Raven researcher Stacia Backensto disguises herself
as an oilfield worker in an attempt to fool ravens she
has captured before. She recently bolstered this disguise
with a fake beard, padding around her belly, and a wig.
Photo: Jim Zelenak
This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.
Stacia Backensto has upped the ante. The biologist and UAF student who studies ravens on Alaska’s North Slope has dropped her fake moustache and has taken more drastic measures to not resemble herself when she tries to recapture the birds.
She now wears a beard made of fuzzy fabric, a wig, and she duct-tapes pillows around her midsection to play the most fun role of her graduate-student career, that of “a grumpy old oilfield worker.”
“By the time I got around to the beard and the duct-taping of the pillows, I found myself with a 30-minute costume prep time before trapping,” said Backensto, a Ph.D. student with UAF’s Regional Resilience and Adaptation Program. “It was kind of like getting ready to go onstage.”
Backensto, studying how oil and gas development activities affect ravens, needs to hide her identity from the six or so ravens she has captured before in Prudhoe Bay.