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A dispatch from out west

A couple of weeks ago, I reported on WVU grad and Summersville native Kirk Groves.   Kirk left a job at a Texas game ranch to join a team with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on an aquatic survey project in the Upper Colorado River Basin.

Kirk has been on the job for a couple of weeks and gives us an update. 

“I’ve traveled probably 100 miles of the river so far not counting that we do each section four times. We’ve seen quite a few Razorback Suckers, but I haven’t taken a picture of them yet,”  Kirk writes in an e-mail. “I just got back from a trip on Thurs-Fri and we caught 2 pretty big Pikeminnows and a Humpback Chub. The scenery has been unreal.”

The project is geared to try and restore poulation’s of the Razorback Sucker, Pikeminnows, and the humpback chub.  Those aren’t fish we’s be familiar with in West Virginia.  In fact, the term “pikeminnow” is misleading if you look at the pictures Groves sent to us. 

He adds, there have been some light moments.

“On Friday we were floating past a ranch and they don’t have the river fenced off. A calf was standing on the edge of a bank and the bank gave out and it went right into an eddy below. It got out and went back on the back but couldn’t get back up. Being around farming most of my life I couldn’t just let it be, so I paddled over and helped it back up the bank,” explained Groves. “That’s probably one of the most humorous things so far with the exception of when I misjudged  the water depth and stepped off the boat only to go face first into the freezing cold water.”




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