Category Archives: Skills

A detailed description for all of my skills

Four Square Mile Survey

01/08/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

For the three summer TERM employment opportunities I had with the USFWS, I participated in the four-square-mile breeding waterfowl survey (FSM). These are incredibly fun surveys to do, and I hope to be able to do more of them in the future. I got to canoe down a water basin with a partner and identify wetland birds and waterfowl as we paddled down a lazy stream. I even got to do it from an air boat at the Arrowwood NWR one time. That was a difficult one as the birds were scared up by the boat and started circling the body of water.

I also was able to participate in some rocket netting in North Dakota on a wildlife preserve. It was quite fun, and we didn’t decapitate too many individuals. Many of the birds got banded, but a lot just had to be tallied and let go.

The FSM survey entails recording pairs of breeding pairs of waterfowl or wetland birds and whether or not they are hatch year, or after hatch year (determined by plumage) in a four square mile area. See some images below on what a typical wetland looks like in North Dakota and South Dakota.

ducks — Shovler top right, green wing teal left

Several waterfowl on a wetland in the prairie pothole region — A typical scene for counting breeding pairs of waterfowl on a wetland in the prairie pothole region

Skills

Feasibility Study: Hydrogen Fuel Cell Power System for a Crewed Base Space Station

01/07/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

While attending Bismarck State College, I applied for a summer grant program with North Dakota Space Grant Consortium (NDSGC), and was accepted as part of the North Dakota Space Training and Research (ND STaR) program. It serves as a NASA exposure program where we developed a mock feasibility study and presented it at the end of the program. I was paired up with Mike Holmes at the Environmental and Energy Research Center (EERC).

During the grant period, I lived in Grand Forks, ND and worked at the EERC doing literary research on fuel cell systems for the integration into a crewed base space station (like a mars or lunar base). After I had a fair deal of research completed, the EERC sent me to Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, TX where I met up with system integration specialists and was able to propose my ideas to them. It was a wonderful experience and I got to go on an inside tour through the facilities at JSC.

Once I had a white paper completed, Mike Holmes and I worked on a poster presentation and a 15 minutes televised speech. I gave the speech in front of a large audience and cspan cameras. I could not have gotten as far as I did without the help of the EERC staff.

Check out the Aurora NDSGC flyer for the spring semester 2004. I’m listed towards the middle.

Also, while I was working on the feasibility study, they were able to get me a few extra bucks working in a lab with Ron Kulas reforming ethanol across various mediums to reform the ethanol into usable hydrogen. Our primary catalyst was platinum.

Etoh reformation hydrogen — Etoh reformation and hydrogen production in time

Skills

Electroshock Fishing

01/06/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

Electroshock fishing is a fine art. Turn up the power too much and the muscles contract so hard you kill the fish, but not enough power and it doesn’t do anything. While I was attending Minnesota State University: Moorhead (MSUM), we used a backpack electroshock fishing setup to collect fish samples throughout some of the close by lakes.

Enjoy this wikipedia article on electrofishing. Also, this youtube video.

Skills

Fish Mark and Recapture

01/05/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

When working with a post doc student from North Dakota State University, we studied the life history of the endangered Mohave Tui Chub, we conducted several mark and recapture studies to determine the population on several bodies of water. The two main ponds we focused on were, Lake Tuende and MC Spring on the grounds of the Desert Studies Center at Zzyzx, CA.

mtc — A very large example of the Mohave Tui Chub

We clipped the right pectoral fin on all of the fish we caught in our minnow traps one day, and repeat the experiment the next day to see how many individuals we recaptured. To determine what the population is, you multiply the number of individuals marked the first day by the number of animals captured on the second visit divided by the number of marked animals captured the second day (See wikipedia article for math notation).

Skills

Avian Influenza (AI) Monitoring

01/04/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

When we were in close proximity of the ducks due to rocket netting or trapping, we wanted to get as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time. One of the things we were able to test for was Avian Influenza (AI) with APHIS, the animal and plant health inspection service with the US department of agriculture (USDA). We did pharyngeal and cloacal swabs on a random sampling of the birds being handled. These swabs were put on ice and shipped overnight to the closest USDA testing facility.

Skills

arcMap and arcView

01/03/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

This software is used by most Geographical Information Systems (GIS) professionals. I’ve used this software to measure wetland area, random point intervals for survey work, and georeferencing. If you are interested in seeing a brief introduction to arcMap, please view this short video.

I used arcview on handheld Trimble GPS units to locate points in the field for the belt transect surveys, and also to locate areas for ground cover analysis.

Skills

Aluminum and Incloy Waterfowl Leg Banding

01/02/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

Aluminum bands are the go-to for bird banding, but there was a new alloy called incloy that we were putting on larger waterfowl. Even using a banding pliers, it was hard to get them to crimp right without having to adjust the roundness of the band. They always wanted to overlap.

incloy1 — Incloy band and banding pliers

waterfowl banding — Incloy band being placed on a leg

Here you can see a standard aluminum band placed on a leg. The identifying number allows us to track the migration of the birds, but relies on hunters turning in the band. To combat this, the USFWS partnered with Ducks Unlimited are placing green reward bands on only Mallard ducks.

duckbanding — For aluminum bands, a needle nose pliers worked the best

Below, you can see the standard device used to hold the different sizes of bands. This allows us to put a band on any species of waterfowl that will not fall off, even if they are just in their hatch year.

Skills

Benning Style Swim in Traps

01/01/2016 Eric Hanson Leave a comment

Benning style swim in traps are used to sample duck populations. I used them during my time banding ducks. We first baited a site with barley for several days, and once the ducks were acclimated to that site, we erected the trap.

It consists of a vertical mesh net fashioned in an oval shape with the two ends being curved inwards at the bottom to allow the ducks to swim into the barley feed. As the ducks swim outwards to escape, they reach the inset areas and are forced to bridge the gap and hit the other side of the oval wall. The top is also covered to keep out birds of prey.

My team also set out lethal grip traps for mink and raccoons on predatory paths. This helped limit the morbidity of our Benning traps.

Learning Through Life