A minor inconvenience

It's been a few days since I updated, because on Monday we returned to
the field station to discover that the internet is still down. I can't
help but wonder if it's entirely coincidental that I was testing the
boundaries of censorship just before it went down last Thursday. Oops.
Won't do that again. Although I'm pretty sure I did it before and that
this was perhaps the same result...

Otherwise all is well. The Kazakh family is unbelievable. They have
been catching more than 20 females each night although almost every
one of them died the first two nights. So now they're bringing the
animals to me each night after they finish the collection which was
about 1 am the first night and 2 am last night. I am becoming one with
my nocturnal animals. The unfortunate thing (besides my lack of sleep)
is that these guys are much more agressive than the animals in my
colony back home, and especially pissed off and active at night after
being trapped in a small cage. Thank good for my gloves with leather
fingertips. They try desperately to take their vengance on my and
instead get a mouthful of leather. Perhaps it still makes them feel
good to think they're punishing me.

Many of the embryos are too old for my analyses, but the pregnancy
rate is almost 100% this year so I'm still getting a lot of embryos of
the stages I want. 25 litters so far, to be precise. Which is more
than 60-70 embryos for two night's work. At this rate I'll have a
bumper crop in no time and perhaps be finished a bit early. Definitely
in time to switch gears for phase 2 of the biomechanics work when the
grad student working with me arrives from Boston in a couple of weeks.

Not sure what happened this year though. The climate is no different
from when I've been here before.The temperatures are tracking the
same. There's hardly any vegetation yet, and the trees haven't budded.
But the jerboas have all clearly fed well and are breeding at least
1-2 weeks earlier than before. Maybe there are annual cycles I'm not
aware of. A professor at the Academy of Sciences told me that about
once in 5-7 years there are almost no jerboas. Maybe this is the
opposing peak of that valley.

In any case, I can't complain. Given the difficulty of this work and
all of the many many factors that are out of my control, I have to say
I am pretty pleased. Fingers crossed this run of good luck continues.