Well, life keeps getting in the way of blogging, but I really wanted to get SOMETHING up today!  So, I bring you the noble cotton rat:

One of my coworkers at the natural history museum where I work live traps small mammals to monitor their population at the museum’s field station.  I finally had an opportunity to go with them a few weeks ago, and this rat in particular, though quite elderly and a little soggy, ended up being my favorite.  I love rodents in general, but we were also collecting insect and arachnid parasites off the mammals in the traps, you see, and this was the ONLY rat we got that had anything on it: a single flea.  My coworker grabbed the flea and I carried it around in a little vial in my pocket the rest of the morning.  I can’t say why, but the idea that I was carrying a flea in my pocket really amused me.  Granted, it WAS quite early in the morning at the end of an exhausting week, so my threshold for what I thought was funny that morning was perhaps a bit lower than normal…

I get my whole weekend off this week, so I might actually have time to get caught up on my dragonfly swarm blog posts.  Here’s hoping nothing else comes up before then!

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