My First Month in the Jungle

After my first jungle post you get the general idea of the kind of work that I do, so I guess I'll mostly point out interesting things that have happened rather than a play-by-play of each day.

A few weeks ago the jungle got it's first taste of me - I got bit/stung by some kind of creature while on a foraging walk. We're not sure what exactly it was, but it looked like some kind of ant. It bit me in the stomach, and within minutes my whole front - from my shoulders to my waist - was on fire, and basically felt like someone was jabbing a hot poker in my belly button. It sucked that it was my stomach because I couldn't sit comfortably since that scrunched my stomach. The pain went down after a day, but it was still red, warm, and tender for a while longer.

That's one of the interesting things I've learned about the jungle - there is a complete reversal of creatures that I'm scared of / not scared of. Spiders in my mosquito net? Too tired to kill you. Cockroach on the floor? Beat it, cockroach. Possum in the trash? It'll be gone by morning. Ant on my sleeve? "Uhh, hey, there's an ant on my sleeve and it's big. Get it off of me ... I think it's a bullet ant. GET IT OFF OF ME. SERIOUSLY GET THIS SHIT OFF OF ME." (Bullet ants suck, by the way. Apparently they have the same venom as a cobra, and their bites make you feel like you've been shot. The pain spreads through half your body, and you either get diarrhea or you throw up.)

Oh, so you know how last post I said that a tourist invited Katharine and I to the bar for drinks for his brother's birthday? Well that same tourist ended up smelling me. I was at the Colpa one morning with Carloncho, and he walked over to our observation area to chat and see a different view. He started talking about looking forward to having machine-washed clothing again because he couldn't get his clothes to smell clean after five days in the jungle. Carloncho and I laughed and said that five days was nothing... he should try for a month or two. Then the guy said he wanted to know how bad it was, so he leaned down to where my arm was propped over the back of my chair (armpit exposed), and took a big whiff. That may have been the weirdest thing that's happened so far. Carloncho was staring with his mouth hanging open, and I kind of froze in my seat, shocked that this guy would actually WANT to smell me. *I* don't even want to smell me. But he agreed with our original statement and said "oof, that's bad". Thank you, kind stranger. At least you bought me a soda.

While I'm talking about gross things, it wasn't until my third week (I think) that I finally got diarrhea. (Carloncho warned me in my second week that I WOULD get diarrhea at some point and that it was only a matter of time.) Since most of you don't want to read about this, I'll only say that jungle diarrhea is like 15 times worse than city diarrhea, and is sometimes called "The Explosion". You are warned.

What else... oh! So American Thanksgiving isn't exactly celebrated in Peru. Instead, Katharine and I spent the night talking about all of the food we will eat when we get home. Our conversation lasted at least 45 minutes (actually, it's been continuous for about a month). We also spent a good hour googling pictures of cake. I may have hit an all time low when I seriously contemplated licking the computer screen hoping that it might taste like a warm lava cake. Fortunately, I used all remaining willpower and resisted. Apparently Peruvians don't really crave chocolate like Americans and Europeans (granted, they have crappy chocolate here). As a result, the rest of the researchers were just staring at us as we drooled and cried over pictures of desserts. Anyone want to celebrate second Thanksgiving in January?

Oh man, so a couple days after Thanksgiving there was a HUGE storm during the night (we're in the rainy season now, so it rains every other day, if not every day). The storm hit around 3 am, and I thought I was the only one who was awake, but I found out the next day that the rest of the researchers were all awake, too. We sleep in a loft on the second floor, and the middle section of the roof (where the two sides meet at the top to form the ridge along the length of the building) is made of some kind of... plastic? I only specify because we were able to see the lightening flashes through that strip of ceiling. And holy crap there was a lot of lightening! There were lightening strikes every 1-2 seconds for a good half hour (and that was only the high point of the storm - the whole thing lasted for hours). It was like an extreme fireworks show... hosted by NATURE! There was also so much to hear - lightening striking trees or the ground, trees falling down all night (and into the next day), and the thunder! Our loft was shaking from the storm (granted, it shakes when anyone walks up or down the stairs). That was seriously cool. Of course, it's after nights like those where entire sections of trails have disappeared in a tangle of fallen trees/branches, which is something our machetes are no match for (oh yeah, machetes are one of our daily accessories).

