Renée@Rutgers

A California girl who's not in Kansas anymore.

[reneeatrutgers]

Please help... we have a full sized ROBIN, flying into our closed window ,[hard] for 6 days.. now starting at about 6am & WON'T GIVE UP, all day.. if we try to 'talk' to it, it just sits on the ground where it falls, looks at us for a few mins., flys away about 30 or 40 feet.. and back to continue banging the window til twilight..We are afraid it will kill itself, if it keeps up... Once I tapped on the inside of the window, to chase it then it went to the upstairs window & continued..

Oh no, this is fairly old by now. :( But there are decals that you can buy for your windows that birds can see and humans can’t (since birds can see UV). There are also ones that you can see that look like hawks and such. I’ve seen them on Amazon.

[reneeatrutgers]

We got about 2ft of snow in the span of 24 hours (Friday night-Saturday night) from winter storm Jonas. Featuring the woodstove at Dan’s house with a fire I built, and our sad, sorry attempt at an igloo.

[reneeatrutgers]

We found out the other day what happened to Ed. From his cousin: “We received word today that it was his heart. He had a birth defect that limited his heart to 2 valves where there should have been 4. This complication combined with a tear somewhere inside his heart was the culprit, a ticking time bomb of sorts.”

If ever there was a reminder that life’s not fair, I suppose this is it.

Will’s been over a lot, and he’ll randomly come over and give me a big hug, and has been making sure we all know he loves us.

Ed is survived by his little brother, Nick, a sophomore at Rutgers. He spent the night on Thursday. When I got up on Friday Lieve had curled up at his feet where he’d fallen asleep on the couch. Will and Rachelle took him to a couple funeral homes to make arrangements. He asked his mother on the phone if Ed had ever said anything to her about being cremated, and I was reminded of how we’re all too young for this. Edward Romano, Sr. died a few years back, and I know that they don’t live with their mother. This whole thing is so fucking tragic.

Rachelle finally found some words.

Last Sunday, I finally finished a D&D campaign I’d been running for a good 2.5 years. One player, whose character ended the campaign as a lightning moose, requested this little miracle for his epilogue. After I finished narrating, he ordered a box of 24 cookies to share with the rest of the players. I told him I could only afford to pay him back for one; he insisted I eat as many as I want. He was going to buy them anyway. Together, gorging ourselves on fresh-baked cookies, we all watched the latest Rick & Morty, the purge episode. It was hysterical, and he was laughing about as hard as I’ve ever seen him laugh.

And then on Wednesday morning, he was dead. 

Now it’s Saturday night. I’ve been desperate to be drunk for four days, which might help if it happened, but it hasn’t. My best friend has been sleeping over every night. He wasn’t going to tonight, but this afternoon he told me he wasn’t ready to go home yet. He’s sleeping next to me right now. We’ve hardly talked about it at all today, the memorial was yesterday, the wake is Tuesday, the funeral Wednesday. Tomorrow makes a week from the last time I saw my friend. The funeral makes a week from his last morning alive, a week from our first day without him. 

At the pit of me there have always been words, words have been my core, words help me to express the things I understand and explore the things I don’t. But now at the pit of me there is nothing but a pit. They tell us he went softly: he was maybe lightheaded, he maybe sat down, he maybe went to catch his breath or his balance, that was all; he maybe died not even knowing this was death. They tell us it was peaceful. 

Well if he went peacefully, he left us violently. He left us with pits in our stomachs, our voices, our hearts. He left us in a place unserved by words, and it’s Saturday night, and words are all I have. 

[reneeatrutgers]

We arbitrarily defined the population of bats going extinct at 150 individuals. Why? I don't know, it was a good number.

Dr. Brooke Maslo, professor of my Wildlife Conservation & Ecology class. She got on a tangent about a paper she's writing right now about bat populations in New Jersey.

This is an interesting class (the one I was banding ducks for, actually). We're learning about conservation and ecology, part of which is species management. And the big takeaway is that the answers aren't on Google or in our textbook, a lot of it is subjective and you have to make decisions about how to do things and then be able to justify the decisions you make about why you did things a certain way.

[reneeatrutgers]

A Rutgers Leader Falls: Edward Romano Dies at 21

New Jersey lost a vigorous leader today.

This morning I learned of a friend's passing.

