Dubious achievements in science noted.
Propwash Awards pay wry tribute to gaffes among wildlife workers
In his long, illustrious career with the Canadian Wildlife Service, Ernie Kuyt won the Order of Canada and many other awards for his efforts to bring back the whooping crane from the brink of extinction.
But in 1992, the biologist was awarded the prize that neither he nor anyone else in his storied organization wanted.
The Propwash Award is bestowed on scientists or technicians who distinguish themselves by either famously screwing up or making fools of themselves in the office or the field.
Other professions do it in their own informal ways. CWS scientists — Edmonton is the regional centre for Western Canada and the North — do it by awarding a ceremonial trophy.
Kuyt’s ignoble accomplishment was a doozy.
In 1965, he was studying wolves in the Thelon River area of the Subarctic, occasionally shooting them from the air with a double-barrelled shotgun loaded with heavy buckshot. Cruel as it seems now, this is how biologists routinely collected specimens back then.
Never a great shot, Kuyt missed while firing from the open window of the plane on the first pass.
He felt that something was amiss. Realizing that his seat had been pulled forward to allow for the removal of some fuel drums, he slid it back before giving it another try.
The adjustment proved to be a bit extreme. Instead of hitting the wolf the next time around, most of the pellets sprayed into the plane’s propeller. Pilot Paul Slager immediately shut things down when he heard the frightening whine, then the sickening shudder of the engine.
As luck would have it, there was a lake below and he was able to make a perfect stick landing.
But their ordeal was far from over. Sitting there in the middle of a cold lake, out of radio range and with no way of getting to shore, they needed some way to rescue themselves. Slager considered using a hacksaw to cut off the damaged tip. In the end, they went with Kuyt’s idea of using an axe and stone to straighten the prop.
Although a few metal chips had splintered from the prop, Slager was desperate enough to attempt a takeoff, which he did, albeit noisily.
In his youth, Kuyt had been a virtual prisoner when the Germans invaded his native Netherlands, and he was never shy about sharing his war stories. Not surprisingly, he took a lot of ribbing over the years for shooting a plane down in peacetime.
The Propwash Award was first given to Edmonton-based biologist Bert Poston in 1972 for an incident in which he reported what he thought was a leak in the engine of a plane that was flying him and others to the Mackenzie Valley. Long story short, Poston was tricked into believing the situation could be resolved if he could find some propwash when the plane landed in Fort Simpson. Looking everywhere without success, Poston eventually returned empty-handed and was horrified to discover the pilot was going to fly anyway. (Propwash is an actual term, meaning the disturbed mass of air or water pushed aft by the propeller of an aircraft or propeller-driven watercraft.)
Poston had wrongly assumed that propwash was a special oil additive until colleague Ray Glasrud presented him with the real story, and a trophy — an empty oil can on an oiled, black painted wooden case.
That would have been the end of it had biologist Paul Pryor not found the trophy 20 years later, stored in Poston’s warehouse cubicle. That’s when the award was given new life and presented to Kuyt.
Since then, not a year has passed when someone hasn’t done something that qualifies him or her for the dubious honour. Potential candidates have tried to run and hide, but the truth has always caught up with them. In the nomination process, no one, not even lifelong friends, can be trusted.
Kees Vermeer ran away with the award one year for several faux pas. On two occasions, he had trouble getting his vehicle — with a canoe on the roof — into an underground Edmonton garage. Both times, he took a run at the parkade entrance. Predictably, the canoe peeled off both times.
Collecting phalaropes on another occasion, Vermeer had a bead on one of the small, wading birds before firing a shot that knocked the hat off of a passing canoeist.
Vermeer was renowned for his forgetfulness. One year, he reported a government car stolen only to learn from police that it was buried under two feet of snow where he’d left it at the airport.
His greatest claim to fame, however, stemmed from a trip to the High Arctic, where he and a student spent several days on some uninhabited islands collecting gull eggs. Back home a week later, Vermeer was initially puzzled when the parents of the student called to find out where their son was. It was then that he remembered that he had forgotten to send a helicopter to pick up the young man.
Until he died two years ago, Kuyt was the unofficial recordkeeper of this storied award. With his passing, Edmontonbased scientist Geoff Holroyd has taken over.
As many students and technicians will attest, Holroyd never suffers fools gladly. Focused as he is on species at risk, there is no room for mistakes or accidents in the field.
So there he was on a bright summer day, returning from the field to hunt down some
“You can only do so many stupid things and survive them without injury or death.”
Prop was h recipient frank miller
storage shelves that were being moved for renovations at the office. With the help of colleague Gerry Beyersbergen, he did a bit of snooping and tracked down the shelves. Reluctantly, staff allowed the pair to wheel them to their new offices.
All went well until they rounded a corner in the hall. Neither foresaw that their tall load might strike the overhead fire sprinkler, but when it did, there was a splash of oily water that gushed out, rather than sprayed.
Having been dive-bombed by nesting peregrine falcons many times while perched on the edge of precarious cliffsides, Holroyd did not panic when the building’s fire alarm went off, triggering the entire sprinkler system. Instead, he and Beyersbergen went into action when they saw the boxes of their colleagues’ papers getting soaked on the floor.
