April 2004 - August 2004
________________________________

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 - 25 Pics (Assessing Spotted Owl Reproduction/Banding Spotted Owls)

Gallery 02 - 48 Pics (Various Side Trips Throughout CA, Etc.)

______________________________________________________

Job Description:

After I graduated from UVM in December of 2003, I was unemployed for a few months until I got hired by the University of Minnesota's Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology.  In April of 2004 I left Vermont for my first ever experience on the west coast.  The University of Minnesota hired me as a research specialist to work on their California Spotted Owl demography study in Eldorado National Forest, located in the Sierra Nevada of California.

Working on an owl demography study entailed locating spotted owls by hooting and waiting for a response (yes, I actually did learn to hoot like a spotted owl, it's not that hard).  Once owls were located, there color band was resighted to figure out who they were.  The study site that I worked on had something like 20-30 breeding owl pairs (not positive on those numbers), and for the most part they would come back to the same general area every year.  Each individual owl was banded with a color band and tab, that allowed for many different color combinations (including stripped and dotted bands).  Once resighted, we would determine if the owl/pair was breeding.  Later in the season, this also included locating nests and juvenile owls.  This was all done by carrying live mice into the field, offering them to the owls, and seeing what the owl did with the mouse...meaning that sometimes we would have to run through the woods at night to see where the owl was bringing the mouse and what it was doing with it.  Throughout the season we also banded any adult owls that weren't already banded  and towards the end of the seasons we banded lots of juvenile owls.

It was very interesting working at night.  I got to see and hear lots of things I wouldn't have otherwise.  I saw several black bears really close throughout the season, heard Northern Saw-whet Owls and Long Eared Owls, Saw and Heard Flammulated and Great-horned Owls, and even saw and heard a Sparred Owl (Spotted x Barred Owl Hybrid).  I never got to see a Mountain Lion though.  I think the most interesting part about this job was the different personalities that different owls would have.  Some owls were so friendly, they would fly right up to you even before you could get out of your truck and would almost be perched on top of you waiting for a mouse.   Other owls would become scared for life after their intial banding, would want nothing to do with you, and wouldn't even take mice from you.  It was amazing how a lot of times they would be right next to you in a tree, watching you, and you wouldn't know it until the owl made some sort of noise, which some owls never do.

To pay off my rent I worked a few weekends a month doing Northern Goshawk surveys for the experimental forest that I lived on (Blodgett Research Forest).  This entailed using a tape player to do call back surveys along transects throughout the experimental forest.   I never once saw a goshawk doing these surveys, but did see one once when I was hooting for a spotted owl, and a Coopers Hawk once when I was walking to an owl site.

In my spare time I got to travel to Yosemite, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Reno, NV, all thoughout the Sierra Nevada, and once up to Seattle, WA.  This job was my first real field job and first experince out west and it was a memorable one.

_______________________________________

Updated March 2007
 © Christopher Hansen 2007
chris.f.hansen@gmail.com