Milnesand, New Mexico

The lesser prairie chicken is one of the goofiest animals I have ever seen. Like the wildebeest, the LPC must have been a good laugh that God was having.

Proof:

(photo from the Audubon 2007 Watch List)

Does this not look to you like an anxious man pacing, like one who is waiting to be told if it's a boy or a girl? Such a charming creature, if bizarre in appearance and behavior.

Like zebras, the banding on the lesser prairie chicken helps to camouflage it in the grasses. I was amazed at how well-concealed the birds were, especially when they weren't moving. It took me some time to find the females out in the grass (of course, at first I didn't realize that they were in the grass; I thought the lek (or mating display field) would be out on the bare earth in front of our van).  We could hear them well before we saw them, before the sun even really thought about coming up.



(video by DisapprovingRabbits on youtube)

The plainer specimen is the female (very nice sexual dimorphism); while the population of about 4,000 in the Milnesand breeding range is fairly evenly divided between males and females, we only saw a handful of girls in comparison to the boys. We joked that the females came out when they felt like it, and reported back to all the other girls still having their morning coffee.

You can't see it in that video (not mine, by the way; I was too far away to get good pictures or video, though I could see them really well in my binoculars), but the males also stamp their feet while they run back and forth. It's a booming noise that I'm sure is quite sexy for the ladies.

While we were in Milnesand, which is where we saw the prairie chickens, we camped out (in wind so strong that we couldn't pull the rain fly all the way away from the tent, so it was a moot point anyways), had good food cooked by the sweet ladies of the town, and marked four miles of fences so that the chickens would see them when they are flying away from predators.

Mentioning predators, we also saw a male golden eagle in captivity. He was just kind of hanging out in the back of this guy's truck, looking around imperiously. There was a dead hare at the foot of his perch, which was covered in Astroturf for some reason. He had apparently been killing and eating livestock in Montana (?), and the government stepped in to have him relocated at the rancher's request. The guy that took him has some sort of agreement where, even though he is not a government entity, he can capture the eagle and take him around and show him off. I thought it was awesome.

One last image:

Fishin' Clothes

One of my projects this semester, an NHH senior project, is to make a set of women's fishing clothes that is attractive and not just a "unisex" version of men's clothing. Oftentimes, what is marketed as being for women is just plain unattractive, lacking both hanger appeal and body appeal. Instead of making the clothes to fit, flatter, and be comfortable on women, it is just sized-down menswear that is full or tight in all the wrong places.

Even big-name companies, like Bass Pro Shop, carry very few women's items (around a dozen, compared to literally hundreds of men's items), and what they do carry tends to be unisex blobs of clothing that are uncomfortable. Pants rely on drawstrings to fit at the waist, or have a long, narrow crotchseam that binds at the hips and sags at the inseam. There's no real reason for the dearth of women's fishing clothes; niche markets are generally fairly sustainable in the long run, especially ones that have so many potential consumers. I know many women who fish in spite of discomfort, and many others who would fish if they could be comfortable.

So what I've been making is a pair of women's pants, a knit top in a pretty color but still in a technical fabric, and a vest that fits a woman's contours and needs (also in a pretty color). Instead of anticipating that a fisherwoman will just buy what approximately fits, regardless of what it looks like, this is designed to attract her based on what she actually likes, not just what she needs. Instead of breast pockets on the vest, I hope to be able to put magnets inside slits to create places for the flies to attach. There will be magnetic closures, instead of velcro that will get nasty with time, or snaps, or a zipper.


Haha! I triumph over computers, and win! Here's the picture.

Discomfort

I hate being uncomfortable. I would rather be in outright pain than uncomfortable. I prefer the pain that accompanied my broken collarbone than that with the stress fracture in my foot. It was a much more honest pain, that could be dealt with stoically, instead of with fidgeting and whining.

I bring this up because on Wednesday we planted trees in class. I was expecting, and hoping for, that feeling in my muscles that hurts when I first move them in the morning but loosens into a satisfying warmth. Instead, only the back of my right thigh hurt, and in a way that was nagging instead of gratifying. I don't even know what I did. My left side is dominant, not my right, so I'm not sure what I could have possibly done to pull that particular muscle. I guess it will just be added into the category of "things that happen that I don't know why," like getting a blister on the very tip of my big toe at the same time. Alas.

I enjoyed planting the trees, though. Because I show up midway through class each time, I only got to help in planting two trees out of the eleven, a soapberry and a hackberry, but it was still enjoyable.

For one tree, we had to dig through caliche to make a big enough hole. Nic attacked it with a fury, and then we shoveled it all out to put in the tree. Roots were trimmed so that they stood out straight from the trunk; this was to discourage them from curling around and making the tree root-bound. Around each tree, we built a trough and rim capable of holding two or three inches of water for the tree to soak up. Young trees need a lot of water, especially after being transplanted.

The trees were planted almost at random. Scott and Matt looked at the land and decided where they wanted trees, picking low land and high. Then, after marking these places on the map, they compared it to their map of known archeological sites. If the trees were marked in one of the sites, they moved it off to the edge, to prevent any further disruption of these historical places. The class got about half the trees that they had planned planted, so this coming week we are going to hopefully plant the rest.

I enjoyed being outside, not cooped up in the lab. The sun was hot, and it was a good fifty degrees warmer than it had been the week before. I actually managed to get sunscreen on all exposed surfaces this time; maybe next time I can keep it up!