Animals Intrigued with Scientific Field Sites
As reported in an earlier column , Alaskan bears show a great deal of interest in remote scientific field sites, and particularly delight in tearing them up.
This brought to mind some other instances pertaining to animals and field sites, almost always humorous, and almost always involving my best friend, Doug VanWormer. Doug and I worked together for many years at the University of Nevada in Reno, at the U.S. Earthquake Mechanism Laboratory in San Francisco, and at the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks. Doug, a young father, died tragically from cancer in 1979, but our trips to the field were always fun and I remember them vividly and with great fondness.
In 1966, the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America was holding its annual meeting in Reno. Dr. Alan Ryall, our boss, and president of the society a number of years later, had dispatched Doug and me as an advance party to Bell Flat in central Nevada (surely one of the most desolate spots on earth). We were to prepare for the group, and to install seismographic installations around the Fairview Peak fault which abutted Bell Flat. This fault, in a series of earthquakes in 1954, had developed one of the most impressive fault offsets in recorded history. It was to this feature that the touring group would be taken by bus on a field trip.
Doug and I got there about a week before the group was supposed to arrive and went about the business of setting up the seismographs. We began to notice that a small she-coyote appeared extremely interested in our operation, and would hang around watching us from about 100 yards away, but showing no fear. Finally, one day, Doug and I decided to see if we could catch her. It wasn't all that easy, but finally, by running in relays, we managed to grab her. We shot a jackrabbit, took it back to camp for her dinner, and within a matter of hours, she was a member of the family.
She would sit between us on the pickup seat while we went our rounds, with her tongue hanging out and looking for all the world like Odie, the mindless pup in the famous Garfield comic strip by Jim Davis.
But the best part was when the bus arrived with the touring group of seismologists, about half of them Japanese. The bus was not able to make a steep climb to view the fault, so Doug and I were shuttling them back and forth in the pickup truck. The first person to get into the cab was the distinguished seismologist, Clarence Allen, from southern California. Doug and I were waiting for his reaction, and it exceeded all expectations. Dr. Allen climbed in, took one look at the critter sitting next to him, opened the door of the pickup, and yelled back to the group trudging up the hill behind us: "Hey, guys .... there's a COYOTE in here!"
Understandably, many of the Japanese contingent did not understand this, but when the word got around, we all had a good laugh. We left the little coyote (we never did get around to naming her) on Bell Flat where we had first seen her, but she was a frequent topic of conversation later. A favorite remembrance was the night that I had reached for the water jug and gulped down about a pint before I realized it was the bloody water from which she had drunk after eating the jackrabbit.
Another favorite story involves the time that Doug was working with the U.S. Earthquake Mechanism Laboratory and was installing some equipment at Stone Canyon, south of Hollister, California, on the San Andreas fault. It so happened that the ranch on which he was emplacing the equipment belonged to a man who loved horses. Doug was fiddling with the electronics involved while the horses all huddled around watching him, nudging him, and generally making nuisances of themselves. Doug loved animals, and decided to take a break and pet the horses. In his pocket, he was carrying some "sour ball" candy. The name describes them accurately--some sugar on the outside, and sour on the inside. The horses accepted them with relish, until they melted down to the inside. Their reaction, as described by Doug and other witnesses, was hysterical. My friend was known to exaggerate on occasion, but judging from the relish with which he told the story, I'm not sure that he was too far off the mark this time. The horses, he recounted, would suddenly assume a startled look, take a few steps backward, their top lips would fold back over their eyes, and their tongues would stick out a foot while they tried to scrape the thing off with their teeth. But it took a master story-teller like Doug to get the full impact across. We'd likely have more animal stories if Doug had not died so young. We miss him an awful lot.
