tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74506227654319796762024-03-05T01:31:20.248-08:00The Great Blue ErinErinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-13379678297847844532013-07-15T07:53:00.003-07:002013-07-15T07:53:09.780-07:00Why one should never tempt fate with misquoted movies…
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I know ir’s only been a few days since my last entry, but
yesterday was a crazy enough day that it was worth trekking out to the network
point just to write what happened. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So today is Camille’s last day in the forest, and Noah
leaves on Wednesday. Consequently, a fete was in order. Noah had also at some
point in time offhandedly mentioned that he’d like to play football (soccer)
while he was here, and Frederic (my field assistant, who told me he is very
popular with women because he’s so good at football!) arranged a friendly match
between some people from the forest and the official football team of Gouliyako
II, one of the villages where our field assistants come from (And yes, there
*is* a Gouliyako I) to be held on July 14.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And with that July 14 became basically the most awaited day
in the forest. Our field assistants – even the laconic one – constantly talked
strategy. It came out that most of our field assistants felt too old to play
football, so they arranged with the Pouliyula football team to let some of our
guys play with them in a match which we were still calling friendly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Yesterday morning, we decided to drive out to the town of
Tai because Noah wanted to get a pair of sneakers. Since Camille is leaving and
our main driver will be gone driving Noah to Abidjan for a few days, the time
had come for me to learn to drive our Toyota Hlilux out of the forest. It
shouldn’t be too difficult, except it is a manual transmission (which I tried
unsuccessfully to learn at age 16), and the road is very squishy, except for
where it is slippery and muddy, or crosses little wooden bridges. And it is
twisty, with occasional point things. But anyway, it started off really well!
Camille and Noah and I piled into the practically empty Hilux, making sure to
grab the machetes in case we needed to clear trees off the road. I handled
giant puddles with aplomb. When we had to stop halfway up a terrible hill to
avoid running over the chimp project’s car, I got us going again without
sliding all the way back DOWN the hill. I even crossed the bridge. And then… I
drove too far to the right and the car sunk in the mud. It was well stuck.
Camille gave up on my driving and tried to get it out, but to no avail. So then
we started chopping up fallen branches and built little ramps for each wheel,
and then Noah and I pushed, and THEN we put the car in some sort of
hyper-4-wheel-drive. And finally, after a half hour of machete-ing and pushing
and mud and tsetse flies, we escaped!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The match, it turned out, was less friendly than we had
anticipated, and instead turned into kind of a terrible grudge match. There was
an impressive amount of actual injury (Noah got accidentally punched in the
face, for example), and an impressive amount of fake injury. Ivorian
footballers take Didier Drogba’s example seriously. Camille and I took pictures
and hung out with the little girls, all of whom are quite taken with Noah (he
can’t walk anywhere in the village without a gaggle of 10-13-yaer-olds who
blush and whisper “Bonjour, Noah” whenever he passes them). After the match, we
distributed palm wine and coutoucou to both teams, and ate some painfully spicy
pork and sauce feuilles de patates before driving all the footballers back to
Pauliyula (it took three trips, with the Hilux literally stuffed to
overflowing!), and then making it back to the field station for the fete. I was
in charge of the music, so I now have a lot of Ivorian dance music. Zouglou is
not my favorite genre, but ca va aller! I also stuck some “Musique des blancs”
in the playlist. Bob Marley and Michael Jackson went over well, and Sean Paul
could make a strong comeback in Cote d’Ivoire. Sometime, maybe I’ll mention
that all the white people music they like is actually played by black people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Around 1:30, Noah and I crashed and headed back to our camp.
While I was getting ready for bed, I heard something rustling in the corner.
Since there’s a very bold mouse, I thought that was who was moving around, and shined
my headlamp in the corner to see who it was. In fact, it was a snake. Not a big
snake, but definitely a snake. So I kept my light on it and called for Noah to
get me the broom and dust pan on a stick, and we shepherded the snake out my
door. Unhappily, it fit in the crack between the door and the floor, so I am
having Bertin make me a wedge to put in the door to keep more snakes from
visiting. Anyway, he slithered off into the forest, and didn’t bother me again
except for in my dreams, where all the fecal samples I collected turned into
snakes </span><span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">L</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> I’m
not sure what kind he was – sort of dark brownish, but with a purple tinge?
Very slim, with a triangular head. My guess is a forest cobra, or maybe a viper
of some sort. Anyway, exciting times here, and hopefully I won’t see another
snake for a while. I’m on my own here from Wednesday until about a month from
now, and I’d really like this month to be snake free!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-40106792568607576292013-07-11T07:17:00.000-07:002013-07-11T07:17:05.208-07:00Ants... why did it have to be ants? Hi everyone – I apologize for the delay in my entries here! I kind of over-estimated the strength of the internet in the rainforest, and additionally under-estimated the internet requirements of blogger as a platform. However, it looks like last time I tried to post I was doubly successful, and I didn’t even think it posted once! At any rate, here I am, still doing well in the middle of the rainforest. <br />
<br />
I’ve only been here in the forest for three weeks (I got in late the evening of the 19th), but it feels like I’ve been here for much longer. I’m back to a familiar routine of waking early, eating bread and either blue band (amazing margarine spread that doesn’t need to be refrigerated and tastes kind of like butter!) or Nutella, drinking lots of tea, and wandering around the forest after monkeys. In the evenings, we’re cooking much fancier foods than I ever cooked when I was here last time. There are also two other students here, so I’m talking with people a lot instead of reading nearly as much as I did last time. Unfortunately, they both leave next week, so I’ll be on my own for a month until the next student shows up. In the interim, though, I’m taking advantages of Camille’s fancy cooking abilities. No longer am I eating only rice and eggs, rice and tuna, or rice and sardines! We’ve made carrot coconut curry! We’ve made guacamole! We’ve made zucchini chips! We’ve made sauce melon! We’ve even made cheesy flatbread! I’m afraid that canned sardines and fried onions are no longer going to satisfy me. <br />
<br />
I’ve spent the past three weeks helping my friend Noah finish collecting data for a project we’re working on, looking at the way different monkeys here use their forelimbs while they are foraging. I’ve also been working hard at learning to recognize the female Diana monkeys. It turns out that the easiest ways to distinguish between females are comparing their calls (which I am learning), their tails (how fluffy they are, where they are broken, etc.), and their nipples (which side is bigger, what direction they face, etc.). I have notebook pages full of PG-13 Diana monkey drawings, trying to remember that it is Pensette who has inward-facing nipples and a tail like Melo does (Melo has a larger right than left nipple, and a tail like Pensette), while Eva is the one whose nipples point down and has little white spots on her face.<br />
<br />
That may be more information than you wanted to know about my research methods – I apologize.<br />
<br />
I’ve also been working with one of the older field assistants – Ferdinand, our Chief of Assistants who represents the assistants in all their negotiations – at learning the most important trees eaten by the Diana monkeys. My project has taken a much more ecological turn than I initially thought it would, which is great because I like the ecological stuff even more than the social stuff. We begin our 5-day weekend today (the assistants work 9 days, then have 5 off), but when Ferdinand gets back, we’re going to start going through the grid to measure the abundance and size of different tree species so that I can see what the monkeys are eating in relation to what is available for them. I’m hoping to get between 10 and 20 100m x 100m squares measured in the following two weeks, and then start my data collection with the monkeys in earnest on July 30 when my official field assistant finishes his two-week break.<br />
<br />
When I’m not staring intently at monkeys’ chests, searching for their feces, or trying to figure out what tree the monkeys I am staring at are in, things back in camp have also been exciting. We had a green mamba eat a frog under our laundry the other day, and a giant scorpion we have decided to call Alfred has chosen the steps of the old house as its new favorite spot. A few nights back, a swarm of army ants tried to move through my house. Fortunately, Noah caught them when he was heading to bed, so we spent the next two hours fighting back by pouring fuel mixed with water in all the door jambs and liberally spraying Rambo at the edges of all the mosquito nets. While this curtailed our usage of candles in the house, it also successfully kept the ants out! They also only bit me four times, but a bunch of them embedded their heads in my sandals and got stuck. Pulling them out of my sandals was probably worse than being bit. Unfortunately, it looks like the colony has decided that UNDERNEATH MY HOUSE is an excellent place to build, and we don't have any more Rambo to dissuade them for the moment. I've been having nightmares about earthquakes depositing me in the middle of an army ant nest. We were thinking that maybe if we named them, they'd be less scary, so for the time being we're calling the army ants Gloria (the workers are all female).<br />
<br />
Well, my computer battery is growing dim and it’s starting to get dusky out. I’ll cross my fingers that this posts (once!), and try to write again soon! Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-73526976700565120402013-06-22T08:14:00.003-07:002013-06-22T08:14:49.547-07:00A la foret!
