that'll do pig

Hearing Trish's bird story reminded me of a rare moment we shared in the woods. Trish and I used to study little brown birds called Acadian Flycatchers in a ravine near Ravenna, Ohio. Trish collected their poop so she could identify what insects had been eaten. The adults dropped the poop from their nestlings in the same vicinity every day, so the poop was generally easy to find.

However, finding enough poop was another story. We needed about 20 per nest to get a decent picture of the bird's diet. On one particularly grueling day, when our backs were breaking from all the collecting and neither of us had much to say, I remember standing up and uttering the words, "That'll do pig". Of course this caught her by surprise and she looked up at me with a look of disgust on her face. But after seeing the movie "Babe", she came to appreciate the significance of the words and the compliment I'd given her. We didn't make the news that day, but we did get a good laugh out of it.

Another good laugh concerns my former student Rob Adair (http://antennaehead.blogspot.com) who parked his car next to a culvert along a very steep bank and got stuck. We tried and tried to push it out, but it was no use - the car wouldn't budge! Then Rob's dad showed up in an oversized pickup truck, and the first words out of his mouth were, "Rob, take off the parking brake". We couldn't stop laughing for days and still it brings a smile to my face when I think of my absent-minded friend.