The storm continued into the next day, which delayed our climbing (can't climb when the rope is wet). Instead, Katharine and I made (aka watched Carloncho make) brownies, and then she and I ate heaps of batter... like a sickening amount of batter... like I still felt ill six hours later. That was totally worth it. Again, that is not something that Peruvians typically do, so there were half a dozen staff members just staring at us as we shoved spoonfuls of batter into our mouths. We paused briefly for a picture and then just kept eating. I think that should happen again soon. Oh, so after that I had to do nest observations at the nest Hugo. Just a reminder - nest observations are where you sit in a chair and stare up at a nest for six hours. This isn't like colpa where you record data only every five minutes... you have to pay attention for six hours. That sounds nice and easy, right? "But you're sitting in a comfy chair... it's not tiring like climbing is... just listen to music." No. You don't understand. Try staring at one thing for six hours and convince me that you're not crazy by the end of it. It's not even something interesting for six hours. In that time there is maybe 30 minutes of activity in total. That's like watching grass grow for five and a half hours and seeing a line of ants for 30 minutes. I think you get it now. Anyways, after that I was pretty fried and not in a great mood, but as I was gathering my clothes and stuff for a shower, I noticed a plate with a fresh-baked brownie on my bed. At first I couldn't comprehend what this goodness could possibly be, but then the realization set in and I started gasping/shrieking more and more loudly until the guys in the loft thought that maybe I saw a rat or something. Shoving warm brownie into my mouth somehow erased the previous six hours. It was amazing.

The day after there was more rain, which hit while I was observing at the colpa. The rule with the colpa is that after two hours of rain you can radio back for the boat to pick you up. It started raining around 5:45am, and so at 8:00 I packed up and started calling for the boat. Unfortunately the radios weren't working well, or no one was listening on the other end, because I was calling for the boat for 45 minutes. Eventually it came, captained by the barman who brought the chef with him (the barman actually does drive the boats... it was the chef who I was confused about). Instead of taking me straight back, they wanted to go for an adventure, so we took the boat around the island that I was on (in the pouring rain). They even taught me to drive, which was pretty fun. I only ran us into shallow rocks once! By the end of that I was completely soaked, despite my poncho. That afternoon was also cool because Carloncho and I got to make pizzas! Katharine and I had been fantasizing about pizzas for weeks, and so we finally got to make some. One had bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, cheese, and sausage on it, and the other had bacon and ... who cares what else was on it?? THERE WAS BACON!!!!

The next day I was out climbing trees on some of the islands with Carloncho. While we were leaving Colpa Island we heard rustling in the trees, and it turns out there were 20-30 squirrel monkeys all around us!! A tree had fallen down and it's branches were hanging over the trail, so the monkeys were running across, jumping from branch to branch, and watching us as we stood there, completely surrounded by monkeys. There was one monkey who we assumed was the head honcho because he was bigger than the rest, and he was pulling down fruit and dropping it for the others to grab. There were medium sized monkeys, and the babies were the cutest little things ever. They were so small (could have held some of the smallest ones in my hand), and some were just hanging onto their mother's fronts as the mothers wandered through the branches. The monkeys were so curious, too, because as we stood there watching them, they gathered all around to watch us! We were incredibly close, too, maybe only a meter or two from the nearest ones. But of course, neither Carloncho nor I had a camera on us, so this will just have to be one that I remember.

Let's see... so at the end of November some of the macaw eggs started hatching! This means climbing trees to take the chicks down so they can be weighed and measured. One person climbs the tree, then they send down a carabiner using a pulley on the back of their harness, the person on the ground sends a bucket up with a hot water bottle and towels, the climber puts the chicks in the bucket and sends it down, the person on the ground takes all of the measurements and removes any parasites (botflies and mites being the most common), and then sends the chicks back up for the climber to put back in the nest, and then they come down. There can be a lot of down time for the climber while all the measurements are being taken (20-50 min), which can either be good or bad. Some trees have a bunch of ants on the trunks, so you don't want to be bumping into them. Some nests have macaw parents who will squack at you from a distance, and others will attack you. Sometimes it starts raining - if it's a light rain you have to stay up there, and if it's a heavy rain you have to get the chicks back immediately and get down quickly (either way the climber gets soaked). However, the early morning sun over the jungle canopy is pretty much one of the most amazing things ever. And you're up there for so long that it's easy to hear where animals are under the canopy - there might be a herd of peccaries off to your left, some parrots flying behind you, monkeys climbing through the trees on your right, and hey! A climber in the tree a couple hundred meters a way! (That was really cool the one time it happened - Carlitos and I happened to be climbing at the same time, so we got to chat and take pics of each other over the canopy. Unfortunately the early morning sun isn't conducive to pictures.)

