shichahn | (no subject)

Oh man, I have posted too many times today. This is nuts.

First off, don't forget about the SOPA thing. That is incredibly important. Go do that.

Secondly, for those who do not have

tinylongwing friended, go see my latest entry there if you want to read about Pele, a passage Cooper's hawk.

Finally, a little update on my life! Yesterday I had a meeting with the guy at Arkansas Game and Fish who is getting me funding for my MS project, now starting sometime in the spring. So that's still coming along, we're just waiting for the funding to make its way through the state government and on to us. It's a much slower process than it was supposed to be, but that's bureaucracy and science funding in the current political climate, unfortunately. It'll come through eventually.

More immediately exciting is that I am volunteering to help out with the project of another student in my graduate lab. Her project is focusing on optimal foraging of red-tailed hawks and American kestrels here in agricultural fields around Jonesboro. (Why is this not my project, you ask? Because I chose the one that had funding attached. Hawks are cool, but getting paid to go to grad school is even cooler.) What this means for us right now is that we have to go out and trap and band a bunch of redtails and kestrels, which is good fun.

Melissa with the first redtail we caught, a large female who is now banded as RW.

Releasing the second hawk, KY.

I hear they caught a Krider's this morning, too, and I'm jealous I missed out on that! (Krider's hawks are an informal subspecies of redtail that are very pale in color, and tend to come from the central prairies of North America.) But I'm sure I will have more fun redtail photos for you guys in the future.