Still Alive

* Pictures to come. I’ve had to reduce image quality to between 9% and 25% of the originals to facilitate my 1.5kb/s max upload speed.     

Sometimes I ask myself, why is the skin coming off my feet? Is it because of the tropical fungus or because I wear the same socks and rubber boots everyday? The answer probably involves a little bit of both. Oh the joys of the rainforest. I had my 2^nd shower today since arriving… I like to think it’s a step in the right direction. That being said, I don’t plan to make a habit of it. The showers are so damn cold… Vancouver ocean in the winter kind of cold. It’s just not for me.

Life in the middle of nowhere is, on a scale from 1 to great, pretty great. I spend almost all day being wowed by just about everything. The name “Cloud forest” was well chosen, as the clouds are constantly forming, disappearing, reforming and moving through the mountains. I have my camera taking pictures at 20 second intervals most of the day so I can watch the movement at high speed. Just between that and the night sky (not a whole lot of pollution out here) I think I would be content, then you throw in everything else and life is pretty swell.  For example: this bird (Orange-Eared Tanager- this picture doesn’t even begin to do it justice)

The birding from my tent is outstanding. I have yet to actually actively go birding, and yet, I usually manage to ID about 30 species of birds a day just while cooking from the platform (plus a bunch that I can’t ID). Huge mixed flocks of birds forage in the trees around our platform daily and the hummingbird garden just down the hill is always full of hummers – One of the most common being the booted racket-tail (look it up).  

The rest of the biodiversity is pretty incredible too. We stumbled across a troop of wooly monkeys a few days ago… infinitely better than Capuchins. As seems to be the norm with wild monkeys, they were not pleased to see us – jumping, howling and shaking branches before moving off deeper into the forest. Then you get to the insects… which seem to come in every shape and color that you could imagine as well as quite a few that you couldn’t.  At night the air lights up with a variety of different glowing bugs. They seem to travel in big swarms as you generally just see a hoard of florescent green sparks go flying across your vision, as if someone shot off a gun full of glow-in-the-dark buckshot.  We also attract an unbelievable amount of moths to the lamp we use in our work cabin. They’re often even crazier than the butterflies. 

My house is currently a large covered wooden platform supplied by the lodge. We’ve set up a kitchen (a table with a stove), dining room (a table with a candle) and even some chests and drawers (vegetable crates) to store food. 

Anything not nailed down continues to be stolen by the monkeys. Our place is continuously under siege. Yesterday I came home to find our entire lodge covered in banana peels and broken eggs. They were stored in an enormous wooden chest that the monkeys somehow broke into. It’s beyond reason… I mean, these monkeys are just over a foot tall and the chest is made of 2x4s with a lid that’s 5’ x 3’ of plywood and wooden boards. Manuel (our station manager) hit one with a shoe yesterday and knocked it off a tree (not very high… unfortunately it was fine). They generally send a scout or 2 ahead and then raid in force if they don’t see anyone. The key seems to be to hit the scout with a stick and scare it off…. That usually keeps em away for the day.

The schedule here is pretty relaxed, though night shifts are a task. We alternate nights, working in pairs to stay awake. The equipment we’ve been using is buggy at best and the computers crash pretty much nightly, losing any unsaved data. The result is generally a work night from about 5:30pm – 5:30am not including the mist-netting, which starts at 2:30pm.

So, what is it exactly that I do out here? Well, to begin with, I catch birds. This is done using mist nets, a series of super fine mesh panels that look somewhat like a badminton net. The birds can’t see them, fly into them and then get tangled in the netting. We come along, untangle them, and bring them back to our little hut at the lodge.

The goal of this stage of the project is to measure baseline oxygen consumption at a series of different temperatures. At about 5:30 we turn on all our equipment, put the birds in modified Tupperware containers with a thermometer and an input and output air tube, and put the whole thing in a mini-fridge. The fridge is used to control the temperature, with experiments conducted at 10, 20 and 30 degrees Celsius (recently we’ve started doing a fourth at 33 degrees). We’re supposed to do the first 3-4 sets of experiments on a group of 3 birds (the most that fit in the fridge) and then finish it off with one more set on 3 more birds. Most of the time though we don’t make it to the second set of birds before the sun rises due to a equipment failures and such. When there's enough light to see (around 6am) the people who weren’t working the night get up to finish processing the birds. This is just the typical banding procedure, measuring various body parts and taking feather samples, ectoparasites, etc.

Most of my free time so far has been spent catching up on sleep, washing dishes, arranging our house and cooking. It’s not so much that I’m essentially a maid… its just that I’m essentially a maid. When I’m not doing any of the above, I’m out walking around the area looking for anything cool… which is everything.  We found some enormous cat footprints today (this is a different today than the other todays in this post… I didn’t finish writing it in a day) while walking along the river. Either a huge male cougar (most likely at this elevation) or a Jaguar! Also some awesome frogs.

Fridays are our day off here, and that generally means we head into town. Getting there requires a 1.5 hour ride in the back of one of these.

