Busy times for the little ms kellybones….
Tuesday went goosing…fourth time in two years. This time, however, was a bit more on the bloody side….
First thing that involved blood was my own…I tripped over a knee-high, two foot diameter anthill in the middle of an ankle deep swamp that was full of chest high grass and thigh high bushes full of MANY thorns. I fell down and got a bit stuck in a bush. Nidia (she works in the lab next door to mine) rescued me before I a.) bled to death b.) got eaten to death by the ants c.) drowned in the mucky water or d.) died of embarassment at having to shout for help until big burly hairy DNR men came to save me. Not one of my better moments.
Second thing that involved blood, aside from the blood samples I was taking from all the wee baby geese, was from damaged geese. As you can imagine, when you chase over fifty geese into a net (they can’t fly this time of year) with a helicopter, three boats and thirty volunteers, they’re a LITTLE freaked. So they step on each other. Or JUMP on each other, and bite, and peck and struggle. So, I, being a bit more wee than the DNR men, was always handed the smaller birds. These ones nearly always are hurt or at least dazed in some way. It makes them a helluva lot easier to handle. However, this time around I got me one bird who’d managed to break all of the blood quills in one wing and he drizzled blood all down my hands and my shirt and my pants. After I released him, I went back to the net and got another bird, this time a female who’d managed to yank out a toenail. She also bled all over me. But she also bit my pants about eight times. Bitch.
The third episode of blood is two separate episodes at one drive. The first one, one of the geese, who didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be able to fly, decided he’d do it anyway. So, he’s in the process of flying away and dodging leaping DNR men. Me, being ever so bright (and short), decide I’ll jump for him, never thinking in a bazillion years that I’ll actually CATCH him. Of course, I do. And while holding 25lbs of honking, flapping, struggling, clawing, biting goose, I managed to get clawed all down my left arm, big huge scratches about 6 to 8 inches long. Luckily, there is only a small amount of blood. Sadly, my amazing leap, while earning me much applause from the DNR men, also got me buffeted in the head repeatedly by this stupid bird, so I eventually dropped him and the guy behind me caught him and threw him in the net. I personally would have drop kicked him. The other goose that attacked me was one that another person was holding while I was getting blood samples out of him (we yank blood quills…kinda gross, but a lot less invasive than syringes). He clawed me all down my right arm.
I also had a goose poop in my backpack and one bite me square between the eyes. And a bit of a sunburn.
On the positive side, I was outside in the 75 degree weather and I didn’t have to do real work. I also petted a goose’s serrated tongue, picked wild blackberries, road in the back of a pickup truck at over 65mph and explained why I was doing the DNA work that I was doing to large quantities of very excited men who just want to shoot more Canadian geese.
All in all, exhausting, but satisfying.
Oh, I also got lost on the way home and Nidia and I drove around in Central Ohio for about 30 minutes with no fucking clue where we were.
The real fun started when I got home though. After getting up at 4am to drive up to where this goose roundup was, I then came home around 5ish and cleaned my entire apartment so that my family could spend the night here, as we were driving to King’s Island the following day (Wednesday).
I won’t say much about King’s Island except that I hated the Son of the Beast and Deliriem (Spelling?) made me very very ill. Also, more with the sunburning (through SPF 45! Damn you nordic ancestors and your lack of melanin pigments!). Also. Waterparks with many, many hot guys are baaaaad when your libido is as starved as mine is……
Ah well…today was pretty much me trying to recover from two days of too much fun…
tomorrow…back to the old grind of thesis writing…and pride weekend with my friends!
