Some news

It's not 100% settled and signed yet, but it looks like I just got hired as a naturalist on a whale watch. In fact, it's even the same boat I interned on back in college. The job is part education, interpreting the natural history the cruise comes across, part collecting data on the animals and sea conditions, and part deckhand.

I'm excited. Whales have always been one of my favorite marine science topics, especially the big ones. The last time I was out there, I really didn't have much training in these things. None, to be precise. I'd been studying astronomy up until that point in college, when my advisor went on what turned out to be a permanent sabbatical. I needed credits -- a pre-practicum internship, really -- and one of the other professors knew the whale watch was short-handed. The next semester, he was my new advisor, and I was out on Stellwagen Bank, learning marine biology as fast as I could. But for the first few trips, all I could do was hope someone asked about tides, since the one thing we could see that I knew anything about was the moon.

It was a lot of fun, and I saw some incredible things before the season ended: The surface of the water frothing as a school of herring or something similar tried to get up and away from predators attacking from below. Northern gannets diving after fish from fifty feet in the air. The frankly terrifying power of an October squall in the open water. And obviously, the whales. I'm guessing I'll be writing more about them in the next few months, so I'll save some of that for now.

On one trip, I had a bird land on my head.

So I'm excited to be heading back out there, especially on this particular boat. I haven't worked on the water in... three years, I think. Heck, I haven't worked in my actual field in over a year. Even if it doesn't lead to anything bigger, it'll still be great to be out there.