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Hi everyone!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am writing to
you today from the middle of the forest – literally! Our internet café here is
on the buttress of one of the really big trees; I’m perched on a root watching
a very long, burgundy millipede walk past. He has neon orange feet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So I made it to
the rainforest on Thursday night, late, after a long day of driving from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abidjan. Though our plan was to take
significantly longer in our drive and get there in two days, Bertin decided to
drive all the way through (we were also bringing two 10-year-olds from Abidjan,
and the mother of one of the other field assistants). So we got in late
Thursday night and ate a lot of spaghetti with a tuna sauce. I stayed up talking
with my friend Noah, who has been here for a month. On Friday, I stayed in camp
to do some setting up and arranging of things, but it worked out great because while
I was relaxing on the hammock (reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy</i>), I heard something rustling in the tree next to my
house. When I looked over, there was a solitary, youngish adult male lesser
spot-nosed guenon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">He may be the
same guy who hung out around the house last time I was here – though I would
have hoped it wouldn’t take him a full year to find a new group of females and
raise a happy family of lesser spot-nosed guenons. Then I was imagining that
perhaps he is just a misanthropic (misguenonthropic?), disaffected youth who
thinks everyone else is a phony and so he’s spending all his time alone,
mocking everyone else. I’ve decided to call him Holden. (I promise not to
anthropomorphize all the monkeys …)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This morning,
Noah and I went out with Ferdinand to follow one of the groups of Diana monkeys
I’ll be following. Noah is collecting some data on how they use their forelimbs
to complement the data I collected last year on mangabeys in order to publish
something cool about foraging and forelimbs, and maybe follow it up with some
dissections when we get back to the US! I started working on identifying foods
and females in that group, but we only went out for a half day. However, during
that half day, I collected TWO FECAL SAMPLEs and TWO FRUITS!!!! The first data
of my dissertation! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Tomorrow, we’ll
try and spend all day with the group and finish up with that data collection.
One of the veterinary students leaves soon, so there will be a fete tomorrow
night. Monday, the plan is to get everything cleaned up and organized around camp.
I will probably try to come out to the internet again on Monday as well and
report anything exciting…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-67463239480798730802013-06-22T07:31:00.001-07:002013-06-22T07:31:13.141-07:00Holden the Lesser Spot-nosed guenon!
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Hi everyone!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am writing to
you today from the middle of the forest – literally! Our internet café here is
on the buttress of one of the really big trees; I’m perched on a root watching
a very long, burgundy millipede walk past. He has neon orange feet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So I made it to
the rainforest on Thursday night, late, after a long day of driving from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abidjan. Though our plan was to take
significantly longer in our drive and get there in two days, Bertin decided to
drive all the way through (we were also bringing two 10-year-olds from Abidjan,
and the mother of one of the other field assistants). So we got in late
Thursday night and ate a lot of spaghetti with a tuna sauce. I stayed up talking
with my friend Noah, who has been here for a month. On Friday, I stayed in camp
to do some setting up and arranging of things, but it worked out great because while
I was relaxing on the hammock (reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy</i>), I heard something rustling in the tree next to my
house. When I looked over, there was a solitary, youngish adult male lesser
spot-nosed guenon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">He may be the
same guy who hung out around the house last time I was here – though I would
have hoped it wouldn’t take him a full year to find a new group of females and
raise a happy family of lesser spot-nosed guenons. Then I was imagining that
perhaps he is just a misanthropic (misguenonthropic?), disaffected youth who
thinks everyone else is a phony and so he’s spending all his time alone,
mocking everyone else. I’ve decided to call him Holden. (I promise not to
anthropomorphize all the monkeys …)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This morning,
Noah and I went out with Ferdinand to follow one of the groups of Diana monkeys
I’ll be following. Noah is collecting some data on how they use their forelimbs
to complement the data I collected last year on mangabeys in order to publish
something cool about foraging and forelimbs, and maybe follow it up with some
dissections when we get back to the US! I started working on identifying foods
and females in that group, but we only went out for a half day. However, during
that half day, I collected TWO FECAL SAMPLEs and TWO FRUITS!!!! The first data
of my dissertation! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Tomorrow, we’ll
try and spend all day with the group and finish up with that data collection.
One of the veterinary students leaves soon, so there will be a fete tomorrow
night. Monday, the plan is to get everything cleaned up and organized around camp.
I will probably try to come out to the internet again on Monday as well and
report anything exciting…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-59089057734562456802013-06-19T03:38:00.000-07:002013-06-19T03:38:24.261-07:00The First Snake!Here in Abidjan, I am staying at the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques, a scientific organization that helps us with logistics here and also maintains a nice hostel for researchers in their compound in Yopougon. We're right on one of the lagoons (and can hear the Chinese dredgers working to take sand from the lagoon floor all day). Back in the 60s and 70s, the center was totally forested, and there were groups of Campbell's monkeys in the grounds. In fact, one of the first studies of Campbell's monkeys, which was published in the 70s, was carried out here. Unfortunately, the monkeys are long gone, and so is most of the forest cover (a combination, I think, of hunting and building expansion). There are lots of neat birds in the area, though, and we hear bush babies (galagos) and rock hyraxes all night. There are lizards and geckos all over the place - I am currently watching a tiny gecko, maybe three inches long, hut for spiders on the patio ceiling! There are also squirrels.<br />
<br />
So yesterday, I was sitting on a patio overlooking the lagoon, when a squirrel started running around. I looked a little closer - and saw a long snake slithering up the tree. The squirrel started jabbing at the snake, chittering at it and trying to chase it away from a big hollow in the tree. The snake was having none of this, and struck the squirrel at least once while the squirrel ran around and around the trunk. He actually knocked the snake off the tree to the ground! This went on for maybe 20 minutes, and then things calmed down and the snake disappeared. <br />
<br />
About an hour later, the snake showed up again (I assume it was the same one, anyway) and slithered up the tree trunk, this time without the squirrel noticing. He went all the way into the hollow, stayed there for a while, and then came back out and relaxed on an adjacent branch for a while. The squirrel showed up a little while later, and chased him away again. And just now as I am writing this blog, I'm sitting on the same patio and the snake is slithering up towards the hollow. I haven't seen the squirrel yet - I hope he didn't get eaten! I'm guessing the snake may be a green mamba - he's green, with a yellow underbelly, and a reddish tinge to his tail. He's probably about 4 feet long, with a rounded head (not diamong shaped like a viper). He's pretty, but I'll watch him from the patio with my binoculars and keep my fingers crossed for the squirrel.<br />
<br />
Today is my last day in Abidjan - I'll leave for the forest tomorrow. The roads are bad enough that we expect it to take two days between here and Tai, so I should be surrounded by monkeys sometime Friday afternoon! I'm waiting for Anderson to come back from the bank, and then would like to load up the truck with supplies so that we can get an early start tomorrow. <strong>Hopefully</strong>, next time I write, I'll be at the internet café in the forest!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com1Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire5.3363179999999986 -4.02775099999996665.0833659999999989 -4.3504744999999669 5.5892699999999982 -3.7050274999999666tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-46803870118829845632013-06-18T01:13:00.000-07:002013-06-18T01:13:07.574-07:00Akwaba Cote d'Ivoire!I arrived in Abidjan Sunday night after a lot of airplanes and many airplane meals. Rather than waste precious new books on an airplane (I've spent the past year building up my kindle's library), I slept and chatted on the first plane, and watched Mulan, Les Miserables, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower on the second. My plane was only two hours late, and - unlike last year - all my luggage arrived! For my year in Abidjan, I've got a camping bag full of clothes, a duffel bag filled mostly with Ziploc baggies for collecting monkey poop and food, and a nice new pair of rubber boots.<br />
<br />
I'm currently on the patio of my room at the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifique in Abidjan listening to the call to prayer echo across the lake from the city. Abidjan would like to be a tropical rainforest again, if it had its way, but instead it gets to be a giant, crowded, humid city. It is the rainy season now. Last night and this morning the rain was really impressive. It's since cleared, but I'm glad I got an extra dry bag to keep my camera in! <br />
<br />
I spent Monday getting logistical things taken care of in advance of heading for the forest. We'll leave on Wednesday rather than today because we've got a few more things to finish up here. Monday afternoon, we went to change some money and get groceries at a very fancy grocery store downtown. Not only is this grocery well stocked, but you can pay with a credit card! As well as some staples like rice, sardines, and lentils, I got some extravagances (in particular, Nutella, but the French kind without palm oil in it). I also got a *lot* of tea because I like drinking it in the mornings, and I like having tea for people when they come up to camp. I am also now the proud owner of an Ivorian cell phone, and the magical little doohickey which will give me internet access in the forest. And, most importantly, I got my research permit which will allow me entrance to the forest! <br />
<br />
