The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake as the children of the sun began to awake.

So yesterday we learned about herps. For those who don’t know, that means reptiles and amphibians, making today pretty much my favorite day. I’d like to introduce you to my specimen.

                                           

  I was calling him 1016, but that wasn’t his real name. He was an iguana that somebody had as a pet years ago, and when he died, they skeletonized him and donated him as a research specimen. He’s got a pretty charming little face. A real sweetheart. I bet he was pretty great when he was alive, too. Somebody loved him enough to give him immortality- here I am talking about him and taking his picture to share with you almost twenty years after he entered the collection.

I also want to show off another skeleton I worked with today. This is the rattle off of a Great Basin rattlesnake. We’ve yet to see one of those alive, but it’s likely we’ll see a few when it gets a bit warmer.

During the afternoon, we went fish seining and field herping. We did this in an honest-to-god meadow, which I was gleefully running through (along with the others) until I fell and scraped up my leg. You heard it here, folks: frolicking in a meadow is literally too dangerous for me. But it was a really good time.

 

                                     

The drive to the meadow felt like something out of a Disney theme park or an African safari. The land here just looks so… surreal. Like a really good landscaper planned it. But aren’t the best of them really just following nature’s random patterns anyways? We all crowded into the back of a pickup truck, then drove for the better part of an hour down the mountain to the start of a stream that wouldn’t look out of place in a fairytale. I kept waiting for a wolf wearing drag to come sprinting out of the trees or something.

We set up these big seine nets in the river, then a bunch of us ran downstream and herded everything towards them.

Setting up a seine.

Fish in a bucket.

We caught bullfrogs in both their larval and adult stages, Lahontan red-sides, speckled dace, and the rare-to-this-area Paiute sculpin.

Bullfrog larva, also known as a tadpole. They stay tadpoles for about two years and eat the tadpoles of other frogs, making them a dangerous invasive species.

Another tadpole; you can see his developing legs.

Newly-metamorphized bullfrog. It'll get a lot bigger.

The bullfrog and I were friends.

Speckled Dace

Paiute Sculpin

In addition to these creatures, this area is also known for its dragonflies and birds. Birds are exceptionally difficult to photograph, especially with an iPhone camera. So are dragonflies.

Dragonfly nymph.

Find the dragonfly.

We also caught two gorgeous western terrestrial garter snakes- the elegans variety, not vagrans. This one was really very docile and followed us for a while even after we let her go.

                                                   

AAs we explored, we came across a lot of interesting little things you'd miss if you weren't looking for them. For example, delicious cattails.

And a Brewer's Blackbird nest.

A lot of the plants we saw were interesting, too. We saw a lot of star duckweed and watercress. I would have taken pictures, but you know those as pond scum. This one, however, is a lovely plant. It's called eglantine, or wild rose, and it grows everywhere up here.

At the end of the day, we found a woodpecker nest in a dead snag. As we were looking at it, it toppled over! That's Russel and Michael (the professor's kid) attempting to put it back up. They... sorta got it. That's definitely not where it was when it started...

 This next bit's a bit gory, so if you don't want to see dead fish, scroll down until you see the trees again. Part of the field school- the part that was really attractive to me- was that we're doing more than just zoology and archaeology. We're learning how to prep specimens for museum work as well, which is pretty vital to what I eventually want to be doing. What we started yesterday was the prep work on four rainbow trout. We gutted them, picked through their organs, sexed them, and then laid them in enamel pans. Then we covered them with rocks so that the raccoons and the skunks wouldn't get at them but so that the flies and beetles could. Since we don't have a dermestid colony up here, we're just letting nature do the work.

Now that you've suffered through that, have some trees! Like I said, this landscape's unreal.