Rocks!

Rocks are cool right? They named rock and roll after a rock.... so they must be cool. Or maybe I am really out of touch with cool. At risk of seeming very uncool, here is a post about some neat rocks I have stumbled upon this spring. The first one is a rock the size of a fist that has some how made itself at home in the crotch of a tree. Over many years, the tree has come to engulf the rock. How did the rock get there? The thing with trees is that they only grow up from the leader of the tree so the rock was not carried up from the ground by the tree, as A tree does not grow up from the bottom, it only expands outwards except for the yearly growth at the tips. Twenty or thirty years ago, someone would have had to place this rock in the crotch of this tree. Now rock and tree are one. I think it looks cool. Maybe we should all start putting things in trees that will look cool lodged in place twenty years to the future. The second rock is a fossil I found on Pasqua lake. I think it looks like a cray fish... but who knows. What do you think? Can anyone help me identify this?

Spawn camp

After two years of schooling I have landed a pretty wicked summer job. I will be working out at Echo lake for the summer at the provincial fish hatchery. Lake side living and fishing every single day. Close enough to Regina to take in everything worth going to but far enough away to stay out of trouble. Right now we are full on involved in spawn camp. This year we are capturing fish in live net traps on Pasqua lake. Here we are mostly after ripe female walleye but have been taking the odd northern pike as well. What we are doing is taking the eggs from the females, adding sperm from the male walleye and taking them back to the hatchery to rear them under controlled conditions. At the hatchery we are able to obtain around a 60-70% success rate with the eggs while in the wild it may be closer to 1%. When the fry hatch they are taken throughout the province and released in waters that need help with their walleye populations. You might as well call me a fish jerker offer. There is often a lot of by-catch in the nets. Sometimes this can be a real bother like when you have to search through 1500 one pound carp to find twenty female walleye but sometimes you get to see some pretty cool fish specimens. In here there is a picture of a channel catfish, the biggest one any of these fishery biologists have seen in the province and likely bigger than the Saskatchewan angling record. We did not weigh or measure it, perhaps we should have. My coworkers believe that a lot of cat fish found their way through the qu'appelle valley from the assinaboine river during the high water last year. Here is a little video of my coworkers sorting through the fish, looking for the ones that are ready for some action.

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Done with the trailer... for now

Well I have retired the trailer. At least until another day anyway. I have shipped it with loving care up to Smeaton Saskatchewan where I hope to one day purchase land. A friend from school documented the past two years of my life living at the trailer and it can be seen here.

Have you even been out for a walk in the bush and thought you heard the sound of a two stroke engine firing up, even though you know you must be the only human around for miles. Low and behold, it was not a two stroke engine, it was the mighty ruffed grouse. This guy kept me up at night with his constant attempt to get laid(every four minutes the males do this during the breeding season, almost as often as I wink at cute girls on friday nights). I snuck up on this guy not 100M from my camper. It took a lot of slow walking to get there without scaring him off, but I managed to get pretty close. Strangely the camera did not pick up the sounds. My guess is the sound is to low? Here it is