So I'll spend the rest of today finishing up some loose ends from school - I'm trying to finish a manuscript draft to give to my advisor when he heads back to Ohio tonight (he's been in the forest for the past few weeks), and I am working on coauthoring a paper with my friend Noah based on some data we've been collecting on forelimb use in several species of monkeys in Tai, so I need to finish up my section of it before he leaves Cote d'Ivoire in late July. But then I'll leave bright and early tomorrow morning for the place that really knows it's a rainforest!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-49610803274971998652013-06-15T06:14:00.000-07:002013-06-15T06:33:11.443-07:00And they're off...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: left;">
This evening, I leave the US for Cote d'Ivoire! An overnight plane from Boston to Paris, followed by an afternoon plane from Paris to Abidjan, will deposit me back in the tropics where I can sit overlooking the lagoons in Abidjan and watching lizards sun themselves. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I plan to spend Monday taking care of logistics: groceries, changing money, buying a cellphone, buying a usb-connector for the internet. There's a fancy grocery store in Abidjan we go to where I can purchase a year's supply of rice, tuna, tea, powdered milk, candles, and so on - and, importantly, use a credit card! I'll also meet up with my advisor in Abidjan. He has just completing a few weeks checking up on our field station.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
If all of that goes as planned and I get all my stuff taken care of on Monday, I'll leave on Tuesday morning for a long drive all the way across the country. From Abidjan, which is the de facto capital of Cote d'Ivoire (home to the ports, most government offices, embassies, etc.), we'll drive up north to Yamoussoukro, which is the official capital of Cote d'Ivoire. Apparently President Houphouet-Boigny, who ran the country during the 90s and early 2000s, was born in Yamoussoukro, and wanted to honor his hometown by making it CAPITAL. The other ridiculous thing he did there was build the world's largest Basilica. It is quite large, and we'll drive right in front of it on our way through the city. From there, we make an arc down to the southwest, through Duekoue, Guiglo, Daloa, and eventually the town of Tai! That takes between 6-10 hours depending on traffic and the state of the roads.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
We'll likely spend the night in Tai on Tuesday. Tai is a small town with probably about 5,000 residents. It's only electrified part of the time because sometimes the big generator breaks down - they're off of the main grid in Cote d'Ivoire. Last year, I slept in the convent in Tai on my way into the forest because the hotels were all full (there are only a couple). Tai is where I get all my produce and groceries during the time that I'm in the field. I'll need to say hi to the mayor of Tai and other government officials, and show my permits to Eaux et Forets, the agency that deals with the parks and wildlife. Wednesday morning, we'll drive to the villages to pick up the field assistants, and then - between Gouliako and Pouliyula - pick up the road heading into Tai National Park where I'll be back in my forest home!</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I'm not sure how frequently I'll be able to get to the internet; the place where we can pick up a signal is about a half hour walk from camp. I anticipate once or twice every week or two. I'll do my best to keep in touch as frequently as possible over the next year (!!) that I'm in the rainforest! </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu1hMaM1lfFM18hpoo8bnNh1c78CdG8oPw9Iuk0WMm5BelHQRMqhKwvGwX2zqfgM-uy2NcqRNXIzzV1PuxrnpXoGxcWe397XnKU8eXwteHlltBz0y_9_JJhj7UeosYWp3izvphzC7KzG_9/s1600/DSC_0005.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu1hMaM1lfFM18hpoo8bnNh1c78CdG8oPw9Iuk0WMm5BelHQRMqhKwvGwX2zqfgM-uy2NcqRNXIzzV1PuxrnpXoGxcWe397XnKU8eXwteHlltBz0y_9_JJhj7UeosYWp3izvphzC7KzG_9/s320/DSC_0005.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My house in the research station</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The kitchen at the research station, with food, coolers, and dishes</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The cooking setup. In the evenings, a group of monkeys hangs out in the trees behind the kitchen and watches me cook.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A tailless whip scorpion who lived in my house (they're not dangerous, just impressive looking)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Four of the employees of the Tai Monkey Project and me!</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Diana monkey - the guys I'll be studying!</td></tr>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com0New Hampshire, USA42.988576458321837 -71.45507812541.503421458321839 -74.036865125 44.473731458321836 -68.873291125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-77344112057899552712013-05-07T14:38:00.003-07:002013-05-07T14:38:42.897-07:00Beginning AgainIt's time for a re-dedication of The Great Blue Erin. I've made it through my first three years of graduate school: coursework, gross anatomy, conferences, three months in the field, five semesters of teaching. I've submitted a lot of unsuccessful grant applications, and a few successful ones. I took my candidacy exams, I defended my dissertation proposal, and now - here I am! It's May 7, and I leave for a year of nothing but primates in 37 days. Of course, this is generally an occasion for celebration, but I thought I'd be leaving on my own with not even a satellite phone to connect me to the world outside of Tai National Park.<br />
<br />
Fortunately (!!), it turns out this isn't the case! With the help of nearly-ubiquitous mobile coverage across sub-Saharan Africa, I will apparently be able to access the internet just a short half-hour walk from camp! Expect occasional dispatches from the middle of the rain forest of southwestern Cote d'Ivoire ...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-21302188514810656702011-01-26T20:42:00.001-08:002011-01-26T20:54:10.766-08:00This time tomorrow.I was doing some reading for my archaeological theory class when This Time Tomorrow by the Kinks started playing. The reason I own this song is its presence on the Darjeeling Limited soundtrack, but I've always felt that it does a pretty good job encapsulating life.<br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HjMw7eIIUiI" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Seven miles below me I can see the world and it ain't so big at all</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Well, this time tomorrow what will we see</span>?<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Field full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I don't where I'm going, I don't want to see</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I feel the world below me looking up at me</span><br /><br />To some extent, that matches where I'm at right now. I'm about a third of the way through my second quarter of graduate school (frequent blogging is, fortunately, not a prerequisite for grad school success). I am working on Archaeology Theory right now, preparing for a presentation and paper on Marxist Archaeology. I'm also working on collating data for a possible master's thesis on the feeding ecology of the Diana monkey, in case I don't get to go to the Ivory Coast to start my fieldwork this summer. I'd love a little more certainty about the next 6 months, but things are treating me well. I'm going a little stir crazy with the winter - last year I skipped most of winter and went right to 95% humidity and a hundred degrees. I'm starting to realize that might not have been such a bad plan ...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06648522763144021254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-79265870979548875942010-09-10T08:43:00.001-07:002010-09-10T08:51:40.658-07:00Well, I've been a resident of Columbus for about two hours shy of a week now. I have a nearly complete apartment (no internet yet, and other things keep popping up. Paper towel dispenser. A thingy to put in the shower to hold shampoo. Something else to put in the living room so it's not just a couch and a bookcase), a complete room (I put my bed together all by myself - it arrived in a box full of lumber and screws), and some well-stocked cabinets. Today I'll make my second grocery run. I have to go to the library this weekend to return books and DVDs I borrowed. I know my way from the student union to the anthropology building to the science library, and I have a wireless password. I'm practically a regular at the coffee shop across the street from my apartment (they have free wireless, too), and I've found great Ethiopian and great Mediterranean.<br /><br />I haven't met very many people yet, but the next week looks promising. On Saturday, I'm planning on going to the botanical garden with "Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry" (hopefully avoiding the crush of 110,000 people headed to the football game). There's swing dancing on Tuesday, and I'm going out to dinner on Wednesday (Somali!) with a group of people from the area who I know through a website we all post on regularly. The other anthropology students start showing up in the next week or so, and classes start in a week and a half! Things are looking pretty good :-)Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-2152261889770957942010-08-02T17:45:00.001-07:002010-08-02T18:49:45.299-07:00New Hampshire is not the rainforestAfter almost 3 months of being in a temperate climate, I think I've finally readjusted. I've stopped needing to sleep under a blanket at night and sweatshirts rarely feel like the right clothing choice. The cats and dog don't look quite so monstrously large any more, I don't get urges to catch any large-ish orthopteran I see to feed to a hideously ravenous monkey. My neck doesn't feel strangely light without binoculars, and I don't think I could climb up a cliff right now.<br /><br />I've beenwhiling away the time at home, for the most part. May included a trip to Columbus to dance and meet other graduate students, and graduation came and went in a whirl.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs337.snc3/29441_620929225722_3113054_35858242_4876776_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 720px; height: 477px;" src="http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs337.snc3/29441_620929225722_3113054_35858242_4876776_n.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />In June, I took the train to Chicago and went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where I fell in love with some Allen's Swamp Monkeys. Then it was back to St. Louis for some more dancing followed by an extravagant week of traveling in California. I spent 8 hours at the San Diego Zoo where I fell in love with even MORE monkeys.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5a1l-NDA-Rf8zHtz1jgCCGjl6N38XetCb8tfa75jfUTju-NUfQAi0793afElKbx_jVrSCy_JqFvm7B2sG_-yRG12TL6HsnqdvExweZK9RDJlBsLR9pmbK9pNCtq0LVgbsjcDuHKrLQeE/s1600/P6080264+-+Copy.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5a1l-NDA-Rf8zHtz1jgCCGjl6N38XetCb8tfa75jfUTju-NUfQAi0793afElKbx_jVrSCy_JqFvm7B2sG_-yRG12TL6HsnqdvExweZK9RDJlBsLR9pmbK9pNCtq0LVgbsjcDuHKrLQeE/s320/P6080264+-+Copy.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5500992776876689570" /></a> <br /><br />I took trains and buses up the coast and really enjoyed myself. Since then, it's mostly been working as an engineer and occasionally heading down to Boston and dancing. I have a number of friends around, and it's been wonderful catching up with people before they scatter to all corners of the earth (literally. Central Ohio is very tame. I have friends who will be in Korea, China, London, Paris, Zimbabwe, California, etc. doing things as varied as studying the circus, teaching English, and working for Facebook). I move to Columbus at the very beginning of September. I have a roommate and an apartment about 2 miles from campus. The prospect of preparing for graduate school and adultish life is very exciting, though really I wish I was headed to the rainforest, Kenya, or both. Soon enough!Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-34214620494299724132010-05-07T05:44:00.000-07:002010-05-07T06:05:16.405-07:00El fin de ViajeThe man at Karine, the fruit stand in the Mercado, still remembers me. I catch his eye as I approach the line of fruit stands (having passed the line of shoe stands and the line of plastic bucket stands) and he starts laughing, probably remembering the earlier fruit excursion - mounds of apples, plums and grenadillas, plus three avocadoes all squirreled away to sustain us during the strike. A polite kiss on the cheek later, I explain that, sadly, this is my last morning in Peru and I wanted to buy some fruit for the plane. And say goodbye, of course. I take a plum and he adds a grenadilla to my bag. "This is your food for the plane?" he asks. When I nod, he takes the back back from me and adds a kiwi,, three apples, and an unidentified fruit that looks suspiciously like a tomato,but, he assures me, is really a fruit from the forest. He won't let me pay for them, and waves goodbye. "Ojalá, nos vemos!"<br /><br />Two days earlier, I was sixty meters in the air. The sun had just peaked out over the horizon, and within one minute shone brightly in its entirety. Coincident with the sunrise, a flock of scarlet macaws flew by 30 feet below me but still high above the canopy. The sounds of titis and howlers reaffirming their territories' integrity filtered up to where I sat. Ronald and I sat against the metal poles on the platform, the two of us still wearing the rock climbing harnesses we'd hooked onto the wire guideline as we scaled the ladder to the platform. Minutes pass and the forest below us wakes up. The nightjars, jaguars, and owl monkeys are asleep and now the screaming peahens and emperor tamarins take over.<br /><br />Ronald and I head down to Puerto together. We managed to avoid the Collectivo by hitching a ride on a boat from Boca Amigos going down with a motor to be fixed and a huge quantity of cases full of empty beer bottles to return in Puerto. It started raining at 2:00 in the morning with a brief lull at 4 when I ran from my cabin to the lab without getting completely soaked. On the river, though, with my raincoat, a poncho and a tarp over my head, I am drenched and sit in cold water for about five hours. On the bright side - this is the first time in four months that I've shivered!<br /><br />And now, here I am, taking off. The air conditioning in the plane sends visible clouds into the humid rainforest air that followed me on. I guess it's similar to whatever fogs your breath on chilly mornings. My seatbelt is fastened, the trees speed past, and now I'm up in the air. People are all very clean, and my seat is squishy and comfortable. There are no baby monkeys peeing in my hair, no fer-de-lances hiding next to the doors. For a while I follow he meanders of Rio Madre de Dios through the green below, but now we're up above the clouds and the only thing I can see is white, punctuated by occasional mountain tops. Away we go!Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-46635398994723005722010-04-22T17:39:00.000-07:002010-04-22T18:03:50.151-07:00Who is this Chiky Basterd, anyway?Chiky was probably born in the Peruvian Amazon, some ways east of here. He arrived at the perfect time to be born a tamarin, right in the heart of the rainy season when the biggest and best trees are fruiting, and food is abundant, late November or early December. His group consisted certainly of a mother and a father, and there were probably also one or two other adults in the group. It's also quite likely that he had a twin who would travel aroud with him on their father's back. <br /><br />One day, probably quite early in Chiky's life, something went wrong. Maybe he fell off of his father's back and was scooped up by miners in the area. Maybe someone came looking for baby tamarins to sell and took him and and his twin. Maybe something else happened. But the point is somehow, Chiky ended up in a butcher shop in Puerto Maldonado as a little girl's treasured pet. He's certainly not the only monkey to end up like that - I've seen baby capuchins and howler monkeys in the mercado. Chiky would eat the bugs and scraps of meat from the floor, and otherwise spent most of his time perched on her shoulder.<br /><br />At about this time, we on the monkey project were beginning to despair. Monkeys were ignoring our bananas, and no matter how elaborate our traps or how frequently we spread overripe bananas throughout the jungle, they just weren't getting the hint. Though she had initially been resistant to the idea, Mini began considering getting a caller monkey. Caller monkeys are usually babies taken in a cage to sit by a trap and vocalize. The idea is that their vocalizations attract other monkeys to the traps. It's worked very well for other researchers, so Mini decided that it was worth trying. In early February, she and Gideon went down to Puerto to try to find a baby pichico.<br /><br />After a lot of searching aroud mercados and friends of friends of friends, they ended up at the Carneterria Chiky was calling home. After some haggling over the loss of a pet, they paid the family some amound of money and took Chiky to Taricaya, a rehab center that returns animals from a variety of origins to the forest. They agreed to take Chiky as an animal confiscated from the pet trade, and allow us to borrow Chiky for the duration of the project. Ultimately, he'll be rehabilitated and end up part of a group of his own. <br /><br /><br />Chiky's full name, bestowed upon him by the man in charge at Taricaya, is The Chiky Basterd Guy, and it refers to (among other things) his strong aversion to being held, the biting that inevitably follows when you try, and his insatiable, terrifying appetite for live grasshoppers. The noise he makes when approached by a scientist bearing orthopterans is almost indescribable - some awful combination of the Tasmanian devil, a very petulant child, and a caterwauling stray, but higher pitched and more frantic. The noise is the same, whether the grasshopper in question is his first or fifteenth. One memorable day, this 200 gram, four month old monkey put away 27!! I've joked that Chiky could eat a jaguar if it was wearing a bug costume, and I still believe that to be true.<br /><br />Chiky lives in a decent sized cage in our labe, constructed from galvanized hardware cloth, termite-free wood, anticipation, and excitement before his arrival. He has a ball to roll around and a baby rattle to hang from and shake. He climbs a rope ladder and perches on a shelf for us to rub his belly through the mesh. At night, he either sleeps in his towel hammock or the plastic trashcan suspended from the side of the cage and stuffed with fluffy towels. He gets taken to the field everyone morning where he sits in his cage close to the trap and whines, his baby calls enticing other monkeys to our trap. But someday soon, Chiky will get to live in the jungle for real, without the barrier of wire mesh separating him from the plants and the other monekys. He will hunt his own grasshoppers, hopefully after learning to suppress his terrible noise, and wheedle his way into a pichico group, probably in a way very similar to the way he's wheedled his way so firmly into ours.Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-1500934990937832402010-04-14T13:28:00.000-07:002010-04-14T13:34:01.385-07:00And look ... a bat!One of the really cool things about being here at the research station is meeting and interacting with all of the other researchers here. Everyone is studying an impressive variety of things. I’m sure I’m missing people, but aside from the pichico team, there are people studying: raptors and mercury, ant-tree interactions, ants, mosquitoes, seed dispersal by primates, mining-site regeneration, the short-eared dog, bats, long-horn beetles, peccary, and the essential oil of the palm fruit. <br /><br />The other night, Adrian asked if we wanted to help him set up mist nets to catch bats. Mini, Gideon, Adrian’s parents (visiting from Miami), Sarah, Musmuqi the owl monkey, and I headed out to the appointed trail a little before dusk. Earlier in one of our trapping attempts, Adrian helped us set up mist nets to snag tamarins. It was, sadly, unsuccessful, so we were all eager to see mist netting in action.<br />Mist nets are long, wide nets with a mesh of maybe ½ inch squares. They have 5 or 6 guidelines running taut along the length of the net, with loose mesh creating pockets running along beneath the guidelines. They are frighteningly prone to tangle, but when untangled and stretched out by bamboo poles on either side, they cover from about 3-10 feet off the ground for maybe 20-30 feet. The mesh is thin enough that bats (and birds, who are also frequently mist-netted) don’t see it and fly into the netting, where they get tangled up enough that they can’t fly back out. The getting stuck technique was brilliantly demonstrated by Musmuqi, who is really getting great at launching himself onto a variety of hanging objects. In case you’re wondering, it takes 3 people about 10 minutes to extricate a struggling baby owl monkey from a mist net, and they’ll only get bitten 4 or 5 times.<br /><br />Fortunately for the bats, Adrian is much more adept at removing them than we are at removing owl monkeys (perhaps it’s for the best that we didn’t catch tamarins in our mist nets!). When the night began, Adrian said 5 bats would be a good night! Our sights set high as dusk fell, everyone spread out along the nets, waiting for the first visitor. We didn’t have long to wait, as an exciting, small, insectivorous bat flew directly into the net shortly after everything was set up. Bats are really amazing looking little guys. The ones we were catching all had nose-leafs, protrusions of skin on their noise that look like small, bat-skin-colored leaves (they were, appropriately enough, the Leaf-Nosed bats. Similar, but unrelated to Odd-Nosed monkeys). The skin between the digits on their wings is thin and rubbery – imagine something between a balloon, a rubber glove, and a tissue. Seeing the wings all spread out next to someone’s arm was like one of those illustrations of homologous structures from an introductory biology textbook.<br /><br />All told, Adrian netted 9 bats in about an hour and a half. Those of us on the tamarin team were impressed, but also painfully jealous! If only the monkeys were so eager to fall into our clutches… Unfortunately, trapping tamarins is a pretty arduous task. I believe I mentioned the Chiky Basterd Guy, our baby monkey who calls to attract wild tamarins to the trap. He gets taken out to a trap every day for about 7 hours, plied with bananas and water, and acts as bait to entice the other tamarins to come eat our yummy bananas so we can steal their genetic data. Slow going (after more than a week here, we’re VERY excited that the group sniffed a bunch of bananas today), but if this spot works well, we’ll add another 18 monkeys to our trapped column!Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-47714306673593219872010-04-10T05:20:00.000-07:002010-04-10T05:24:58.109-07:00A Final Hurrah!The mining strike ended on April 7 as the government agreed to give more recognition to miners. I’m not entirely sure what the details of the negotiations were, but in the end, the miners went home happily and peacefully from Puerto Maldonado. No buildings were burned, and in Puerto, no one was killed. My friend Sarah, whose university in Lima is notorious for frequent and strong strikes, was a little disappointed in how tranquil the strike was, but all in all, I’m glad I have no better stories to tell than “I spent 6 days in doors and ate a lot of increasingly stale bread while watching bad American TV.” I really appreciate everyone's thoughts during the strike - sorry I made folks nervous.<br /><br />This morning, I’m heading back to CICRA. We have a lot of work to catch up on since we had 10 days with nobody watching the monkeys. I also have a lot of laundry to do!! I am going to be so excited about washing machines when I get back to the States!! <br /><br />I have 25 days before I leave Peru. I can’t believe how quickly the time has passed. Days are very long here, but weeks go by before I notice time changing. There are some things at CICRA I haven’t done that I still need to – see Pozo Don Pedro, home of the anaconda. Work up the courage to climb the 60m tall tower. Head out to Segund Mirador and see the capybaras. There are still more monkeys to be trapped, more data to be entered, more focal observations to be transcribed … it’ll be a busy 3 and a half weeks! I’m planning on coming back to Puerto Maldonado on May 3 – a friend wants to take me to see a place where they have lots of snakes, I’ll have a final day of eating marvelous passion fruit ice cream (yesterday I had passion fruit and chocolate chip. Yum!!), and maybe I’ll learn how to drive a motorcycle!<br /><br />And once I get back to the US, I've got a lot to look forward to. Being home will be marvelous and wonderful, and I just signed up for a Lindy and Blues exchange in my future hometown, Columbus, the weekend before graduation. A lindy exchange is when a bunch of dancers (150 or so in this exchange) converge on one town for a weekend and dance literally the whole time. I'm hoping that I'll meet lots of cool swing dancers and also be able to apartment hunt. If nothing else, I'll know people in Columbus who hopefully wouldn't mind me crashing with them for a few days while I find an apartment. After that, I go back to school and hang out with all of my Wash U friends until we graduate. Then, of course, there's graduation. Then two weeks after that, I head BACK to St. Louis for a blues exchange, where I'll spend the whole weekend blues dancing with some really cool people! Then it's the summer ... and then I can officially become a graduate student. Life is a whirlwind!Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-854637310158138382010-04-06T09:49:00.001-07:002010-04-06T09:50:10.736-07:00How long can you stay in one room without going crazy?Life is a little surreal right now. I’m about halfway through my 6th day in Puerto, and going on 96 hours without leaving the hotel. I’m sitting on a remarkably comfortable bed with a fan blowing directly at me. I have a refrigerator that, while less full of food than I’d like considering that the strike is still officially indefinite, does have cold Coca-Cola and a few plums (and other stuff, don’t worry). The internet works intermittently, and the two times I’ve turned on the TV, I’ve watched an episode of Third Watch and the Yankees-Red Sox game (wish it’d gone better, but still very exciting).<br /><br />Outside, I occasionally hear angry men shouting through bullhorns. I can only catch a few words intermittently – mineros, lucha, the names of Alan Garcia and Brack followed by jeers and boos. Every now and then, we hear The city seems pretty quiet right now. Earlier this morning, police helicopters were flying overhead so low that I could practically see the pilots’ faces. We’re not entirely sure what’s going on now in Puerto, but we’re doing fine here. It’s almost time for lunch – probably avocado and tuna sandwiches. I’m almost done with my second bottle of Coke, so it’ll be water for me for the rest of the strike. We’ve still got a bunch of big bottles, so that shouldn’t be too bad. Dinner has been pasta and tuna and cucumber, or ramen noodles. We’ve still got some apples and peaches, and I think granadillas as well – a tangy fruit that looks and tastes a lot like passion fruit.<br /><br />Stocking up on groceries before the strike was fun. Sarah went out with us to the mercado to help us buy things – mayonnaise, bread, tuna, coffee powder, pasta, avocados, yogurt. The best find was at the fruit stand we stopped at, staffed by a Peruvian guy probably about 5 or 6 years older than us. About 30 soles into our purchase of plums, granadillas, apples, avocados, peaches, and cucumber, we realized that the stand was named Karina – just like Karina! So Sarah asked what the owner of the store got, since she was right here in front of him. He ended up giving us some oranges for free, and we all walked off giggling. The next morning, we needed to stop at the grocery-esque store to get our ramen and some cookies and other things, but we headed out too early and it wasn’t yet open. We spent a while at one of the DVD piracy stores. Karina got Where the Wild Things Are and Stardust; I got La Princesa y El Sapo – the Princess and the Frog – and 6 Gael Garcia Bernal films on one DVD for the small prices of 8 soles and cheating Walt Disney out of his money. After trying all of those films successfully (and a few others unsuccessfully) to make sure they were either in English or had subtitles, we still had time to spare, so we went back to Karina to supplement our fruit supply. He was happy to see us on our return!<br /><br />I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be in Puerto. I don’t have a good sense for how the strike is progressing, though it’s officially still indefinite and the government says they will not be caving to the miners’ requests. It still feels very strange to be a Bad Guy. I have lots of research to do when I get back to the US, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be purchasing much gold jewelry in the near future.Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-91010811106981252502010-03-28T14:00:00.000-07:002010-03-28T14:22:10.980-07:00Will you be a lousy scab, or will you be a man?Part of my insistence on adequate preparation for my next traveling experience - rain forest or otherwise - lies in the fact that I feel sort of disjointed here. I am in a rain forest. But nothing about it suggests to me that it is specifically a rain forest in Peru, that it is the Amazon. I place the blame for this mostly on myself - as I mentioned earlier it's mostly my poor knowledge of Spanish and, I would assume, my poor knowledge of what organisms I'm seeing here place me specifically herein the Peruvian Amazon. In Kenya, we were almost, or even more, isolated than here. A four hour drive through the desert to the nearest internet cafe is far more cut off from outside than I am here with my daily internet access. I can't imagine any sort of equivalent here of finding out about Michael Jackson's death via BBC Swahili on a static-distorted radio in the middle of Turkana. But in Turkana, I was completely immersed in the local culture concurrent with fieldwork. Here, I know very little about what's happening in Lima, 4 hours down river, or even on the illegal mining barge across the way. Consequently, what intrusions of reality and context there are into my monkey-chasing haven come as quite as a surprise.<br /><br />To wit - earlier this month, the Peruvian minister of the environment fundamentally changed the situation for the Madre de Dios district of Peru. In a place where more than 2/3 of the economy relies in some fashion on illegal gold mining to function, suggestions that mining be better regulated (or really, regulated at all), do not go over well. But - that's what has happened. This minister has announced that, among other things, illegal miners will be evicted from the river patches they are mining; in order to be legal, all miners must include an environmental recovery plan; no mining is allowed on the northern shore of the Madre de Dios river; and the use of mercury is no longer allowed, even for legal miners. Predictably, this has infuriated a large portion of the Madre de Dios populace.<br /><br />Perhaps less predictably, a certain amount of the blame for these new restrictions has been incorrectly placed on CICRA and its parent organization, ACCA. ACCA is interested in creating corridors linking CICRA's concession with another conservation concession further away. They have been talking to private landowners about using undeveloped land for this corridor. For a variety of reasons, though, miners have decided this means CICRA wants to buy up all the land in the area and stop all mining. In recent weeks, folks connected to CICRA have been kicked out of mining towns up river, and vaguely threatened. The threats have gotten more specific, and have been coming from closer and closer to home, especially as we get closer to a planned mining strike on April 4th. These include things like burning down the building at CICRA that houses the library and labs, and trashing other parts of the facilities. <br /><br />Unfortunately, this means we have to stop everything and evacuate down to Puerto Maldonado. I head down on a boat with the other members of the monkey team in the next couple of days, and we will be hanging out there until the situation calms down - at least April 9, it looks like. We're moving the contents of the lab out into the middle of the jungle in case something does happen, but we're hopeful that the miners will have calmed down and not be interested in actually trashing anything. In an effort to encourage their non-interest, a number of members of the Peruvian military who patrol the Madre de Dios River will be staying at the research station and looking impressive, I guess. We all should be perfectly safe in Puerto, though, and hopefully nothing will happen to CICRA. It is bizarre, though, being on the side of The Man oppressing the common folks in this strike situation. The gold mining industry brings all sorts of complications, but watching this clash of environment and economic development unfold in front of me is really interesting. I just hope my books don't get burned up in the process!Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-34475093288251201592010-03-23T17:36:00.000-07:002010-03-23T18:05:44.635-07:00A resolutionI’m sitting on a tarp beneath a mosquito net on the western edge of the Peruvian Amazon. A day of waiting for the monkeys to appear – “Bring a book,” Mini suggests, “otherwise you’re likely to fall asleep.” Sitting in my little bug-free cone, I do get drowsy. The muggy air penetrates what mosquitoes, grasshoppers, and startlingly large red ants can only shuiffle around on in search of a good hole (cleverly covered with duct tape). I am embarrassingly ambivalent about the magic of what is going on aroud me. In the bird song and titi calls, I could discover a thousand dramas – instead, I read a dystopic novel. In the interactions of the three different kinds of ant on my net, I could learn brutal military tactics, but I am content to nibble on some chocolate covered saltines (probably the reason they’re drawn here, anyway).<br /><br />Rustling in the dry leaves below a liana catches my attention in spurts over the course of an hour. I see movement through the mesh, but can’t ascribe it to anything specific. Sure that it’s not a monkey, and reasonably sure it’s not a snake, I let the noise fade into the background until finally – a giant toad hops out slowly and laboriously. Literally the size of a dinner plate, flat and brown with huge unblinking eyes, he sits and catches his beath, making one good hop every five minutes or so until he has passed out of my sight. I’ve seen other toads like him on the path to my cabin. Their eyes glow purple when they catch my headlight, and they freeze when they know they’ve been seen. They don’t seem too concerned with defense mechanisms, apparently trusting camouflage and a definite air of “I will not be very tasty” to protect them from whatever comes calling.