The Appledore Giggles

They’re back. The Appledore Giggles. For those not in the know, it seems that I am afflicted with a peculiar phenomenon of paralyzing laughter that seems to manifest itself only when I am at Shoals. Today, I was struck with them thrice.

After a whole morning of marking out Great Black-Backed Gull nests, we decided to take a well-earned tea break. The topic of hagfish and their slime somehow came up as we sat around the table sipping Earl Grey. Then we went to to discuss their edibility.

“It’s like Green Moray Eels!” exclaimed Michelle. “People eat them, even though they’re slimy. Did you know that they look yellow because of their yellow mucous but are actually blue?”

“Why is the mucous yellow then?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The yellow mucous. Why is it yellow?”

“I… I don’t know, it just is.”

“But if they’re already blue, why do they need to be yellow too?”

“Well they don’t have to be, they just are.”

At this point in the conversation I made the mistake of looking up at the others whose expressions conveyed utter confusion at the fact that Green Moray Eel mucous was a topic of serious conversation for Michelle and I. My attempt to explain that I was just curious why the mucous wasn’t transparent quickly dissolved into bursts of paralyzing laughter, much to the others’ amusement and added confusion. I don’t even know why I was laughing, there’s just something in the Appledore air that seems to set me off.

After tea, I enlisted Michelle to help me with recordings gull calls for my research. The idea was for me to crouch in some bushes a few meters away from a Herring Gull nest with an audio recorder and record the occupant’s vocalization as Michelle walked up to it, creating a situation starting from no threat and going steadily from low to high threat-level.

Unfortunately, the gulls were having none of me. With only one or two eggs in the clutch this early in the season, their nervousness overrode their drive to incubate and they just stood around kek-keking at me, refusing to return to the nest.

After about an hour and a half of this frustrating behavior, I had the bright idea of using Michelle’s hide as a cover to record from. We ran into the RIFS lab, got the hide, popped it open on the grass outside and then got inside and lifted it up to move it. It was an ill-timed operation. Dave, Sarah, Taylor and Cassie just happened to return from birding at that exact moment and caught the whole awkward feet-sticking-out-of-a-moving-blind thing on film. The worst part was that we didn’t even realize we had company till a good ten seconds into the video when we heard voices and decided to unzip the windows to look out, only to find four bemused faces staring at us.

Needless to say, the Giggles struck again. As Michelle put it, “We must be the weirdest pair of interns, ever!”

All in all, it was a pretty hilarious (to me, at least, for reasons I cannot fathom), fun day. And to top it off, I got smacked on the head and pooped on while trying to make a voice announcement at the end of a recording.

“That was nest SS 12…”

Smack.

Pffft. “Did you hear that? I heard it poop on you!” cried Michelle.

… and I was struck by the Giggles again.