I met Ed about two years ago, when he headed the history/political science section at Demarest. From the beginning he was so vibrant and impassioned, and I enjoyed learning about history and politics from him because he made them interesting and hilarious. We became better friends through all of our mutual friends, and I loved his crazy stories and learned so much from him since our interests were so different.

This hit me harder than I could have expected–I didn't even believe it at first, it seemed so ludicrous. He was just here at our apartment last week!

My roommate is much more eloquent than I:

I'm really not sure what to say, but it has to be said: Ed Romano died this morning. I don't know the details, I don't know why, I don't know how it could have happened. It isn't right or logical. I don't know how to express anything beyond that. He was such a force of personality, smart and witty and capable like no one I've ever known, a brilliant storyteller whose life was somehow only believable because of how crazy it was. He wasn't one to be summed up in a few words. I wish I didn't have to share this news, and I wish I could do him justice, and really, I wish he was still alive.

We all love you, Ed. There's a hollow in the future that was meant to be shaped by you.

He will be sorely missed.

[reneeatrutgers]

A word about my major and misunderstandings.

A friend of mine saw the video of the net cannon from yesterday and said it seemed kind of sad. I think she thought we were killing them, so I explained what it really was and why banding a hunted species is important and she said, 'Oh, ok.'

It reminded me of another conversation I had last month with a friend from high school who was visiting NJ/PA with his brother. He went to Cabela's, an outdoors store more centered around hunting/fishing gear, and he thought that I'd feel pretty out of place there. Which I don't think is true, I like fishing, and I would like to go hunting.

Long story short, we got into a discussion about hunting and he seemed pretty off-put by the concept, even after I told him that, in New Jersey at least, deer are overpopulated and need to be hunted to maintain forest health and reduce conflict with humans (e.g. vehicle collisions).

There was also an instance last semester where someone thought it was gross and sad that we were looking at dead bird specimens in ornithology lab.

And it just...it floors me. I love animals--sometimes more than I love people--so it bothers me when people are bothered by educational or practical things. The bird specimens were, in some cases, collected over a hundred years ago and are an important resource in the classroom. Hunting deer is good for humans, deer, and the environment! Banding ducks is important for information about harvest rates.

I recognize the practicality of these things so, even though I also love animals, I understand why they have to happen.

[reneeatrutgers]

This was my morning. More coming soon!

[reneeatrutgers]

Dan’s aunt Cathy has a house on the Delaware in Lumberville, PA. Today, as a last hurrah of summer, we dragged Mike and Zak out there to go float down the river with Dan’s cousin Ben and his girlfriend Ashley.

I wish I could’ve taken my phone or camera because it was gorgeous, but I didn’t want to get it wet or lose it. I took this picture off Cathy’s back deck. It’s been a really dry August and September so far so the water level was really low and the current was basically nonexistent.

There was a rope swing at one point so we got out and pushed the inner tubes to the bank. I’m gonna have a bruise on part of my leg because the swing was super high off the water and I hit at a weird angle. Was terrifying and fun at the same time.

We pulled out near Stockton, NJ and Cathy came to pick us up and drive us back to her house. Was a really fun day and I wish we’d gotten this together sooner in the summer so we could have done it more than once!

[reneeatrutgers]

So basically our marching band is hella cool. Star Wars show from the game against Norfolk yesterday (that we won, amazingly).

[reneeatrutgers]

My intention this morning was to wake up at 5:30 and go birding in the park, but my alarm went off and I was just, 'Yeah, not happening,' and went back to sleep.

Finally made it out around 9am, didn't see any birds really. BUT I did find these two cuties. At first I thought the one on the left was the same one from Tuesday, but NO. Looking at pictures, his lowest tines are lower than the other one, and his top left tines curve a little differently.

I really wish there was a good place for Will to hunt around here, because all three of these would make nice trophies for his wall and would be a lot of delicious venison.

[reneeatrutgers]

There's a little park down the street from my apartment called Highland Park Meadows. There's a nice little half mile loop trail through some wooded area, so I went for a walk the other day.

Saw a few Song sparrows flitting about, and then a solitary black-and-white warbler.

A little while later I was startled by a great crashing in the brush and saw the typical fluffy white tail running away. Luckily he didn't run too far and I got to admire this nice eight point buck. Showed Will and told him he should come hunting here and we could have venison for months.

A little bit of trail in nice afternoon light. Local cat was hunting something in the brush. A male Cardinal in poor plumage, probably molting before the winter.

And an almost full moon.