<br /><br />A little while later, I am distracted from my collection of wildlife essays by movement out of the corner of my eye. I watch a quarter-size spider delicately climb up the mosquito net, hooking each leg into a different hole and gliding past eye level. Last night, Marco brought out a tarantula to show to a visiting group of students. Black fur on an impossibly large body and many-segmented legs with pink fuzzy feet (tarantula slippers) moved from his arm to my hand, crawled up to my elbow and back down to settle over my watch, not really interested in leaving. Eventually, Marco coaxed the spider back, leaving my arm with a vague sensation of lingering spider webs and prickly feet.<br /><br />I have resolved to know more about everything next time I am in a forest. I’m almost three months in the Puervian Amazon and, though I can speak with certainty about monkeys I’ve seen three or four times, I can’t identify the brilliantly colored grasshoppers with wings that scatter every time I take a step. I can pick out titis and emperor tamarins in the early morning choir of animals waking up, but I can only name one or two of the birds I hear every day. Trees my monkeys eat from regularly are identifiable, but what good are Naucleopsis naga and Inga alba in an entire forest? And, while a constant smile and a smattering of regular Spanish verb conjugations are helpful, I get so frustrated when it is HARD to explain that yesterday morning, the monkeys climbed down an embankment and we followed them. Next time, I will be prepared. I will speak the language, I will hear the sounds. When I have the chance to spend a whole morning in the middle of it all without trying to keep up with small, speedy primates and just watch and absorb – I will leave the books behind.Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-85805628304788931842010-03-16T08:51:00.000-07:002010-03-16T08:53:34.513-07:00TransportationTo see a place from the right perspective, I’ve come to realize you have to take advantage of whatever mode of transportation most people use to get around on a regular basis. Have you really been to NYC if you haven’t taken the Subway? Amsterdam without a bicycle? Manchester without a Segway? Nairobi without taking a matatu? Puerto Maldonado without a motorcycle?<br /><br />We’re spending our mid-season break in Puerto Maldonado, a bustling port town where the Tambopata River meets the Madre de Dios. It’s the biggest city in the Peruvian Amazon, a jumping off point for tourists heading to ecolodges, a staging ground for mining operations both legal and illegal, an important stop on the Interoceanic Highway which cuts across South America from Lima to Brazil (exposing miles and miles of the Amazon to illegal settlements, hunting, and agricultural pressure), and the center of regional government. A town with at least four pizza places (though one recently burned down), a great bookstore, several mercados, an Indian restaurant, a variety of discotecas, and heladerias selling ice cream in deliciously exotic flavors like Brazil Nut and Passion Fruit (my two personal favorites), Puerto is a nice diversion from the isolation and occasional deprivation of the rainforest. I won’t tell you how much ice cream I’ve had in the past three days. <br /><br />Conveniently for us, a bunch of other usual CICRA residents are also in Puerto Maldonado with us. It’s really funny watching people I’m used to seeing moderately to quite dirty in field clothes and mud-covered boots wandering the city looking clean, fancy, but weird in clean jeans, dresses, fancy sandals – sometimes even jewelry! In a series of impulse buys, I’ve bought two dresses, a pair of pretty flip flops, and matching pairs of earrings (of course, it’s added up to about 30 dollars, so I’m not too upset). We’ve gone out dancing twice, played Settlers of Catan with some added twists, and, as I said, eaten a shameful amount of ice cream. It’s been really fun interacting with people in a completely different environment, though. One of the guys who’s around right now is Marco. At CICRA, he’s perhaps best described as the mechanic – he deals with the generator, the water, the lawnmower, some trail maintenance, etc. etc. etc. He’s probably in his mid- to early twenties, and has been hanging out with the monkey team for the past couple of evenings. He also happens to own a motorcycle.<br /><br />Though Puerto has a lot of people, it doesn’t extend over a HUGE space. Most people get around walking, taking tuk-tuks (three-wheeled, three-seater motorized rickshaws), or by motorcycle. There are motorcycle taxis (one sol for a trip to the plaza, vs. two soles to go by tuk-tuk). Entire families ride on the same motorcycle: Father driving with a four-year-old in front of him holding onto the handles, mother sitting behind him with an infant on her lap. Teenage boy with grandmother’s hands wrapped around his waist, two brothers, two sisters, everyone has a motorcycle. At the discoteca, a lot of people were dancing with their motorcycle helmets still on! <br /><br />Sunday night at the Discoteca, Marco offered to take us out on his motorcycle to see Puerto, if we wanted. I jumped at the opportunity! So yesterday afternoon, he showed up at the hotel and we went and tooled around. He showed me the port on Madre de Dios where there were giant trucks lined up waiting to cross the river via ferry, as the bridge is still in the “there are two supports erected which were built 10 years ago and have no more funding to actually build a bridge” stage of the project. We went to the much less built-up Tambopata port, and continued up and around through all sorts of parts of town, frightening a number of dogs who were in the road and splashing through an impressive number of puddles. We also stopped at the Tower that overlooks Puerto Maldonado, which you can climb up for 2 soles per person. In my continuing effort to stop being afraid of heights so that I can climb the 60 meter tower at CICRA before I leave Peru, we climbed up this one. It was really beautiful – a thunderstorm was approaching and we could see the lightning through the clouds. It was getting dark, the lights were all visible for a distance until there were no more lights and it was just rainforest forever and ever. The oppressive humidity and heat were dissipated because of wind from the approaching storm … it was pretty wonderful, and almost enough to forget how high up I was! <br /><br />I’m sort of hoping Marco will be interested in going back out around on the motorcycle in the next couple of days – maybe I’ll learn how to DRIVE a motorcycle, too! If a motorcycling primatologist in the Amazon isn’t intrepid … I don’t know what is.Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-35551189072070627632010-03-12T17:12:00.000-08:002010-03-12T17:20:47.110-08:00Late night in the AmazonIt is 11:30 at night – later than I’ve stayed up in a little more than two months. A course from a university in Pennsylvania has just wrapped up their last night at CICRA and bought two cases of beer for everyone from Boca Amigo, the settlement just downriver that keeps illegal miners supplied with alcohol and prostitutes. After the group of students finished their beers, they headed off to bed, leaving the researchers to sit and ponder and finish off what alcohol was left. To one side of me, there is an intense discussion about body image and advertising. To the other, there is an equally intense discussion about potential raunchy Spanish nicknames for a member of my team. The owl monkey bounces along the table across from me, curling up on the arm of a researcher studying primate seed dispersal and I stifle a yawn – ashamed to be so sleepy that I can’t fully participate in any of these possibilities.<br /><br />Conversation continues to swirl around me – how to market ecotourism, kissing in Bollywood movies, so on, and so forth. By about 11:45, the gathering begins to break up to head bedwards. On our way out, we see light flashing in the sky over the cliff, and everyone heads towards the boardwalk outside the Concrete Dorm to see what is happening. <br /><br />The sky is completely clear above us. We can’t see the moon, but the Milky Way is stretching right overhead. After a few minutes of looking straight up, several people have seen shooting stars. What’s really amazing, though, is the foothills of the Andes. 70 km south of us, the mountains are obscured by clouds stretching along the horizon. An immense lightning storm is spread across the sky. Horizontal strikes of lightning split the sky and illuminate the clouds. Like an appreciative crowd at a fireworks’ show, everybody Oohs and Aahs at each fork of lightning. I don’t think I can really describe how beautiful it is, standing at the edge of a cliff looking out over the Madre de Dios River, across a huge expanse of forest, and into the Andes, watching this storm approach us. <br /><br />We stand on the cliff watching for maybe 15 minutes. The ant queens flying around and biting my ankles somehow take a little bit of the magic out of the night, but it all returns when I fall asleep in my bed to the sound of geckos hunting crickets on the screens above my head.Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-14087689399833727322010-03-08T06:18:00.001-08:002010-03-08T06:35:57.786-08:00Trapping TamarinsThe main emphasis of Mini’s dissertation is on genetic chimerism in tamarins. Tamarins are unique in a bunch of ways, but one of them is that tamarins habitually have twins. Due to a quirk of the placenta, the blood vessels that supply the twins overlap and cross, and on occasion, bits of stem cells transfer between individuals. Depending on what the cells end up becoming, this can have really interesting consequences. A baby tamarin may have its sibling’s liver cells, or some of its fur, or – in the most exciting cases – its gametes. This means that an animal has the potential to give birth to its sibling’s child. Mini wants to know if this has behavioral effects, especially relating to parenting. The most important thing, then, is to know the genetics of a whole bunch of different bits – hair, nails, blood, sperm, etc. Not the easiest thing to collect in the wild, so one of the things we’ve been doing is attempting to trap groups. This serves the dual purpose of allowing us to put indentifying marks on the monkeys – a radio collar, beaded necklaces, dyed tails – while collecting genetic information.