Debbie's Work

So I have had many people ask me what I do for work. It isn't too complicated. We leave at 7:00 am mon-thurs and usually drive 1 1/2- 2 hours to get to a site, where we then walk 5-10 minutes and set up tapes (sometimes we have to hike up and down mountains which isn't as fun, especially the 10th day you have to do it). The landscape is usually very beautiful. Each plot (30m x 33m) is taped off with 6 tapes down the middle. The tape on the 11 is used to clip all the vegetation on every other meter to see the rates of growth. The other tapes are used to number the shrubs (like sagebrush, cactus and other bush type plants), to take the volume of a certain number of shrubs, count the number of woody pieces of different sizes to measure fuels in case a fire came through, measure the distance between each perennial plant on a line, another experiment includes dropping a thin metal flag stick every 1/2 meter and saying everything it touches, counting all the native and non-native species and perennial plants in a 1/2 m x 1/2m square every other meter and naming every plant that is seen in the plot. Each plot takes about 1 hr 15 min and isn't too tedious, until the gnats come. Then everything is not fun. For the last three weeks I have been camping and on those day we did about a plots a day, but on a normal day with with 3-4 hours driving we usually do 5 plots. I actually really like my job and am learning a lot. It will set me up for my masters project which will sort of include these type of things.

First we have a picture of a lizard. We see tons of lizards. This one is about a foot long and very fast. I think Joseph would love to see all the wildlife that we see out here.



These next few are just shots from the plots. Pretty view huh?


This one shows the transect lines that we set up.










We see a lot of snakes out here. I have seen probably 8 non poisonous snakes and 4 poisonous ones- rattlers. So this week we reached our half mark of the summer and earned a "career day", which meant that we went and did something fun. For our career day we went bird watching at antelope island and this is the snake we saw there.


We also saw this longhorned deer, which I learned is the same animal that everyone mistakes for an antelope, which the island is named after.


And this buffalo and many others.


And this picture shows the amounts of gnats we are dealing with at work. I used to think gnats didn't bite, but boy was I wrong. The girl gnats bite and I am covered in gnat bites right now and they itch! my ears, by my eye, my face, and my arms. I can't stop ictching! Also bug spray doesn't work on gnats which we have learned from experience and from reading. They say though that gnat season is only from may-june and june is almost over. Sadly.



Antelope Island was very pretty and we had a lot of fun lassoing and taking strolls and looking at lots of pretty birds.






So I think I might be getting close to becoming a professional bird watcher now. As much as I dislike it (not sure I like noticing that every bird that flies by is different from the previous one). The people I work with are pretty into it though, which doesn't help since they point them out every day. And the bird watching made me extra aware as we drove to Manti of every bird we passed.



On fridays I go into my other lab (where I will do a lot of my grad research) and am learning how to extract DNA from the soil (from the microbes) and do all sorts of cool lab stuff with gels and pipettes and stuff. It is really fun. This extra time at work each week is making up for the 40 hours pay I took to go on our trip to Costa Rica. Pretty fun stuff.



And an added bonus- We went to the Manti Pageant yesterday and it was really fun! Except for the fact that it started at 9:30 pm and we normally got to bed at about 10, so we were kind of droopy eyed the whole time. But we saw this crazy truck...



And took along Briana...


And saw the beautiful temple :)