinking I need some
alone/reflective time.
People are overwhelming most of the time, but I’ve learned that everyone is a
tad bit awkward, and sometimes it’s okay for things to be awkward.
Realized that every cute person that I may be interested in consumes meat, and that sucks.
More bike rides will fix everything.
xx
vegan
