Spring Break

Hi All,
Today is my first day of spring break. Yea!!!!!! Yahooooo!!!!!!!!! But before I head off to the Red in KY I am going down to Kalamazoo with four students of mine for the weekend to attend PeaceJam. We will be meeting with other students and staff from some of the states near by to talk and learn more about peace making and differennt issues going on in the world today that threaten the peace making process and things that can be done to fight those forces. The nobel peace prize recipiant Rigberta Muchum (sp) from Gutamala will be there for the weekend to hang out and talk with the kids and the advisors will get a chance to meet with her as well. How often do you get to meet a Nobel Peace Prize winner? I can't wait. Please check out PeaceJam .org to see more about it.

Then it is off to the Red. I will take lots of pictures and let you know how everything went next weekend.
Peace and love,
Geoff

Wrangling Deer

What can I say. I have had a wonderful last couple weeks. And it seems to coincide with me meeting a women named Janice. We have been spending a lot of time together and we are having a great time. Janice is in northern Michigan working on her masters in wildlife biology. She is neck deep in a research project on deer populations. The project consists of capturing female deer and, tagging and putting radio transmitters on them. She relys a lot on volenteers, so I have been helping out when I can.
One of the ways Jancie catches the deer is with a rocket net. The picture below is the set up she uses. The rockets are attached to the net and are shot over the deer when they are in the right postion. Then the techs get to the deer as fast as they can and wrangle them until they can be tagged and radioed. But the few times I have been out we have not seen any deer. But I am still hoping.



The other way she catched them is with traps. I do not have any pictures of the traps yet. But I have been out with Janice a couple of times checking traps and we have caught two deer. The first one is pictured below. We were concerned for this one because it had a broken leg and would not move for a long time. But after we left him alone for awhile he was up moving around on three legs very well.



This next picture is me keeping a small doe still until she came out from under the drug that keeps her calm. She was so relaxed and I was taken by surprize when she finally decided she was ready to go. She pushed me to the ground and I could barely hang on to her until Jancie got the blind fold off. This was a small deer, I can not imagine if she had been full grown.



This has been an amazing experience so far and I am looking forward to more of them I am going to try and get out as much as I can.
Janice is an amazing women. She has worked with project trapping grizzly bears, wolves, bobcats and bison. What an amazing women. We enjoy each other very much and I look forward to learning much more from her.
I hope this post find everyone doing well.
Peace,
Geoff