How to spend a cold raining Friday...

What is the best way to pass a cold raining Friday? By playing in the mud of course!

My parents met Rob and I at our place in the morning, then we all (including Mike and Ginger of course) headed out to Elk Island. Apparently raining days are the best Buffalo spotting days as they were everywhere! Including on the road:

I have never been this close to a Buffalo before! Ginger was quite excited about it too. The adults didn't care about the cars on the road, but the babies got nervous. This big fellow seemed to be concerned with keeping his herd together as he had some on both sides of the road...and we didn't want to get in his way!

Some of the babies were quite red in colour. Perhaps they were still very young?

We saw a few different herds, as well as some lone males sleeping along the side of the road.

So what made us venture out in the cold rain? Fish collecting of course!

My dad has been doing a study for a few decades now, and the Sticklebacks at Elk Island. When he first collected samples, he notices that about half of them didn't have pelvic vertebra, and half did. It appears to be a genetic change and not due to pollution, so he wanted to study if this change would increase or decrease in the population. Over the years the percentage has stayed fairly equal which is odd...normally a genetic change would either show to have an advantage and flourish, or would not have an advantage and die out. For the difference to remain constant it must have SOME advantage, but no more so than the fish without the change.

As my dad is no longer teaching, he doesn't have a ready supply of lackeys...I mean students...to help him, so Rob and I volunteered to help with the collecting.

We started our collecting at the site he usually got the fish, which was by the West Entrance and houses.

The water is very low this year though, so to get to the water involved wading through lots of MUD. Sticky gooey bug filled mud. Rob was kind enough to go first to test the footing, and he let me stand in one place while he drug the skein in a semi circle around me. In this picture I am on the right, Rob in the left, and my dad in the dock. My mom is the photographer and dog watcher!

After filling the net, Rob had to drag it up on the dock and then onto the grass so we could pick through the plants bugs and muck for the fish. There were LOTS of bugs to sort around! at first we couldn't see any fish in the catch, but once we got the idea of what we were looking for, we realized that there were a fair number in the net. Picking up the little fish wasn't as hard as I thought it would be though; as small as some were, they were tough! I wasn't so keen on the bigger ones that would flip flop around on my hand though. Although we were looking for Sticklebacks, most of the wish seemed to be minnows., which was a little disappointing. (Unlike Sticklebacks, Minnows are not native to the lake, somehow they were introduced, so my dad is also going to count the percentage of each type of fish collected).

We did three collections in that mud. It was NOT easy as the muddy bottom would suck your boots under, so each step require a lot of concentration and effort to free the foot and not topple over! Ginger really wanted to help, so my mom had to keep her from jumping in after us!

We had one other spectator during this...a little beaver swam over to see what we were doing. It dived under and reemerged about 2 meters from Rob! I am not sure if it was curious or trying to scare us away. When we were packing to leave we saw it on a post cleaning its face and watching us go. It was pretty darn cute.

As we weren't getting much fish here, we went over to Sandy Beach to try a new location. We drove over there, washed the pond gunk off our arms, and had lunch in the rain. Then it was back into the water. This time it was much easier though; the bottom was sandy and the water much more clear. With our first catch we could tell that this was a better location as the net had many more Sticklebacks, and there were more adults. Still lots of bugs though...and snails...and we also caught one leech! The water drops off sharp at the beach though, so I would only be up to my knees, and Rob would be up to his belly button. I think we did 3 or 4 hauls there before my dad figured he had enough fish for his study.

Before we left though, Rob wanted me to come out to the deeper part with him. I figured he was unlikely to try to drown me with my parents there, so I followed him out. Did it ever feel weird once the water got deep! The pressure of the water clung the hip waders hard to my legs, but the boots still wanted to float. I though I was going to tip over!

So here we are at the end of the day:

Very fashionable I know: We had layers of clothes, including hip waders, life jackets and bright rain jackets just in case something went wrong.

As tiring as it was, it was also a lot of fun to play in the water like that. It is important to note though, that we had official permission to do the collections. It is illegal to take any wildlife or plant life into or out of a national park!

Karen