We just wait on the road until one goes past and wave it down. On the way in they’re full of potatoes, chickens and people. The way back is a little different though. The local women (almost exclusively women) wait until dark before loading up the trucks with bags of coca leaves. Coca here is legal and used for tea and to chew.

The ride back is one of my favorite parts of going into town. There’s something about it that just ties the entire experience together. Lying with the locals in the dark in the back of an enormous cargo truck full of (possibly illegally cut as I think the entire park is off limits) lumber and potatoes is incredibly tranquil… despite being jostled around like you’re riding a bull. On a cloudless night the stars are impressive enough to keep me entranced for the entire ride.  Now I just need to find myself a piece of land so I never have to leave.

GODDAMIT. Its 5:30 am as I write this and our @&*#ing computer just rebooted, erasing our last 1.5 hours of data. The sun has started to come up and the other half of the team will be waking up in 20 minutes to take measurements of the birds and let them go. Unfortunately, that means that we won’t be finishing this round of data (33 degrees) or even starting the next batch of birds. On the bright side... I can go to sleep… until 8, when the sun warms up my tent too much to be inside. 

* The majority of this was written on the 19^th

Goodbye.. maybe?

I´ve left the city... and with it, internet. When they said I´d have internet every night they weren´t lying per say... just not telling the full truth. It would probably take the entire night to load this website, so, new posts may be at an end from me. I´m currently an hour and a half from my home in the closest town with decent internet. My computer also seems to have died.. so I won´t be able to upload pictures. And of course, I dropped and partially broke my binoculars within 20 minutes of ariving... but really, who needs binoculars for bird research?

Home right now is the most incredible rainforest terrain I´ve ever seen. Go watch Avatar, then try and come to terms with the idea that my tent is set up in an even more awesome landscape. The ride in is unbelievable. The west slope of the Andes is dry and arid, with mostly succulents and other deserty plants. As we crossed over the top onto the east slope it changed almost immediately. Wet and cold, the cloud forest starts here. The trees are absolutely covered in epiphytes and moss and the clouds literally form around you. As we descended through the koñipata valley the forest just got more and more insane. Having splurged on all you can eat Indian food the night before, my first experience with the rainforest was yelling at the truck driver to just pull over, diving over the side of the road and welcoming curry to the jungle. Despite feeling like death the whole 8 hour journey (sitting with 180 eggs on my lap the entire ride) it was still one of the more incredible experiences I´ve had. I don´t think you can really appreciate nature until you´ve driven through true rainforest. (The view from one of our mist nets)

The entire research team is currently staying on a platform provided by cock-of-the-rock lodge. This week has been crazy, as we´re trying to organize all the food and equipment needed for 2 months at 3 research stations as well as training everyone in all the research procedures. Not only that, but we have to keep our food protected from the goddamn monkeys. These capuchins are ugly, mean, and want to steal everything we have, our souls included. So far they´ve taken eggs, butter, fruit, vegetables and a whole bunch of our instant noodles.  (These things are actually pure evil. Hit one with shoe yesterday)

If they get the coffee though I may actually die.. considering that the days start at about 5:30 and if you´re running the experiments at night, end between 2 and 6 in the morning. With what we´ve got left though the food is actually pretty decent. Along with the 180 cans of tuna we brought we also found a ton of tuna hidden in a chest from last year... awesome right? Crap... cab´s here, gotta go.

As far as birding goes... this place is hard to imagine. From our platform I´ve already seen some of the most incredible birds of my life. Paradise, Yellow-Throated, Golden, Saffron-Crowned, Beryl-Spangled, Blue-Necked and Bay-Headed Tanagers are all present. Generally seen as part of the most incredible mixed flocks, it´s hard to get over the fact that these birds are even real. This is just one of the crazy birds we've caught - Cerulean Capped Manakin, a Peruvian endemic (many more insane bird pictures to come).

The butterflies too are just unreal. A decent pass time is watching as the tourists coming to the lodge get out of their trucks and immediately stare down at the ground... all the truck drivers piss there and the tourists go stand in puddles of piss and watch the butterflies that swarm for the salt. Who can blame them though?

I do apologize for the lack of pictures and shitty writing. I´m a little rushed since we need to stock up on fruit and vegetables to bring back to the research station. I also need a hammer and nails... I´m planning to build some canopy treeforts in my spare time. What else? Really.. this place is unbelievable. Just outstandingly beautiful. There was a guy staying here who shoots national geographic quality time-lapses (I mean.. he actually shoots for nat geo). Some of the stuff from around here is pretty much mindblowing. I´ll try and put something together for y´all. (Trying to get a time-lapse of this.. haven't had another clear night though) -

Alright, I must be off. If you want to talk send me an email or facebook message, I´m not sure how often i´ll be able to make it to the blog. I will write blog posts regardless of my internet status though and do my best to post them when I get a chance. Pictures will probably come in August.

* Update, I can't seem to upload pictures from here but I can send them to my mom. So if pictures show up here, you can thank her.

Some pictures from a night hike... I don't want to go back and change this post so you're going to have to deal with just pictures, no words.