~ Wildlife Research Assistant ~
March 2005 - May 2005
________________________________

Below are some links to galleries of pictures I took while working this job...enjoy!
***Please note, Adobe Flashplayer 9 is needed to view these pics***
(All pics were taken with my Nikon 5700 Digital Camera and  resized to 800x533 for your viewing pleasure)

Gallery 01 - 35 Pics (Banding Lesser Scaup - Kibbe Field Station and Pool 19)

Gallery 02 - 40 Pics (Wetland Surveys - North Dakota)

______________________________________________________

Job Description:

In the spring of 2005 I headed out to the Midwest to work for Louisiana State University, School of Renewable Natural Resources as a Wildlife Research Assistant on a project looking at declining numbers of Lesser Scaup (Aythya affinis).  This job consisted of two separate parts.  The first, was banding and color marking Lesser Scaup on Pool 19 (roughly where Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois come together) of the Mississippi River, and the second part was wetland surveys in the Upper Midwest.  I'm not particularly fond of the Midwest, but it was very interesting (dare I say fun) traveling around and experiencing the "culture" as well as drinking cheap beer and playing pool in local bars.

Banding ducks at lock and dam # 19 (pool 19) on the Mississippi river was the best part about this job.  Pool 19 is a huge stop over point for migratory waterfowl that follow the Mississippi flyway to the prairie pothole region of the upper Midwest.  Some days there would be hundreds of thousands of ducks on the river and you would look out and just see specks of black all over with the majority of the birds being Lesser Scaup.  The local fish and wildlife biologists told us that it use to be an even more impressive sight before waterfowl numbers started declining.

My day would start out waking up (relatively early) and going to check traps and get a sex ratio survey on Lesser Scaup.  To catch Scaup we used homemade funnel traps made of wire fencing with screening over the top (see pictures) and baited them with corn.  We had roughly 12 traps placed from Keokuk, Iowa to Fort Madison, Iowa (roughly a 20 mile span on the Mississippi).  After sufficient numbers of birds were caught in any give trap (upwards of 10, sometimes 30 or more in one trap) we would wade out in the river (in heavy duty Cabela's neoprene waders) and scoop up the birds in a net, put them in cages, and drive them back to Kibbe Field Station (where we were living) and band them while drinking cheap beer and "shooting the shit".  It was a good time had by all!  After the ducks were banded, we would load the cages back in our trucks, drive them back to the river and release them.  Other than banding them, we would also weigh them and fit them with a colorful nasal saddle (made out of cattle ear tags and fastened by threading heavy duty filament through the nares and melting it via mini torch/lighter).  The idea behind the nasal saddles was to color code them based on body weight (two different weight ranges), so that hopefully they would be re-sighted later on their breeding grounds.  Blood samples were also taken on some of the ducks by bleeding the brachial vein.

My time at Kibbe field station was fun, but eventually came to an end and I headed out to North Dakota with my crew partner Tom.  Our job from that point on was to perform wetland surveys throughout North Dakota.  Their were other crews working in Minnesota, South Dakota, and northern Iowa as well.  The surveys were pretty straight forward.  We had predetermined wetlands throughout the region that we would put out gill nets and minnow traps in and then obtain dissolved oxygen content, salinity, conductivity, turbidity, presence of invertebrates, emergent and submergent veg characteristics, as well as overall landscape disturbances (i.e. agriculture right up to waters edge vs. 5 meter buffer, etc.).  Essentially we collected every piece of information about the wetland in order to determine its overall quality and potential use for migrating waterfowl.  The idea behind this project was that wetland quality has been diminishing over time due to agricultural impacts and migrating waterfowl aren't getting the nutrients they need from these wetlands, causing them to reach their breeding grounds in poorer condition and ultimately fail nesting.

________________________________________________________


Updated February 2008
© Christopher Hansen 2008
chris.f.hansen@gmail.com