Glass Rehousing

This morning, Erica and I started a new rehousing project – this time, we rehoused several dozen glass bottles and other glass objects that were taking up a lot of space in the drawers. Just as rehousing the spoons yesterday opened up a lot of space, rehousing these glass objects today will provide us with several drawers of space to rehouse objects this summer.

Glass objects were taking up an inordinate amount of room in the storage area and are scattered rather than housed together. With Bridgette's help, we decided to rehouse them into Hollinger boxes in the upright shelving area. In this area, objects are carefully packed into Hollinger boxes, which are stored on shelves.  Bridgette made us a list of glass objects in the general storage area that needed rehousing into Hollinger boxes. We began by pulling the objects from the list onto carts, which we brought down to the work area. We looked up the bottles in ANCS+ and saw that none of them had photographs, so we added that to our rehousing assignment.

One of two carts of glass bottles we rehoused

Some of the bottles in their original cases. We were able to reuse many of these housings, but some had to be redone because they posed danger to the objects. 

In the afternoon, everyone from the Heritage and Research Center had to go up to Mammoth for mandatory radio training, a two-hour class where we learned how to use the park’s radios. For my job, I will likely never need to use a park radio, but it was interesting to learn how the radio system in the park works and how the radios work. After the radio training, the HRC interns all attended a seminar by John Vucetich, head of an ongoing study about the predator-prey relationship between wolves and moose in Isle Royale National Park in Michigan.  

The lecture discussed the changing perceptions in the last fifty years about the predator-prey relationship between wolves and moose at Isle Royale National Park. At first, the relationship seemed to be top-down – that is, wolves were the dominant predators and moose the prey in the relationship. However, fifty plus years of research has proven that disease among wolves, climate change, fluctuations in availability of certain moss that moose rely on for food, and the population of ticks on the island all play important roles in the predator-prey relationship. For example, ticks are currently thriving at Grand Isle, and are preying largely on moose, therefore weakening them and making them easy targets for wolves.

After the lecture, we returned to the HRC and worked on the glass bottle rehousing for the last hour of work. With such a big break in the middle of the day, we didn’t get as much done as we would have liked, and will have a lot more to do tomorrow before we are finished with this project.