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Today, I'm one of four wildlife technicians in the Mountain
Hunt unit. I supervise any work we do in my area, and if
I'm helping out in the other technicians' areas, they supervise
me.
The hours I work each day depends on the time of year.
When it's really hot, in the summer, I like to start before
6:30 a.m. and work until 12:00 or 1:00 p.m. I used to have
a boss who wanted us to work 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., no
matter what. The biologist who supervises me now doesn't
do that. In the spring until May, I sometimes plant dove
fields until it's dark.
What I like most about my job is that I don't have to be
in the same place, doing the same thing day after day. I
work outside. A lot of people say I'm lucky to be outdoors,
but when it gets cold and rainy, it's not too much fun.
When people want to go duck hunting, I've got to get cold
and wet to get the hunters out there.
You'd think that our busiest time of year was during hunting
season, but hunting season is kind of slow for us. Our big
time is getting ready for hunting season. I spend a lot
of time on agricultural activities like planting crops that
promote wildlife. In September, I plant winter food plots.
The clover I plant for deer might last about three years
before I plant again.
Throughout the year, I also maintain wood duck boxes and
perform surveys on the area's populations of quail, turkey,
bears, and other animals. For animals like bears, which
are usually shy, I set up special survey stations to estimate
their populations by hanging a partially-opened sardine
can at a height only a bear can hit. It gives a pretty accurate
reading of how many bears there are in the area. Bears aren't
always easy to count, though, because they travel a lot;
they just go wherever the food is. Sometimes, this causes
me to have another kind of encounter with them.
A couple years ago, a man who lived here in the mountains
had been feeding some bears--at one time, he had about three
bears visiting him. One summer, he went on vacation, but
the bears kept coming to his house. When they didn't find
him, they tried the neighbor--an eighty-year-old lady who
lived alone. She heard something on her porch and thought
she had a visitor. She opened the door and found a 200-pound
bear standing up on its hind legs. She called us, and we
went to her house for a "nuisance animal
removal"--another
one of my job duties.
Lately, I've been doing a lot of road maintenance. The
roads through these mountains are so steep that there can
be a lot of erosion. You need a lot of heavy equipment to
maintain these roads; so I'm teaching myself to drive a
motorgrader. Maintaining these roads is a big job, but I
make do with the help I can get, using what I've learned
from the National Resources Conservation Service to keep
these mountain roads from washing down the mountain.
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