<br /><br />On March 5, the day’s plan was to trap Jean 4 and FC. We have wire platforms and traps (basically compartments with swinging doors that we can tie closed) dispersed around the jungle in places we know groups hang out, with bananas sitting on them. Jean 4 is a group that we’ve been following pretty consistently, but have yet to trap, and FC is our marked group. We still needed some genetic information from RC, the presumed mother, and the two twins who were too young to be anesthetized when they were initially trapped. Unfortunately, when we went out to trap Jean 4, we realized that what we thought was tamarins eating bananas from traps had actually been capuchin monkeys. So we called that pretty quickly. Karina, Emma and I went out to follow FC for the rest of the day when (surprise) it began to pour! FC went and hid in a bramble while the three of us went to wait out the rain in the lab. <br /><br />Mini and Gideon were heading back to the lab at the same time (they were much dryer than us because they took a tarp out with them!). They were really excited to hear that FC was so close, so we put up a trap that had been taken down earlier. Emma and Karina stayed with FC, who were still in their bramble, while the rest of us set up the trap. Eventually, all of FC moved around the trap. RC and GPG grabbed the bananas off the top of the trap and the doors while everyone else was swarming around trying to decide if the metal was dangerous, if the bananas were worth chancing the metal, and (once they did), how the heck to get back out! RC was the first monkey we trapped, followed by Twin 2, GBR, and GPG. They get really irritated when they’re trapped, and try really hard to get out – squeaking, struggling, pushing against the mesh, etc. Twin 1 was the only saddleback out of the trap when a group of emps came and investigated the trap. There were about five emps swarming around and in the trap – at least one emp went in the empty compartment and ate bananas, and several emps scent marked and climbed around the top of the trap, especially around GPG. She was not impressed.<br /><br />Twin 1 was scared off of the trap by the emps and spent the next 20 minutes or so climbing around the back of the trap, between the bottom of the trap and the platform, on trees around the trap, and up on top of it. Gideon approached in the hopes that he could catch Twin 1 if he wouldn’t get in the trap, and also to scare away the emps. The strings of all the compartments except for GBR’s were tied to a tree, and we were focused on getting 1 in a compartment when GPG broke through the mesh of her compartment and escaped. After that happened e decided then to let GBR go and take RC and Twin 2 in to be processed, while GPG, GBR, and Twin 1 stayed out, as it was late enough that we’d need to keep the trapped animals overnight. <br />Karina and Emma followed the rest of FC to their sleeping site while Mini, Gideon and I prepped the lab for processing. After a little while, we decided to go ahead and start processing Twin 2. I started out just taking notes – noting the weather, times of injection, what samples were being taken, stuff like that. But once RC also was given Ketamine and Karina and Emma came in, I just held on to Twin 2 and started taking data and keeping her cool. We had a wide variety of things to get – fecal samples, cheek swabs, blood samples, stuff like that. We also took a dental cast (baby tamarins have REALLY TINY teeth!) and tried to bleach her tail to make her more distinct from Twin 1. After her bleach had been in for about 30 minutes, I got to give her a bath to wash the excess bleach out. Soaking wet baby tamarins are pretty adorable.<br /><br />After we finished processing both RC and Twin 2, we put them in the recovery cage. They were definitely groggy, and sort of wobbled around for a little while. We put banana and water in and covered the cage up. When Mini checked on them later that night, Twin 2 was asleep on top of RC. The trapping experience was really cool – it gave me a lot of perspective on the monkeys. They look so big when you’re watching them. Well, that’s a lie. But they definitely look larger than when you’re holding them in your hand. Twin 2 literally fit in the palm of my hand. Her hands were clasped around my finger and she was NOT letting go. 160 grams of monkey is not a whole lot.<br /><br />Hopefully we'll be trapping more in the future - the problem has been getting them to go IN the trap. We use playbacks of saddleback calls to get them to come to the traps, but they get so caught up trying to find who was calling that they never actually sit down and eat bananas. Mini and Gideon have an agreement with a rehabilitation center to borrow a baby tamarin rescued from the pet trade. He's going to be staying with us for the next couple of months and when we trap, we'll put him out to call to the other monkeys so that they'll go in to investigate. He's set to come next week, so hopefully I'll have lots more trapping stories to tell!!Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-62320024055098582762010-03-01T17:20:00.001-08:002010-03-01T17:24:53.917-08:00Who'll stop the rain?While the rest of the world has its crazy weather and geological events, we’ve been experiencing, well, pretty much what you might expect for the rainforest. Today was the first day in four days that we weren’t rained out of the field (and it poured on us during the afternoon for a number of days before that). I wrote a little about rain in the rainforest earlier, but now I feel like I’m practically an expert. Days frequently start out grey – at least hazy – so you can’t always tell by looking at the sky what the afternoon will bring. Some of the most worrying, greyest clouds in the morning portend really beautiful, sunny afternoons. And the converse is true. But for the past couple of days, it’s just RAINED. And RAINED and RAINED. <br /><br />When we’re out in the forest following monkeys and it’s raining, there are a number of variables that determine what you do. How hard is it raining? Are you following FC (the marked group), or are you following a new group? How far from camp are you? What time is it? Following FC with even light rain can be sort of pointless because we depend on voice recorders to get most of our data on the twins’ behavior, and they are not to get wet. FC is usually close enough to CICRA that you can head back after maybe 20 minutes to half hour of steady rain and not feel too bad. If you don’t have a raincoat with you, you can maybe even cut a little while off of that (and most days, if it rained the day previously my raincoat is soaked and I can’t stick it in my backpack or it will mold and make me smell). Once it stops raining, you can head back out and use the radio telemetry equipment to find where the group is now.<br /><br />On the other hand, if you’re following a new group, it usually means that you’re at least a 20 minute hike from camp. It also means that you have no way of finding the group again if you leave them to get out of the rain. We don’t leave a new group unless it’s POURING for a substantial period of time, and even then, more often than not we’ll stick with the group. Especially if it’s the afternoon, it means you’ve put four or five hours into sticking with the group. Losing them before you get a sleeping site means that you have to start out scouting for a new group all over again the next morning – it’s worth getting soaked to know where they’re sleeping and where to find them tomorrow. We’ve started bringing tarps with us to scout in case it rains. Our rain activities in the field include gossiping, reminiscing about food (apple crisp and diet coke are my biggest cravings right now), singing Disney songs, and thinking of songs about rain.<br /><br />Generally when it rains, the tamarins head up into a bramble in a tree and hide there until the rain stops. They’re small enough monkeys, and it rains heavily enough (especially as water collects in the canopy and falls in bigger drops), that it could do some damage and maybe knock a twin out of a tree, or something like that. It also gets very slippery, as one unwitting tamarin found out. Gideon and I were scouting a new group one afternoon and it started pouring. However, it started raining at 2:45. Doing the calculations, we decided that a potential two hours of getting wet would be worth it to get this group’s sleeping site. But then we saw tamarins moving about 30 meters away from the bramble we were CONVINCED our monkeys were hiding in, and we ran to find them. “What weird tamarin behavior,” we commented, but figured we just had a renegade group that wasn’t scared of the rain. After about two hours of running around in circles in this patch of forest, we determined that we’d scared up a new group of tamarins – at least 14 monkeys in one group! They were moving from one tree to another, and I was following to find their sleeping tree while Gideon was getting an official count of monkeys in the group, when the monkey I was running under (who was carrying a twin) suddenly slipped and fell out of the tree! I stared up in shock at this monkey growing larger and larger above me, and suddenly he bounced off of my shoulder! He hit the ground softly (most of the fall having been absorbed by my body), stared at me in his own shock, and scrambled up a tree with the twin! “Gideon,” I yelled, “they definitely have a twin! The monkey carrying him just fell on me!” Gideon, not really paying attention to me, shouted back, “OK, Erin.” I didn’t think he’d heard what he said, so I told him again when we were wrapping up for the afternoon. The reaction was much more in line with what I expected.<br /><br />If it’s raining in the morning when we get up for breakfast, we generally don’t go out until it stops raining. For the past couple of days, that’s translated into “we generally don’t go out.” The rain’s been toying with us – yesterday morning, for example, it was cloudy but not raining until we were literally stepping outside of the lab, all DEET-ed and prepared to head out. And then it began to pour. If we get rained out, we do data entry until everyone’s computer runs out of batteries, and we work on things around the lab. Sometimes we watch movies (yesterday, we watched The Proposal AND the Hangover. Very high brow entertainment). We’ve also become compulsive Settlers of Catan players! I’ve only won one game, but it’s a lot of fun! I never thought that trading things for sheep could be quite so entertaining. <br /><br />We were greeted this morning by the welcome sight of blue sky breaking through the cloud cover. The sun fought its way out for most of the morning – only two hours of rain all day! Keep your fingers crossed for tomorrow. I think I’m going to be permanently pruny when I get out of here!Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-75686394251216770012010-02-26T09:30:00.001-08:002010-02-26T09:31:53.979-08:00The obligatory morbid post.One thing that’s puzzled me about the rainforest is that I have seen very little evidence of death here. I guess that’s not strictly true, as I spend a good portion of my time scrambling over tree falls, decomposing logs, and exclaiming over impressive funguses. But I don’t see a lot of dead animals. In the desert, we stumbled across skeletons of a variety of animals (fossils notwithstanding). I guess that makes sense too, as there are a lot more things here waiting to eat up whatever has died. So leaving that aside, the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t see dead animals a lot.
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<br />When Mini and Gideon trapped and identified the group of monkeys I follow frequently now, FC, they also trapped a solitary male named BBO. Back in November, BBO was old. He had a tumor in his prostate and his teeth were very worn down. He’d pop in and out of camp, and disappear for a while, then come back to eat some bananas or anona (another soft fruit). He’s been hanging around here more frequently for the past couple of weeks, more and more dependent on bananas to eat. He looks more and more frazzled, hair sticking out everywhere, stomach expanding from malnourishment. He has pretty bad eyesight, doesn’t seem to be hearing very well, and is moving slowly. We were all wondering how he hadn’t yet been eaten by some bird of prey or other. We haven’t seen BBO for about a week, and it’s been raining very hard for the past week. I suspect that my last memories of BBO will be nearly stepping on him as he unconcernedly eats banana on the wooden planks outside the lab (having bypassed the older banana pieces as not up to par).
