We’ve
settled into a nice rhythm this week. Two people take the ATVs and drag while
the third does nest checks. We rotate this so it theoretically means two hard
days of dragging and one day “off” to nest check. With the amount of nests we
have found, that easy day is not that easy. So far we have nearly 70 nests to
check, and that is just counting the northern sites. Add to that our new time restraints
and it can make for a stressful day.
Jarrett has been trying to keep
us to 8 or fewer hours a day for the past week or so, an impossible task when
it normally takes us around 12 hours to do everything. But he has good reason
to want to keep our hours smaller. Already, I have over 100 hours of overtime
added up, and the money situation for this project is not looking good.
Much like in “A Wonderful Life,”
somehow $4,000 has gone missing from the budget. No one can understand where
the money has gone, or who spent it. Whether it was the fish heads or us,
nobody knows. All we know is that it is gone and cash is limited. Jarrett even
has to let Neal go, which makes it good that Neal has another job waiting for
him in a week. But for us, it means we have fewer people to do more work now
that song birds are starting to nest.
The last crew moved into the
lodge a couple of weeks ago. The initial rumors about them was that it was a
female grad student and a male tech. Then, the week before they came we heard
the tech was female as well. The lodge was both greatly excited and worried about
this. On the one hand, most of the jokes and conversations that are had around
the lodge could no longer be said. On the other hand, there would be some
ladies to actually talk to.
They arrived right as the other
crew was leaving. When we saw them exit their van, a sad sigh passed through
the lodge. The tech was a guy. But it was not all bad. Mandy and Wyatt are both
pleasant people. Wyatt knows a plethora of Iowa jokes that Jarrett hates. They
are pretty good, especially once I realized that you can replace Iowa with Ohio
and the jokes are even funnier.
Mandy has an interesting
project. She and Wyatt are raising pheasant chicks letting them forage after
gluing their butts shut. Then there going to see what the pheasant chicks have
been eating. It is odd.
Jarrett and his wife have been
in the process of buying a house since I have been in South Dakota. They just finally
closed on one the week after Mandy and Wyatt arrived. Sadly, they sold their
old house the week before. Meaning for a week, they were homeless. For that
week, all of Jarrett and his wife’s possessions came to the lodge while they
waited for the deal to close on their new home. It was quite amusing listening
to Jarrett’s wife respond to Wyatt’s Iowa jokes.
It is interesting how perspectives
can change. I remember looking at Aberdeen on Google Maps before I came here
and thinking that it was a small town, and that Redfield was positively tiny.
Now that I’m here, Redfield seems almost large while Aberdeen is just plain excessive.
Distances are the same too. The first day, the drive from the lodge to Redfield
seemed to take forever. Now, it’s just a short jaunt. I’m excited to get back
to Canton and Ann Arbor and be overwhelmed by the size and closeness of
everything.
On Wednesday it rain too much
for work. So we spent the day watching the first 5 episodes of the new season
of Game of Thrones on Wyatt’s Xbox. It was a day well spent.
-Me
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