The baby cow sucks.
This is my third summer working as a field assistant for intertidal ecologists. My first summer was on the Olympic Peninsula, working in the rocky intertidal. This is my second summer on the Long Beach Peninsula working in the muddy intertidal of Willapa Bay. I help with projects involving oysters, which are cultured extensively as a crop in the bay, and eelgrass, which is a flowering plant which lives submerged in salt water. For my job, I count a lot of things and move eelgrass around (I sometimes think of it as tideflat gardening) and measure eelgrass and build cool contraptions out of PVC and put out cool instruments that measure characteristics of the water (salinity, chlorophyll concentration, etc.) or the speed and direction of the water flow. It's so fun to be out here for a second year because I get to learn even more about the projects in progress and also to get to know the bay over a longer period of time. Also, I work with some of my favorite people.

On the peninsula, we live in a house belonging to the professor who heads the lab. She's on sabbatical this year with her family; it's both good and bad to be here without them. They're great people, and we miss them and their expertise, but at the same time life is simpler without a 2 year old around... The house is on about 5 acres, most of which is pasture (the peninsula grows great grass). There's also a large garden, which has produced peas, radishes, onions, potatoes, beets, lettuce, carrots, kale, chard, strawberries, cilantro, and dill so far this year. The garden is in much better shape than last year – there are times when I go out to work in the garden and can't really find anything to do (not an experience I've ever had before in any garden. I suppose it helps to have 4 people caring for it). We have 2 chickens, which either are not laying eggs or are very good at hiding eggs in the tall grass. In back, there are 10 goats (including the cute baby that was born this summer) and a calf that are cared for by some neighbors from down the road. There is also one horse. It's pretty awesome to live with animals without being responsible for them – we get all the pleasure of watching them, including the goats playing on their new see-saw toy. The first time that they climbed on it was pretty hilarious. They would climb to the highest point, but of course as they climbed they eventually tipped the see-saw and would scamper/fall off with a perplexed expression (yes, rampant anthropomorphism).

The cow is really a baby – it arrived here when it was just two days old, acquired from a milk farm that was going to put it down because it's a male. For the first few days it was just a cow-colored lump that occasionally mooed. Now it's wandering around and interacting some with the goats. I went in and said hello to him the other day. I offered him my hand, which he subsequently tried to eat. OK, so that's not really accurate. He doesn't have any teeth yet, and I'm sure he was really hoping that milk would begin coming out if he sucked hard enough. Wow, could that cow generate suction. I was impressed. And then my hand was covered in cow slobber. However, since it doesn't absorb water, (unlike slug slime), it was no big deal.