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<br />Along similar lines, I watched a lizard dying in agony yesterday. Probably one of the ickiest things I’ve ever seen. I may have mentioned bullet ants in passing – big insects, about ¾ of an inch long, with both a stinger AND a pincher. Some person who makes a living deciding these things has said that bullet ants have the most painful stings of the entire insect world. I’ve yet to experience this firsthand (keep your fingers crossed), but they’re probably the only thing in the rainforest that truly terrifies me at this point in time. There are also these teeny tiny anoles that live here – maybe three or four inches long at the most. Yesterday morning, I was stopping and looking over a Mirador – an overlook – when an anole caught my eye. Then I realized that what had attracted my eye to it was the writhing and twitching it was doing. Then I saw that there was a bullet ant with its pinchers embedded in its neck. Karina and I watched, horrified, as the lizard struggled with the ant for several minutes. At one point in time, we lost all shred of scientific objectivity and Karina tried to separate the pair with a stick. It didn’t work, and, slightly nauseated, we watched as the lizard just … stopped. Then several more bullet ants descended. At that, we decided it was time to move on. I don’t know about Karina, but I had dreams about writhing lizards last night. I’m usually okay with watching predator-prey interactions, but usually it’s not quite so protracted. The lion takes a big bite out of the gazelle, the owl flies away with the mouse, the tamarin bites the head off the katydid, and that’s the end.
<br />Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-75814311920041556202010-02-18T06:26:00.000-08:002010-02-18T06:27:15.970-08:00Meanwhile, back at the ranch...<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: 0in">Well, I’m writing this at quarter of 8 on my half-day off (the internet isn’t on yet, so I’ll probably post it closer to 10). As I said, it’s quarter of 8. I’ve already: Soaked laundry, ate breakfast, washed laundry, hung laundry, entered data, cleaned my computer screen, and sat down to write a blog entry. Now I can add started blog entry to that list, I guess. I mean, it feels like it’s been pretty productive for a so-far-off day, but comparing it to yesterday, it feels pretty measly. We’ve been following a group for the past two days that lives pretty far out of camp. This means that yesterday morning, in order to get to their sleeping site by 5:30, we left camp at 4:30. Which meant that in order to leave camp at 4:30, I was awake at 3:30. Hiking out of camp at 4:30 in the morning means that it’s dark for the majority of the hike – in this case, 2 and a half kilometers on the trail, and another 500 meters or so on. The group that we were following was very strange in that there were 14 adults!!!! Most groups we follow have 4 adults – a group of 7 adults sticks out as weird. So this was pretty mind boggling. It took a lot of effort to follow because there was just so much going on. Usually you can focus on one or two animals and be set, but even among the four of us following, you had to keep track of a bunch more animals and they were spread so far apart. It was pretty crazy.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: 0in"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:black">As you’ve probably noticed by this time, the vast majority of my waking hours are spent in the field. However, when I am not in the field, I can generally be found in one of three places: the lab, the Commodore, or my cabin. Whatever the field lacks in comfort (and, to be honest, while the rainforest can be described as many things, comfortable isn’t one of them), these three places make up for in some way.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: 0in"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:black">All of the project materials live in the lab: dry boxes full of computers, tables covered in binoculars and Rite in the Rain notebooks, trapping material, batteries, chargers, bananas, and (perhaps most importantly) the chocolate stash. This is where I’m writing from this morning – it has big wooden tables set up with benches and stools around. It gets electricity and sometimes internet during parts of the day. It’s in the same building as all the other labs (on the ground floor), a few more offices and the library (on the second floor). The library is a pretty big bookshelf with an eclectic mix of books – everything from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Don Quijote</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Amor en la Tiempo de Cholera</i>, to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">a Short History of Everything</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Lord of the Rings</i>, to trashy romances, to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Don’t Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus</i>! I’ve finished <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Things Fall Apart </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">You Shall Know Our Velocity – </i>I’m in the middle of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Lake Woebegon Boy</i>. The lab itself is a big concrete building with concrete walls. The second floor is made entirely of wood, with a thatched roof. The windows are all screened in to both let in air and keep out mosquitoes. This has the sort of strange consequence of leaving no reflective surfaces at the station. If it weren’t for my computer screen and the occasional photograph, I’d have no idea what I look like. Checking my hair in the reflection of my computer screen as it turns itself on has become a ritual on the same lines as looking at myself in windows before I go in a building.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: 0in"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:black">The Commodore acts as the station’s living room, dining room, study, and kitchen. A building about the same size as the lab, it has three long tables with benches where we eat dinner (and breakfast and lunch on the rare occasion that I eat at the station – usually we eat breakfast early in the morning while getting ready to head out, and lunch is packed for us to eat out in the field). The filtered water, oatmeal fixings, and cookies to take to the field are <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>in the Commodore, and the kitchen and pantry are rooms separated off the back end. There are also several big futon-like couches, two kitchen table-sized tables, a number of games, and a guitar. At night, I usually write and do data entry in the Commodore – the internet is a little quicker from in there, and the electricity turns on at 6:00 so I can charge my computer. Kat is great on guitar, so there’s frequently music coming from there (there was a period of time where Kat, Sarah, and I were learning Helplessly Hoping in three-part harmony. Probably to everyone else’s relief, that’s petered out – it does mean that we’re not sitting and singing the same repetitive song slightly discordantly).</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: 0in"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:black">My cabin is about a 5-10 minute walk from the lab and the Commodore, down the beginning of one of the trails. I pass the wooden dorms (built to house a WWF project, now used for researchers and visitors), the entrance to Premier Mirador and Carratera (two more trails), the football field, and five other cabins plus the bathroom and shower before I get to my cabin. It’s about 20 meters off the main trail and sits in a little clearing beneath a big Green Berry Tree. I’ve seen a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">big</i> coral snake coming down the trail, as well as a number of bats and lizards. Last night I saw a giant toad (reminiscent of the toad in Pan’s Labyrinth!) whose eyes glowed purple in the light of my headlamp. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: 0in"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:black">My cabin itself is about 4 feet off the ground. I have a small front porch perfect for brushing my teeth off of, and a clothesline strung up along one side under the eaves to hang underwear and socks from to dry. In my cabin, I have my bed and mosquito net, two wardrobes (the cabin originally had two people in it, so I’ve got double everything, though the second bed was put up against the wall and now I have a little more room), and two bedside tables. The wall is solid wood about 3 and a half feet up, and then screened until the roofline. The roof is thatched and makes a lovely home for all my geckos and lizards, the occasional stickbug, and the even more occasional bat. My Kindle and Spanish-English dictionary live in their own ziplock bags on my bed, where I read every night for about a half hour before crashing off to sleep! </span></p>Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7450622765431979676.post-59627032519071847642010-02-12T10:51:00.000-08:002010-02-12T11:30:01.362-08:00BambooWhen I pictured my future life in the rainforest, I would see HUGE trees towering above me. Dark browns covered by mossy greens, water percolating down from gigantic leaves and dripping quietly on my bandana-covered hair. Quiet rustling of wet leaf litter as we walk through, brushing past epiphytes with riotously colored flowers, insects, birds, and frogs to find tiny monkeys sitting in a pile and grooming eachother. It would always be darker and cooler in the forest, though certainly humid and moist beneath the trees. <div><br /></div><div>So sometimes that's correct - for instance, it is almost always humid and darker beneath the trees. And there are definitely insects! What I wasn't picturing - and what is, it turns out, an integral part of this particular rainforest - was the bamboo.</div><div><br /></div><div>The forest here is situated on a floodplain, which means that it undergoes natural disturbance pretty frequently - the river will overflow its banks, or meander into a different direction. Sometimes a big tree falls over and brings down all the other trees in its path. When this happens, the first thing to grow up is bamboo. So a lot of the time, what the monkeys are doing is jumping from isolated tree to isolated tree in a sea of bamboo. And what this means for those of us following said monkeys is swimming through this sea of bamboo in vain attempts to make it to those isolated trees before the monkeys have headed to another one!</div><div><br /></div><div>I can see what you're thinking. "Bamboo? What's wrong with bamboo?" Well, I've learned that bamboo has a number of really terrible qualities. It doesn't have the tree cover that the rest of the forest does, which really does make a substantial difference in temperature. It's also frequently a haven for fire and bullet ants. The big bamboo stands are usually considerably taller than I am and don't really want to be pushed through - fortunately, we've developed a specific technique for fighting our way through. Our Bamboo Tramping Technique involves me lifting my forearms in front of my face and basically falling forward. By continuously falling forward, you flatten enough bamboo out to create a path. It can be pretty resilient, so you have to work up a good head of steam before you can move through with any speed (and it also likes to spring back up behind you). We've been going at the same general routes for long enough that there's a really respectable trail out there in the middle of the bamboo that the monkeys traverse most frequently, but on those occasions that the monkeys change it up, it's time to tramp through more bamboo! </div><div><br /></div><div>The other exciting discovery I've made about bamboo is that it frequently has thorns. Big, thick thorns. Sometimes, when the thorns grow long enough, they form thorn-branches which in turn grow thorns! The thorns on thorns are still sharp and uncomfortable. They're really good at catching on shirts, or bandanas, or hair, or hands. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, the upshot of all of this is that I have gained a newfound respect for Panda Bears. And for that, I am greatful?</div>Erinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02165371846961284665noreply@blogger.com1