[reneeatrutgers]

So these are puss caterpillars--so named for being fluffy like pussy cats. Despite their cuddly appearance, they sting. They were also hiding under every single leaf (or so it seemed) at Colliers Mills.

Nick, my boss, felt a pain on his arm and realized he'd gotten one on his pants and had accidentally stung himself. Chase voluntarily stung himself with a white one and a brown one just to see what the pain was like. After like an hour they both said that their entire arms ached. Jill and Jaclyn accidentally got stung, too.

Today was my last day of regular work, I might go out some Saturdays in September, but I escaped the month unstung!

We also agreed that the brown ones look like Donald Trump's toupée.

[reneeatrutgers]

Now I see why rainbows are cool. There's like four more fuckin' colors in there! I knew that, but I didn't believe it.

Will is very, very red-green colorblind. We got him the color-blindness correcting sunglasses for his birthday. A bunch of us chipped in a little bit and he's trying them on for the first time, and it's so precious.

[reneeatrutgers]

Last night I found out what happens when you get a bunch of ecology majors drunk.

Dr. John-Alder is a professor I've taken a few classes with, and will take at least one or two more with him before I graduate. He's also Nick's faculty advisor and head of the Ecology, Evolution, & Natural Resources department. He offered to take Nick and all of us underlings out to dinner last night. We went to the Asbury Park Festhalle & Biergarten, and sat on the roof with a nice view out to the ocean.

I had no idea what to expect, but we got there at 6 and didn't leave until almost 10:30. We all had a few drinks, and at some point after a couple hours Nick and Jill start (good-naturedly) disagreeing about the purpose of mice: Nick and Chase say their only "purpose" is to feed other animals, and they also have a small role in seed dispersal. Jill, Jenn, and Jaclyn all take the side that their purpose, like all things, is to reproduce and pass on their genes.

I, seeing that these things are not mutually exclusive, don't really take a side and watch/listen as they hash this out once, the conversation moves on, and then they come back to it again later. It was ridiculous and amusing. At one point I tried to point out to Jill that everything has its fitness measured in the same way: how many offspring you have/how much of your genes are passed on. Since everything has this, it becomes the least common denominator and you can 'divide it out' of the equation and look at the other things on top of that, but she wasn't having any of that.

This also led to a side conversation between myself and Dr. John-Alder about what the hell "purpose" is, is it the same as meaning?, and what about humans? Upon which my take is simply, "You know, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things my life is going to be fairly meaningless. I am a speck of dust in the universe. I'm okay with that. My life doesn't have to have a meaning or a purpose, I'm enjoying living it regardless." It's hedonism, but it's also realistic.

In short: went out for drinks with my bosses & coworkers, it was silly, we had a good time.

[reneeatrutgers]

Haven't really had anything too interesting to share from work lately, but this week has been fun so far.

The baby lizards started hatching! So now we find some teeny tiny little hatchlings, and they're hard to catch because we're super worried about crushing them.

We found a tiny toad when we had a hatchling so Jill wanted to put them together like a fary tale.

On Wednesday I got to hold a baby bird! Noticed it fall out of a tree, checked it out to make sure it was okay and not injured. Put it on a branch and let it be. Fledglings leave the nest before they know how to fly, and they hop around on the ground and mom & dad still come feed them until they're old enough to fly & survive on their own. I think it was an Eastern wood-pewee. This morning I saw a Northern mockingbird fledge, but it was more proficient at hop-flying so I didn't get to hold it.

[reneeatrutgers]

A panorama from work today. This is Colliers Mills Wildlife Management Area. We work through woodier parts looking for lizards, but the views into the fields are really nice.

[reneeatrutgers]

Birthdays.

On Saturday we decided we should have a birthday party every few weeks just to get everyone together. (Mine in June, Booker's in July, and then Will's in August.)

On an amusing note, Will turned 21 on the 3rd. Since April or May Rachelle and Nicole (his girlfriend) have been planning a surprise birthday party for him at Dan's house.

So on Saturday it was Rachelle's job to get Will to the party, supposedly around 6pm. At 5:30 Rachelle texts Dan to say, "So, I can't get Will to stop fishing. 6 is looking optimistic."

When they finally showed up at 7:30, three people had already had to leave the party for time constraints and everyone asked Rachelle, "WHY did you take him fishing?! That was a terrible idea!"

And she said, "I didn't! I thought we were going for a walk and then he pulled his fishing pole out of the car!"