The first chicks I retrieved were in Hugo (the first nest to have chicks). That was a relatively easy tree - some ants, parents yelled at me from the branches, nice view. The second nest with chicks was Franz, and that mother is crazy (actually, no, she's just a good mother) - most macaws will fly to the branches when you climb up to their nest, but this mother sits in her nest on her chicks and attacks when you open the door. Sucks for us, but she's being a good mother. To get her chicks, you have to wear thick gloves, throw a towel over her, and hold her down. Then you can grab the chicks while she is immobile. You need to have a fair bit of confidence for that job because she will bite the towel and take it from you, snap at your fingers and arm, and generally make your job difficult. The nice thing is that she doesn't leave her nest, even when her chicks are gone, so you can sit up there in peace while waiting for the vets to finish.

However, the mother in PVC nest is a different story. (Reminder: PVC was the first nest that I climbed, and there were two eggs in it!! There was a third when we started climbing to check for chicks.) The first time I climbed that nest to check for chicks the mother came out of the nest and hung from the entrance waiting for me. Gustavo told me to keep climbing and she would fly away. She did. Great! But no chicks. The second time she didn't fly away, so I had to wave my glove at her, at which point she flew away. Good. Still no chicks. The third time she climbed onto my rope and started coming at me, and when waving my glove at her didn't work, I slapped her in the face with it and she flew off. Okay. But this time there was a chick! (Unfortunately by the next day that chick (and one of the eggs) had died. We think it was because of nest fighting, so the chick either got caught in the crossfire, or the parents were too busy defending the nest to feed the chick.) The fourth time I climbed that nest I had to slap the mom in the face 7 times, and she didn't move. So I patienty hung below the nest hoping I wasn't going to lose fingers or an eye, and then I had to blindly put the chick back (the second one) because I didn't want to climb higher to see into the nest. The fifth time was when it got interesting - the mom came out, I slapped her a couple times, and then she flew at me and grabbed onto my arm. Without even thinking I flung my arm around and threw her like 20 feet before she took control of her flight. That was exciting. The sixth time (and most recent, I believe), was probably the best - when I was getting ready to start climbing, we noticed a couple spider monkeys in the nearby trees! They were climbing all around and were really cute, but then I had to focus on climbing. Halfway up the tree I noticed that MORE spider monkeys were gathering. They were curious as to what I was doing, so they started climbing closer and surrounded the tree I was in. At first I was a little nervous because I didn't know if they would attack or not - a couple of them were jumping on their branches in what I learned later was a threatening manner. Fortunatey they all just seemed to want to watch me and didn't bother me at all. That made it hard to climb because I just wanted to sit there and watch them! At one point I noticed four of them all sitting in a row just staring at me. How cool is that?? It was amazing because I climbed up to where they were, and then higher, and a bunch of them followed and climbed higher in *their* trees! The closest ones were less than four meters away. I also learned that these monkeys are just ridiculous and love to play around. There was one monkey who, instead of climbing himself, decided to hang onto his buddy and catch a ride while he climbed the trees (this was definitey not a mother and child - they were both medium-sized monkeys). Another monkey launched itself from one branch to another, except it wasn't even really a branch, but more like a bunch of palm fronds, so the whole thing dropped a couple meters after he landed in them. These monkeys sure are ballsy. Probably my favorite monkey was one in a different tree from the others. He was watching me and playing around the whole time. He started by swinging on a branch with one arm, then he used an arm and a foot, and then at one point he grabbed it with just his tail and was swinging back and forth like a rag doll with his limbs flailing everywhere... and staring at me the whole time! It was just the most ridiculously cute thing I've seen. Once again... no camera. However, this time would have been difficult to take pictures, even if I had the camera, because I spent my entire time up there making sure I wasn't about to die -- I was able to get the mother away initially by swinging a towel up at her, which she bit onto and was then pulled out of the nest by. However, with all of the monkeys around, both she AND the father came back to perch on top of the nest and protect their nest. So there I am, hanging from a tree in the high canopy of the Amazon, stealing baby macaws as 20 spider monkeys surround me and two angry macaw parents perch above me to defend their nest. How often do you get to say that?? But all was good - got the chick back in the nest and got down with all of my fingers intact. What an amazing climb.

Since nothing else is going to top that, I think I'll save the rest for later!

