Friday was spent mostly working, but the fun kind of working.
The kind where you get to cut open pigeons.
I think the heart is so cute in miniature. When I first found the aorta I had a sort of spasm of excitement.
We dissect out the liver, heart, and spleen (which is so hard to find sometimes) and weigh them to see if there is engorgement in response to the presence of fly antigens. We also take lung smears and breast tissue samples in case anyone else wants to see if there are other endoparasites. We usually just dissect the birds in the lab (which makes sense, considering it's a LAB), but yesterday as I was dissecting, one of my PIs yanked out my iphone earbud and hissed into my ear that an inspector was there and she didn't want him to see a half mutilated bird body on the map table. So I had to stop mid-dissection and stuff the pigeon into the freezer before the inspector could see it. A little bit sketch, but I'll finish them on Monday.
I felt like Scully when I was doing the dissections, which thrills me :D
After dissections, I went out into the field again! One of the graduate students is doing a project on parasitic larvae that infest the nests of Yellow-Headed Blackbirds, so she asked me if I wanted to go out to Farmington Bay (wetlands just half an hour away from Salt Lake) with her and another professor that studies bird song. Even though it was for four hours on a Friday night, I still said YES because I love it. Farmington Bay was AMAZING. I didn't bring my camera because I wanted to be professional the first time I went out into the field, but I got the okay to bring my camera next time :D
The lighting was beautiful. Everything was washed with gold and pink, the ochre turned various hues of magenta, the water was glimmering, there was a slight breeze, and there were birds EVERYWHERE. We first stationed ourselves near the water's edge and watched the cattails for signs of females feeding nestlings. We used a lab-raised male to draw in other males that were pissed off that someone was in their territory so we could band them and bleed them. As we hiked around looking for nests, we saw about twenty five species of birds. My mom and I are probably going back next weekend to birdwatch, so hopefully there will be more pictures from that outing as well. All I can say is go at sunset, because the combination of the water, the vegetation, and the birdsong is magical. It got a little chilly after the sun set completely, and the birds were fairy inactive at that point, so we headed out at about 9:30. At that point I was delirious with hunger so I called up Maddie and Kit and we went to ye old Village Inn for our usual fare.
Last night was AWESOME because we played this amazing drinking game with our favorite show ever, X-FILES. The night was spent eating pizza, drinking, laying out on the back porch, and watching X-Files and Southpark. All in all, an awesome Saturday night. Now it's FATHER'S DAY and I'm off to make Reese's Blondies for my dad.
No comments:
Post a Comment