Killing Rats

Good morning everyone! I got into work early today so I could leave in time to watch the Lakers-Celtics game with Justin. Yup, he called yesterday, so it turns out that I was wrong to think I'd never hear from him. Since I was unwilling to get to work before dawn, he's going to DVR the beginning of the game and we'll just start it when I get there. Isn't technology fantastic sometimes?

I'm exhausted though. I was up fairly late helping Joel and Dave string bait. I know that sounds weird; I'll explain. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture and they shipped it off to Palmyra on a cargo plane this morning. I'm going to ask joel to take a picture of the bait for me when he gets to Palmyra in a couple of weeks.

So stringing bait...Oh, quick point! This was placebo bait; there was no poison in it. These guys are doing predator control on Palmyra: "we're eradicating invasive mammal species in order to protect endangered seabirds." Um guys? It sounds much better when you just tell people that you're killing rats so they won't eat seabird chicks. Apparently a lot of the rats spend all their time in trees, so in order to get them, you have to have bait in the trees. The bait is in these little nuggets about an inch long and Joel drilled holes through each piece. Then a bunch of us took cotton string and threaded three pieces of bait on one end of the string, double knotted it, and repeated on the other end. It was a lot harder than it sounds once the string began unraveling and we couldn't get it through the little holes.

The really cool thing about this placebo bait is that it has a biomarker in it. Basically it's some non-harmful something that glows in the dark. That way after they distribute the bait and trap the rats they can see which areas of distribution were most effective because the biomarker will still be on the rats. Crazy. Part of their study will be marking down what part of the rat's body had the biomarker on it: mouth, body, tail, anus. It's not often I get the pleasure of hearing the word anus bandied about in civilized conversation. I was sitting next to a guy with dreadlocks though; seems like my whole world is changing =)

Anyway, it was a nice little mindless way to spend the night after I'd spent about 40 minutes going three blocks on the bus -- a water main broke on the main street of my bus route. I got off and went to the mall instead.

Ok, I'm going to go before I make this post so long people just don't read it!