Oh Yeah!

Oh yeah because I went to Petit Manan but more on that later. First let me start out by catching you up on what has been happening at work. I believe that the last time I updated you till the 28th of August so we shall start with the 31st of August…

on the 30th of August ‘Danny’ was supposed to hit but fell apart and basically all we got was rain. the week before we had ‘Bill” blow through. I mention this because my week started off with me heading down to Stanley Brook to see what had happened after the big rain we had. I don’t remember if I mentioned this in my last post (honestly to tired to look it up) but after ‘Bill’ came trough it basically filled up the antenna array with sand it was all but impassable. After ‘Danny’ came through it was completely cleaned out, and I mean CLEANED OUT! there used to be a sand bar that block half of the water way and sort of held up the water at the lower end of the brook. it is gone it is free flowing from bridge footing to bridge footing. That is a good thing. After this i headed to the west side to check on the pain in our collective asses a.k.a. Seal Cove Pond. It was still bad…both ponds were full again… the workers were putting things away for the day because the water was rushing through the middle of every thing. so there was no work going on there. I finally got back to the office and work on putting together some GIS maps for the Isle au Haut hawk watch for Bik who was leaving on Tuesday.

We saw Bik off this morning as he headed off to start the inaugural Hawk Watch on Isle au Haut. After Bik left  I worked on creating maps for our Big Beaver Census. The idea is that we will walk every watershed and conduct a full survey of the island to gain an idea as to the number of beaver living on MDI. Bruce and I started by heading out to one water way at Sand Beach. We walked down stream from an old fire road and found one family group area with activity. We stopped early and did not complete the up stream area. We came back to the office and had a strategy meeting on how to logistically complete the beaver census along with all the other projects we have to complete.

Today started with me creating a more field friendly beaver census data sheet. I went out with my roommates wife, Jen, and we surveyed two watersheds.

**Jen was working in Alaska for the summer on a Fish and Wildlife Service project with Pacific Salmon. She is now volunteering at Acadia with Bruce and she will now be a regular player.**

The survey was the entire day…Bruce accompanied us for the rest of Sand Beach drainage and then Jen and I went and did North Schooner Head road drainage.  I also found out today that I would definitely  be going to  to Petit Manan Island on Friday…I was SUPER excited. I will have a separate post for my trip to Petit Manan, it will be chock full of pictures.

Thursday arrived and we went out with a representative from Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IFW) a state agency. They have started a long term study site at a stream (brook, all Mainers call them brooks, whatever) called Lurvey Springs Brook. We electro-shocked from a culvert crossing to 150m downstream. It was pretty cool, we got the largest Brook Trout I had ever seen, most are around 4-6 inches this behemoth was 10 inches. We did three passes to ensure we had cleared the reach we were working. When we finished up with that in the late afternoon Jen and I headed back to HQ. When we got there Bik had just returned from IAH. We sat and talked to him for a while and to find out how the Hawk Watch went.

Bik did see raptors but not where we expected them. Every single Hawk seen was during his travels to get to the watch spot or on his ride back to the cabin. Even then he only saw five raptors, five different species but still not an encouraging number.

***The next five days were spent on PMI I will have a separate post about my time out there, I am going to pick this story up with the following weeks worth of work. Which as I write this is last week.***

September 9th to the 11th we electro-shocked Stanley Brook. Since I had missed a day of work because I was at PMI my week started on Wednesday, I was kind of wondering how I was going to make up those hours for Bruce. Well no problem there…I ended up on the plus side of things at the end of this week. we worked for three days, for a total of 34 hours. We started at 0700 every day and went till we couldn’t go anymore, which was right at 11 hours. Here are some photos (not my best to be certain) to show you the fish and what we do with them. It is like banding but with fish instead of birds.

 

**FYI, not sure if i had ever mentioned this but the info about pictures are embedded in the image, this means if you put your cursor over the image it will give you and explanation of the photo.***

 

was looking for a tie in with a knights tale, ‘you have been weighed, measured and found wanting.’

and that is what I did for the last three days. I did get to use the electroshocker, I find that I am better doing that then trying to catch the fish…especially with Bik around, he was mister trout slayer. typically Bik was the one who would catch fish, there would be a shocker and then me the bucket boy. let me give you an image, if you have ever seen History of the World Part 1 you will get this. Remember the French Revolution and the piss boy…that was me.

And so we go…

Expect a new posting soon about my PMI time.