"CUCKOOO, CUCKOOOOOO!!!"

Just another Sunday night in Bethel…This past weekend my roommates and I went Ptarmigan hunting. Ptarmigans (said like, ‘Tarmigan’) are medium sized birds found on the tundra that surrounds Bethel. No, we didn’t have a gun, crossbow or even a bow-and-arrow in our arsenal. We had a beat-up 1980’s 5 passenger station wagon, 2 radio stations and some good company. See, the trick to catching these Ptarmigans is NOT concentration and pinpoint accuracy …it’s simply cruising around town in any old clunker car as it gets dark. Heading out when it’s dark outside is vital… These brilliant birds actually fly into telephone wires and poles, knocking themselves unconscious. Our job as the hunter is to find the helpless poultry, throw a bag over it and kill it by spinning it around a couple times in a helicopter motion. Sounds pretty easy…

The seven of us piled into the stealthy hunting vehicle just as it neared dusk and set off to find some unconscious prey. We drove around some of the back roads for over an hour scouring the ground for any signs of these white beauties. Unfortunately, we had no luck. We pulled out all of the stops…even attempting to lure the Ptarmigans to us with my best Ptarmingan mating call. My mating calls proved fruitless and no Ptarmigans were apprehended. We haven’t given up hope however…we’ll be making the rounds a few more times over the next couple of weeks. Just last week, my roommate Joe came within inches of catching his first Ptarmigan…except when he reached for the bird it suddenly sprang to life in his hands and narrowly escaped becoming our dinner.

Clearly, our subpar hunting skill isn’t what’s keeping us fed. Thankfully, we have generous friends in the community. In addition to the millions of salmon that have been donated to us, we’ve also been given duck and moose. We had a delicious ‘moose stew’ for dinner last week. If you’ve never eaten moose, I highly suggest it. Moose hunting season just ended here so there is a good amount of moose in town right now. Each moose has about 800 POUNDS OF MEAT!!! Needless to say my roommates and I never caught the elusive moose…maybe next year?!

On a separate note, we're slowly losing our daylight here. On my first night in Bethel it was light outside until just after midnight. Since then however, we've been losing about 6 minutes of light EVERY day. Now it's actually getting dark close to 9pm. That probably doesn't seem so bad but at 6 minutes a day, we're heading for some dark days ahead. We'll continue to lose daylight until mid-winter (January-ish) when there is just about 4 hours of light a day (from 11am-3pm). There's a good chance that I'll go through an entire day seeing just a few minutes of daylight as I walk to the courthouse or lunch. TIB

This week I get to travel to Anchorage for the annual Public Defender's Conference. It will be a cool opportunity for me to a learn a bit more about the CINA cases and law in general. I'm also just really excited to see some mountains and experience another part of Alaska!