I’m having a pretty good week o’ science.
Last week I ran a procedure called immunocytochemistry (ICC) where tissue sections are stained for the presence of specific compounds – in our case an enzyme that converts dopamine to norepinephrine. This is the second time I’ve run this assay on my own, and sometimes even though you follow every step of the protocol, it doesn’t work. Apparently in those situations the appropriate sacrifice to the science gods wasn’t made, and you’ve wasted a week of your life and valuable tissue samples. Today, after 3 hours on the microscope I found out that my ICC worked! Yippee!
Yesterday I made a happy discovery. I was going to move my House Finches out of the aviary so that Buddy could move his Lincoln Sparrows out there. However, since I have “breeding pairs” in each of the 5 cages, I figured I should double check the trees that we have in there in case they had nests that I had missed. Sure enough I found a nest that I hadn’t previously known about, and inside it was this little guy (or girl). I think he’s probably somewhere around 10 days old. I have another nest with 4 chicks in it, but they’re still really small, so I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet. But, YAY for the little one!
And, on Saturday morning I caught 4 new HOFIs – two juveniles, a male and a female.
Bite count 2007: 13