* 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 2nd 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)
.jpg)
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 19th
No comments:
Post a Comment