Duck Duck Goose

Sans ducks.

Wednesday I was up an hour early again, this time to go band some Canada Geese. It was kind of weird, because I was the only girl (a "city girl" at that) amongst 14 guys, who were all definitely hunters/farmers/general outdoorsmen, so it was kind of strange at times, since I generally didn't know what was going on, being my first goose banding and all.

It was still pretty cool, though - basically what happened was that a few of us would drive to one side of the lake, and set up this giant net trap thing, to corral the geese. Then we'd have to hide somewhere, and the rest of the team would either run on shore or drive up on boats, to literally herd the geese into our trap. It was interesting, they somehow managed to do this without scaring the geese, they were pretty relaxed about it, and not many would try to fly away!

Then came the actual banding. The guys would have to catch the geese, then flip it over (to determine the gender), then clip the band on; my job was to do the recording. The baby goslings (or 'gozzies,' as the guys liked to call them) were really fuzzy and cute!

Thursday was the same deal. We had gotten about half of our quota (172/375) on Wednesday, so we thought it would be a quick, easy day. Well, not so much. We were down to about 60 left by noontime - one more site, hooray! Except the geese apparently had caught on to our game, so we'd end up trying to wait them out as they sat on the shoreline, and then would have to pack up and try a different site. That equates to sitting in hot, empty fields for a good hour. Did I mention it was at least 90 for most of the week?

But finally we got to a good site about 5pm, and got our last few geese there. Whew! It was a good hour or so of the actual work, then we had to drive another hour back to the meeting location, and then another half hour back to my normal work; I didn't get back to my apartment till 9:30!

After such a long day, I had hoped that yesterday would be an easy day for me, but no such luck. My boss had assumed I would be out banding for another day, so she didn't have anything lined up for me to do. That meant I got to go out with the YCC kids (high school volunteers) to pull up rusty old fencing, which included a lot of barbed wiring! At least I got to stick to my normal 8 hour day, instead of going over.

Man, by the time that was over, I was glad for the weekend. Today and tomorrow are going to involve lots of sitting around, catching up on some good old R&R.