Oodles of Owls

Ok, I’ll be honest. No more promises of photo updates to this site, it’ll happen when it’ll happen. :) But, I can promise a new update from camp, right now. Baby owls, baby wolves and other camp stories, ready and waiting for you. Here’s the latest news from camp.

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Four owlets!

Four owlets!

It has been an interesting season so far. Nothing seems to be going as planned. We’ve lost 2 crews members (all survey crew) in June for various reasons (more on that in a bit). The weather has been confused too…warmer in April, cooler and rainy in June…I’m kind of afraid to see what July has in store for us. The jets have been cooperating as much as they can, but we haven’t had many overflights. And the biggest surprise of all…(drum roll please!)…four owlets from one nest! Never before seen in this study, perhaps never before seen in Mexican Spotted Owls ever (we’re still researching). It’s not unheard of in Northern and California Spotted Owls, just not common. And it was only last year we saw our first nest with three owlets out here! And just today we beat last year’s (and the project’s) nest count – 26 nests and 52 owlets! The crews have been working on naming all the owlets; I can’t even keep up with them. We’re pretty sure we’ve lost one owlet though (either Lucky, Dust or Ned). A crew found a small pile of owl feathers that didn’t appear to be naturally removed and were missing one owlet that day. Hopefully it will continue to rain though so that there is food available to sustain all these owlets. Watching owlets getting ignored and declining in health is not fun, especially because we’re not allowed to do anything to intervene (no matter how much we want to adopt them).

Wolf pups

Wolf pups

We’re all hitting that 3 month slump that usually occurs out here. Four months is a long field season, even though we’ve got it pretty much made up here. We went to visit the wolf project crew who live (temporarily) down the road. They’ve got trailers to sleep/work in, but that’s about it. No running water, electricity, satellite internet. But they do get to work with the wolves. This summer, the wolves have been predating on cattle more often and some of the wolves have been taken out of the wild. The wolves that live near us (the same pair that came roaming though our camp last year) were captured just last week. The wolf project had only been able to capture one of the pups. They came and asked us for volunteers to help track down the remaining pups! So a handful of us went over to their camp on Friday and helped to search for the wolf pups. It was a lot like searching for owls, except you’re looking on the ground instead of up in the trees. We searched for about three hours until I heard Kevin called out “I’ve got three!” and we all came running. We thought we were looking for one pup, but it turns out we got three of them. It was really exciting, and the wolf project people were very happy for our help. The pups were so cute, even if they were a bit stinky (pups poop when they’re scared). So that was our big excitement for the week.

We’ve had quite a few moments of excitement this summer, both good and bad. One of the survey crew members was fired at the beginning of June. Her boyfriend (also on the survey crew) was so upset about it that he ended up getting himself fired in the process. It was not pretty and they managed to burn quite a few bridges on their way out of camp (figuratively, not literally). They pulled a bunch of childish pranks on the project manager (who happened to be here on the VIP visit) and on the supervisors (myself included). Since they’ve left, more stories have surfaced confirming that firing them was the right choice. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so disliked (bordering on ‘hated’) in my life. There’s not much I can do about it, but wish them the best (I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s the truth) and hope that they grow up. As we expected, camp has been running much more smoothly since they’ve left, despite that the survey crew is down to a bare bones crew. All the other crews have been pitching in trying to get survey routes done.

The good news is…I’m going home on break in a few days! I haven’t been home for the 4th of July in six years…I can’t wait! And then it’s just one more month until I home again. So if you’ll be in San Diego for the 4th, give me a call or come down to the beach because that’s where I plan on spending most of my break.

Love and sunshine,
Stefanie ;)

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