10 Interesting Jungle Things

I'm in the middle of another *real* post, but I made this list of 10 interesting jungle things while at the colpa the other morning, so I thought I'd share:

1. Spiders that I considered to be "big" at home are now allowed to build webs in the corners of my bed's mosquito net. Spiders that are actually big are fortunately only out at night.
2. Ants are terrifying; they fly, they bite, they make you feel like you're on fire, they can be over an inch long, and they are EVERYWHERE.
3. There is nothing in life that smells worse than a herd of peccaries... except maybe a herd of wet peccaries.
4. I have a new found respect for SoCal water after drinking brown water for a month and a half. I've actually kind of forgotten what clear water looks like, so I don't mind this stuff anymore.
5. Chocolate in the jungle is equivalent to cigarettes in prison. There are laptops and iPhones and whatnot lying out in the open, but it's chocolate that people lock up.
6. I will shamelessly scavenge for food from the remains of the tourist breakfast... like a dog in a trash can.
7. Nothing will make you climb a tree faster than incoming rain clouds, because once you've seen them you have two minutes until you're soaked.
8. You don't quite realize how loud scarlet macaws can be until you're climbing to their nest to steal their children.
9. The three most common topics of conversation are chocolate, sex, and diarrhea.
10. Five minutes after you put something down or walk through an area, there will probably already be a spider building a new web there.

Hoping to get the next post in soon!

Jungle time!

Finally! My time in the jungle!

I left Cusco on Tuesday, November 6 (election day) and arrived in Puerto Maldonado around noon. Arriving at the airport was interesting because we kept getting closer and closer to what appeared to be very thick jungle, and only at the last minute was there a clearing for the airport. It was very warm and raining a ton. After grabbing my bag, I met a woman from the Rainforest Expeditions office who took me to my hostel. Unfortunately she didn't speak a word of English, and she didn't speak slowly to give me time to understand her Spanish. I figured out that she needed to go back to the office to find out what time my boat was the next day, and she said she would be back to give me the information. Unfortunately she didn't give me any indication of when she would return (which turned out to be 7 hours later), so I was kind of tied to my hostel for fear of missing her. Around 5 I gave up and went to the main plaza for dinner and something cold. (As it turns out, Puerto Maldonado is Hell on Earth. Or maybe it was just my hostel with no airflow... or the fact that I was coming from Cusco where I had 3 blankets on my bed and my hands would freeze trying to use my computer outside at night. No matter the reason, I was so hot and uncomfortable that I couldn't even exert the effort to kill the mosquitoes that were biting me.) After some food I went back to sitting in my hostel (the woman came back and told me she would pick me up at 11am the next morning) and watching election results start to come in. Just as it was getting good (around 10pm?), the power in the hostel went out. Great. That meant there was no internet and no fans. Fortunately it came back on 30 minutes later, so I got to watch more results come in before giving up and going to bed (as sad as this is, it was hard to care about seeing the outcome that night considering I hadn't been around for any of the news in the last 2 months, no one else around me even knew what was going on, and I felt like I was being cooked alive).

The next morning I slept in, through breakfast apparently. I went out to grab a quick bite before getting picked up, but everything appeared to be closed, even at 10:30am. I figured I could grab a snack later, so I went back to wait at the hostel. The woman picked me up, took me to the Rainforest Expedition office, told me a lot of stuff in Spanish, from which I could only understand that a guy named Carlos would be meeting me, and I would take a bus with him to the port. She didn't give a time or anything, and it turned out that I waited for over 2 hours. There were no stores near the office, and I didn't see any food available for purchase, so I just sat there waiting. Around 1pm I wanted to make sure I was still in the right place, so I asked a woman at the desk if she knew who Carlos was and when I would be meeting him, and she said "oh, he's right over there". So apparently Carlos had no idea he was supposed to be meeting me... great communication on their part. Fortunately he came over and introduced himself, and I was relieved to see he spoke some English. Not long after that he said our bus had arrived, so we got on with the tourists for the 45 minute drive to the port.

During the drive the tourists' guide passed out food baskets for them, and I was sad to see that there weren't any extra. (By this point it was like 2pm and I hadn't eaten since 5pm the night before.) Fortunately there was a tiny little snack shack at the port, so I bought some crackers and gatorade. It was there that one of the tourists introduced himself to me, and I found out he was actually a visiting professor at Pomona for one year while I was at Harvey Mudd... small world! We chatted a lot on the boat, and with another guy who turned out to be a biologist living in Oregon. They were both really awesome. Pomona guy was also being super nice by trying to make me one of the tourists - I knew that since I wasn't a tourist I didn't get all of the touristy benefits, but when they started passing out food packets wrapped in giant leaves (and I'm sitting there nibbling on crackers), he grabbed one for me (and a juice box, too!) and told me to eat real food. And when we finally got to the Refugio Amazonia lodge (3 hours by boat), there were snacks, drinks, and cold towels for the tourists, which I hesitated about getting, but he told me to grab a towel and then got me a glass of juice. Seriously my favorite person that day.

