The past few days here at Mývatn have been great. We've had perfect weather, albeit a bit cold at times, and a bit windy at times. But that is to be expected. The sun has shone way more than I had envisioned though. Not only is the sun out longer every day here than at home, there have been relatively few clouds, and judging from the reactions of the veterans of the field station seems to be fairly rare for periods of more than a day or two. In the past few days I've done some pretty cool stuff. I've played tourist, traveler and local. Here is a highlight from each.
Tourist: We visited Krafla, a dormant volcanic caldera that is about a 15 minute drive from our house. I think the area is a national park, but I am not sure. There are a few interpretive signs and some sort of ranger station, but really you are on your own except for a few marked trails through the lava fields and a boardwalk through some areas with some mudpot-kind of things. I was playing tourist here. I had my camera and I took a bunch of photos, and most of the portraits do not have me in them because I couldn't figure out the time delay (the next day I figured it out in under 30 seconds of trying). The landscape is really pretty incredible, and the volcano was last active in 1984. There is still plenty of steam escaping from vents all over and it is pretty amazing to see where rocks have flowed in a liquid state and hardened in their lava-river shapes.
The traveler part came in when we received an invite through our one of our local contacts to see sheep being birthed at a local farm. Naturally we accepted the invitation, and in the morning we drove over to the farm Vagnbrekka (all of the farms here are named). We were directed into the barn and Egill the farmer invited us in. We were introduced to the leader sheep, Fluga. Leader sheep are bred specifically to lead the herd around in the summer when the sheep are put to pasture in the central highlands of Iceland. Egill explained leader sheep are a bit skinnier than normal sheep in his flock so he only has two (out of about 300 total). Fluga was very much like a dog, eager to be pet and interact with humans. Sheep normally have two lambs, but may have one, three or even four, rarely, and Egill had marked each pregnant ewe with a different colormark so he knew how many lambs each ewe was carrying. His daughter Hilður (11 years old) came in and was also answering questions. One of the ewes was about to give birth and she reached right into the birth canal and determined something was amiss. The lamb’s legs were not aligned right and the lamb would not have come out right, so she rearranged them and pulled the lamb right out. The mother immediately began to clean the lamb so it could breathe easier. The transition from relying totally on one’s mother to breathing on its own is nearly instantaneous. And something of a miracle in my mind. Within five minutes the lamb was up and teetering around!
The local part of my week happened after my first stint on lake Mývatn itself. I call this a local experience because there are very few people who are actually allowed to be on the lake in a boat. The lake is owned by the farms around the lake (one came up for sale in 2009 for the first time in 40 years) and it is only the farmers us at the research station who are allowed on the lake. I even got to go on an island, which even fewer people are allowed to do.
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