Firefighters were not amused when they arrived to discover this scientific dynamic duo had neglected to evacuate the building. While Holroyd tried to make their case to one unimpressed firefighter, another got up on a chair and stopped the flow by inserting a wedge into the sprinkler head.
Fellow colleagues at Environment Canada were grateful for the four-day holiday that ensued, but Gerald McKeating, the regional director-general in charge of the Canadian Wildlife Service, was not impressed. He immediately informed them the incident would be brought to the attention of the Propwash Selection Committee.
McKeating was a throwback to the days when Environment Canada had tremendous respect for its scientists, so that may be why he himself won the award for simply toughing it out on a rough survey flight and tossing up a $2.99 breakfast along the way, rather than asking the pilot to return.
Frank Miller, who also was based in the Edmonton office, was another throwback to an era when men were men and their stories were neverending. His crowning lifetime achievement took five pages to tell, but goes something like this: Miller, along with five Inuit colleagues and a student, was catching and tagging caribou in Thelon River country with a 22-foot freighter canoe and a shepherd’s crook. Miller repeatedly tried to frighten off a grizzly bear that was attracted to the smell of a season of fishing in their camp. The first of many attempts occurred at 2 a.m. when he awoke to the sight of two frightened Inuit colleagues firmly grasping their loaded rifles. Dressed only in his underwear, Miller went outside to see a bear sitting on its rump.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Miller looks like a bear and sometimes sounds like one. Whatever the reason, the bear was attracted to his burly — not to mention hairy — lily-white frame. As the bear walked slowly toward him, it tripped over a guy-wire that gave the tent a violent snap.
Realizing that his nervous, gun-toting colleagues might mistake his shadow for a bruin, Miller immediately froze and prayed they wouldn’t shoot.
In the days that followed, the bear continued to prowl around camp. Out of frustration, Miller grabbed a baseball at one point and hit the bear between the eyes. Instead of fleeing, this bear simply let out a “whoof.”
Frozen, unarmed, but fully dressed when the bear came at him, Miller recalls thinking: “You can only do so many stupid things and survive them without injury or death.”
To his surprise and relief, the bear walked away and sat down beside some empty fuel drums. At this point, the student arrived with a rifle, suggesting that he fire a shot at the drums to scare the bear off. Thinking that a bullet ripping through a steel drum might do the trick, Miller gave him the go-ahead.
No one was more surprised than Miller when a “shrieking noise” resounded before a “giant, yellow-orange flame” shot 20 feet into the air. The large mushroom cloud of dense smoke was a wondrous thing to behold until Miller noticed the tundra was on fire around them. Evidently, there had been fuel in the drum.
While fighting the fire, Miller was humbled by the sight of the bear sitting there, a few hairs on its back smouldering, playing with an old caribou bone.
Until a few years ago, it was mostly veterans who got the award. But in 2010, two brilliant young bucks proved that age doesn’t make a difference.
In this case, Robin Bloom and Olaf Jensen were assigned to establish the presence of the western harvest mouse (affectionately known as “Squeeky”) across the vast grasslands of the Suffield military reserve in southern Alberta. The small mammal had not been seen in more than a decade.
As the official record shows, this pair was up to the challenge. “They made a plan, they collected the necessary materials, they got the requisite approvals, the permits, the committee reviews, and the blessing of the regional director,” said a statement at the time of the award, before heading south from Edmonton to fulfil their mission.
It did not go as well as the confident pair had expected. In five days, they managed only to trap deer mice, snakes, some toads and a vole.
Low on supplies, the situation was getting tense.
“Day 6,” the official record notes, “exhaustion setting in, and still no sign of ‘Squeeky.’
“Finally, in the dewy light of a cool autumn morning, Robin pried open the cold aluminum door of a live trap perched atop a grassy hill near Dugway in Suffield. A deer mouse? No! Too small, too light. … Well just not peromycus enough. Fingers trembling, Robin called to his colleague Olaf who has dashed over with requisite supplies. Not wanting to make a mistake, the two knew they had to wrestle the beastie into a metal mesh cone, lift up Squeeky’s upper lip and look for grooved incisors.
“Trembling, Robin opened the door. Soiled cotton and peanut butter slid out. No mouse.
“Repositioning the trap, Robin gently tried to coax the prize into a bag. Success. Squeeky was in the bag. … Now for the measurements. Now for science. For glory! Robin reached for the mouse. Lifting him gently toward the cone of truth; Squeeky was suspended in mid-air momentarily and — suddenly — acrobatics, the mouse turned, twisted. The trembling fingers could not hold him and he fell — as if in slow motion — to the prairie below. Hopes dashed. The first harvest mouse seen in a decade turned and fled through the grass. Gone.”
The tales are too many to tell in this one story. But consider, if you will, bush planes disappearing downstream in a flash flood, a misstep which leaves a female technician dangling topless on the edge of a cliff, the world’s leading polar bear scientist arriving at a pizza party a week late and not realizing it until the perplexed host invites him to sit down for supper.
Holroyd says the Propwash is awarded in good fun.
“There is a ceremony at the Christmas party where the event is read out to the audience and the surprised recipient is allowed to respond,” he says.
“Often the winner’s name has been leaked due to lack of security in the nomination and election process. Some of the responses have been very funny as the recipients regale the audience with even more details that the nominator did not know.”