AZ JazzyJ
<font color=teal>The Talented One<br><font color=p
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2000
- Messages
- 1,945
Pretty funny...
I remember in college I needed another biology credit. I got out the course catalog and found a class called "Field Biology". I read through the description that basically said this class was a series of field trips to study nature. Well I remember in elementary school how much fun we had when we got to go on field trips so I figured it would be the perfect class. What student wouldn't want a whole semester of going on field trips? I registered and went to the first class. We sat in a lab and the professor described the various trips we would be making. I thought I had found the perfect class. At the end he told us a little bit about himself and ended with the phrase, "my specialty is ornithology". Being a hick freshman I just nodded thinking about the canoing trip he had described and the rafting I would be doing. The next class we met and climbed onto a bus and were driven 60 miles to an area that looked like a river bottom right after a flood. We traipsed around for several hours counting the population of Great Blue Harens nesting. That whole semester we went on excursion after excursion looking at birds. It wasn't until the end of the semester that I realized that ornithology was the study of birds. I thought this guy was just obsessed with feathers.
The only non-bird related field trip we got was when they took us out to the desert and we set live traps for field mice. We marked off a square and set traps. The next day we came back and counted how many field mice we had captured. We then were supposed to mark the field mice and let them go, reset the traps then come back the next day and see how many field mice we captured the second time and how many of them had been marked. From that we would plug the numbers into some hairy formula and it would tell us how many field mice per square mile there were in the area. It all sounded good on paper until we got out to our traps and realized none of us had thought about how we would mark the field mice we caught. It just so happened my girlfriend was in the class and she had a bottle of finger nail polish. We took the field mice out of the traps and I painted their fingernails. Do you have any idea how hard it is to paint the nails on a field mouse? It's a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. But after giving each field mouse a pedicure we released them. I often wondered what happened that night in the field mice community when a group came back to the burrow with freshly painted sultry rose nails. It must have caused quite a stir since the next day only one mouse returned to have his nails touched up. I'm not sure which was more funny; me painting toe nails on a field mouse or my girlfriend's face when she saw her favorite nail polish being used on the toes of a rodent. That relationship kind of went downhill after that.
I guess I should be grateful our professor was an ornithologist and not an icthologist. I'm not sure I could have dealt with the idea of sticking my head underwater and counting fish. Besides, the nail polish didn't appear to be waterproof.
I remember in college I needed another biology credit. I got out the course catalog and found a class called "Field Biology". I read through the description that basically said this class was a series of field trips to study nature. Well I remember in elementary school how much fun we had when we got to go on field trips so I figured it would be the perfect class. What student wouldn't want a whole semester of going on field trips? I registered and went to the first class. We sat in a lab and the professor described the various trips we would be making. I thought I had found the perfect class. At the end he told us a little bit about himself and ended with the phrase, "my specialty is ornithology". Being a hick freshman I just nodded thinking about the canoing trip he had described and the rafting I would be doing. The next class we met and climbed onto a bus and were driven 60 miles to an area that looked like a river bottom right after a flood. We traipsed around for several hours counting the population of Great Blue Harens nesting. That whole semester we went on excursion after excursion looking at birds. It wasn't until the end of the semester that I realized that ornithology was the study of birds. I thought this guy was just obsessed with feathers.
The only non-bird related field trip we got was when they took us out to the desert and we set live traps for field mice. We marked off a square and set traps. The next day we came back and counted how many field mice we had captured. We then were supposed to mark the field mice and let them go, reset the traps then come back the next day and see how many field mice we captured the second time and how many of them had been marked. From that we would plug the numbers into some hairy formula and it would tell us how many field mice per square mile there were in the area. It all sounded good on paper until we got out to our traps and realized none of us had thought about how we would mark the field mice we caught. It just so happened my girlfriend was in the class and she had a bottle of finger nail polish. We took the field mice out of the traps and I painted their fingernails. Do you have any idea how hard it is to paint the nails on a field mouse? It's a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. But after giving each field mouse a pedicure we released them. I often wondered what happened that night in the field mice community when a group came back to the burrow with freshly painted sultry rose nails. It must have caused quite a stir since the next day only one mouse returned to have his nails touched up. I'm not sure which was more funny; me painting toe nails on a field mouse or my girlfriend's face when she saw her favorite nail polish being used on the toes of a rodent. That relationship kind of went downhill after that.
I guess I should be grateful our professor was an ornithologist and not an icthologist. I'm not sure I could have dealt with the idea of sticking my head underwater and counting fish. Besides, the nail polish didn't appear to be waterproof.
