I feel like I'm finally getting used to Wyoming- or at least, I felt like I was getting the hang of things, and then hunting season started. Apparently rifle season for pronghorn antelope started on Friday. I think that the best way to explain the first day of hunting season is that it's like St. Patrick's day in Boston. People go crazy. I drove home from the field at 5 AM on Saturday morning, and there were swarms of people at the little gas station in Rock River (pop. 235) dressed in sagebrush camo. It's actually pretty silly-looking- since there aren't really forests in my part of Wyoming, people dress up like sagebrush instead. They look like little kids in patterned pajamas. Except they have guns.

In reaction, my field-clothes fashion has become even more compromised. Now, in addition to wearing the same clothes for five days on end, I also wear a super-duper bright orange baseball cap that's too big for me, and a child-size orange hunting vest. I'm trying hard not to resemble an antelope, you see. It gets even sillier, though. We're currently tracking nocturnal rodent activity, so we work from 5-7 PM and 2-5 AM most days. We put out seeds on pans of day-glo powder (pink, orange, or nuclear waste green), and then come back with UV flashlights at 2 AM to follow the glowing mousey footprints in the dark. Of course, I'm incapable of dealing with day-glo powder neatly, so all my field clothes are vaguely fluorescent pink, and I usually have a smear of powder across my nose or in my ear. The (few) locals think we're nuts, but since it's Wyoming they're kindly incredulous, and politely offer us food, beer, and showers.

I just returned from backpacking Cirque of the Towers- another completely foreign experience. Real mountains are super awesome. We saw multiple Momma Mooses. We also saw a pika:
http://images.google.com/images?q=pika&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=aTCnSvP3I5PQtgPSkvTCBQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1, although I didn't get a good look at it because it was scurrying away. I'd never heard of them before, probably because they're fairly mountainous, but they're really cute. Also really endangered, sadly. They freeze to death in winters when it doesn't snow enough and their burrows aren't insulated. (Ironic to freeze to death due to global warming and warmer winters...)
But anyway, enough bio nerdiness from me.