June 8th, 2009
This morning I left with Tiziana and Daniela to do surveys. I do not know if the surveys are becoming less difficult or I am just getting more in shape, but the hiking was not bad. I think we had to walk about 800m to the first site and 1km to the second where we ended up finding a bear bed. The only thing that sucked is the fact that I have a giant blister on the heel of my right foot that makes hiking difficult after awhile. During the survey, while we were looking around the first GPS location for any signs of a bears, Daniela saw a snake in a patch of small juniper bushes. She said it looked like the one snake Abruzzo has that is slightly venomous (not at all comparable to the 6 venomous snakes we have in NC) but since I was looking in a different area it had slithered away before I reached her. We searched for it for 20 minutes only to come up empty handed. I was very disappointed about this but sucked up my sorrow and continued on to the next survey.
Later that afternoon I ended up trying to locate a bear with Faustio using radio telemetry. We were successful in locating it, but it was not visible so we could not observe it. It ended up being about a 45min outing. Back at the house Giovanna surprised me by telling me I was going to get to monitor a trapping site with Gigi that night. I was beyond ecstatic since if we caught a bear it meant I would get to help them place a radio collar on the bear, do measurements, and of course get to witness a brown bear up close. The deal with assisting with bear trapping is that for every trapping there are a ton of people who want to go. About 3 park rangers get to be present as well as 2-3 veterinarians, Palo, and Gigi. This leaves very little room for anyone else to attend causing those of us working on the bear project to have to alternate who is gets to assist with trapping. This means that depending on how many trappings take place while I am here this could be my one shot to assist with one.
I was told that I had to meet Gigi around 5:30pm when I arrived home at 4:40pm leaving me very little time to pull my stuff together. I quickly took a shower, gathered night stuff, and hopped in the car with Daniela and Giovanna who were going to drop me off to where Gigi was on their way to locating another bear. In Pescasseroli we had to stop at the market so I could get some food for dinner. I ended up getting two mini salami and cheese sandwiches, a coke, a bottle of mixed fruit juice, and a bag of crick crock potato chips. It was a dinner for champions!
The entire night Gigi and I had to wait in his large Volkswagen sized van incase the alarm signaled meaning a bear had been caught in the trap. We were probably parked about 4km away from the trapping site which was necessary since it was far enough away that our presence would not be noticeable to the bear. However, the alarm signal could not reach much farther than that which is why we had to sleep in the van instead of in the park ranger house nearby. If the alarm went off we were responsible for calling the park ranger house so the park rangers and veterinarians would know to come to the trap as well as Dr. Palo who decided to stay in Pescassrolli about 15 minutes away. For most of the night Gigi and I read our books. Then we watched an episode of scrubs before going to sleep.
2 years ago