Last night was the wombat catching for Laura, with Jesse. I truly had an indelible time! (That’s dictionary.com’s word of the day, indelible) It was a lot easier than I expected, although still quite difficult. The project was a week long wombat catching exercise, and Jesse and I helped just for the one night. We met some really nice people, namely Ron, Ingrid, Dave (Tags), Bill, and Elise. We went out a few times, the first time we split up, and it was a relatively unsuccessful expedition, and I let a couple wombats get away that I should have been able to catch. The way it works is that someone drives a ute, and you have at least three on the back of the ute. The spotlighter shines the light on wombats, amongst 1 million small shrubs that look very similar to wombats, and then presses a button which triggers a light in the cabin for the driver to stop. The light stuns the wombat for long enough for the shooter to get ready, and one or two or even three runners with nets to jump off the ute and get ready to run. Another person will shoot a rifle pellet to deliberately miss, which then stuns the wombat completely (most of the time) and scares it from moving at all, so you can run up to it away from the light, and catch the wombat with the net unaware.

Jesse and I both caught three each, I think we did really well for our first time, considering I got extremely sick by the end of the night such that half of the time I was too sick to do anything. Both Jesse and I did a couple really sweet catches (if you don’t mind me saying) and we work pretty well as a team! Tags (Laura’s supervisor) is incredible to watch catching a wombat, and was really good at teaching us the intracacies of the art.

Later that night we got back at 4am, and sat around a fire until 5am, telling stories, until we crashed. I woke up shortly after going to bed, feeling like I wanted to throw up, with the taste of blood in my mouth. Jesse couldn’t sleep either, so we came back really early. I would love to have stuck around more, but uni/work commitments don’t really permit for either of us Hopefully Laura has just as good success for the rest of the week, and I look forward to hearing how she goes! And remember Laura, we want to be on the Acknowledgements page of your thesis

I’m now still feeling like absolute crap, but I’m stuck back into my work and pretty much on top of it again.