But yes, so Carlos and I had to stay overnight at Refugio (which is pretty normal when trying to get to the Tambopata Research Center (TRC)). The nice thing was that we stayed in a tourist room, which had two beds, a hammock, private bathroom, and a wall missing for us to enjoy a view of the jungle. The not nice thing was that we had to stay a second night (because there was no boat heading to TRC the next day either), and we had to move into the staff quarters, which were 3 bunk beds per room, communal bathrooms of a much inferior quality (no toilet seats??), and my bed's mosquito net was falling apart and had not been cleaned in what must have been months.

The first night we just wandered the lodge (which was HUGE) and talked to people, ate dinner in the staff dining room, and that night a bunch of staff members were drinking in the bar, so Carlos bought me a drink and we joined them. That was fun and all, until the lights went out at 9:30pm and they lit candles. When you have the only source of light for ... a very long distance, the bugs WILL find you. And they are HUGE. The first bug someone brought over was some kind of water bug, which was nearly the size of a hand. Then came the cockroaches. They were ... 5 inches long? I was impressed because the guys got rid of them by just grabbing them in their hand and chucking them as hard as they could at the ground. After the cockroaches were other flying things. Normally at home when a flying thing flies into a flame, it gets burned and drops dead. The flying things here are so large that they fly into the flame and put it out. I had never seen bugs that big in my life, but the staff members tried to make me feel better by saying that these were nothing compared to the ones I would see at TRC, which is another 4 hours up the river. Fantastic. Anyways, Carlos and I didn't stay more than 30 minutes after the lights went out, so I was able to retreat to the safety of my mosquito netted bed. It being my first night in the jungle, I wasn't sure how many creatures would be crawling into our room during the night, so I just piled everything I could possibly need next to me on the bed - clothes for the morning, flashlight, earplugs, mp3, toiletries, etc. Turns out very little actually crawls into the room - it's mostly just grasshoppers, beetles, little cockroaches, and such (I was imagining turning on my flashlight in the middle of the night and not being able to see through the wall of creatures that had formed over my mosquito net, but thankfully that was not the case).

The next morning we got up at 5am for breakfast (we actually ate the tourist food!) and then intended to join them for an exploration of some lake. For some reason Carlos told me to follow him (on a different trail from the one that the tourists were taking), but we ended up getting lost and never found the lake. Instead we wandered around the trails for a few hours and went to an overlook of the river, climbed to the top of the Tower (like... 30 meters? 35?) to look out over the canopy, and generally just explored. It was on that hike that I realized my sweating potential was way higher than anything I ever expected. We happened to get back to the lodge just as the tourists were getting back, and my Pomona friend grabbed me a glass of tourist juice and a piece of tourist banana bread. After that Carlos and I showered in our fancy tourist room and then packed up and moved to the staff quarters. We ate lunch with the other staff members, and then a bunch of them played volleyball while I sat in the staff living room and chatted with guides - that was when I discovered that Peruvians, or at least every male employee for Rainforest Expeditions, really like white girls. That night was much more calm - we ate dinner, chatted, watched TV, and then went to bed.

Friday we were finally heading to TRC, but our boat wasn't until 11. I woke up with cold symptoms, so I skipped breakfast and just napped on the couch. One guide, Julian, was actually genuinely nice and got me some medicine. I liked him. Finally Carlos and I walked to the boat, but we had to wait a bit until the couple of tourists made it down. From there it was 4 hours to TRC, with a stop at a checkpoint along the way. On the way I mostly chatted with one of the tourists and his guide, Manuel. They were both really nice, and I liked that tourist because during his few days at TRC, he would stop whenever he saw me and tell me about what he saw that day and then ask what new things I did/learned. Really cool guy. Manuel was awesome, too - he kept checking in to find out what new things I was doing, and the day he was leaving was when I first learned to climb, so he was encouraging me with only a handful of sarcasm.

Anyways, we finally got to TRC around 3pm. Carlos and I took a separate path to the researcher's part of the lodge (as opposed to the tourist entrance). On the way we ran into the other three researchers - Carlos (Carloncho from here on out), Lukas, and Yessenia. Turns out Lukas was leaving the next day, so I only saw him the one night. Carloncho had been there two months already and had one more to go. Yessenia had only been there four or five days, but I believe she is staying for two months, like me. At the lodge I met Gustavo, our field leader, Agusto, the lodge manager, and a handful of other guides/employees.

Then Carlos (the one I'd been traveling with, who I'll be referring to as Carlitos) showed me the researchers' loft and my room. We are the only ones living in a second floor of the lodge. It's nice because it's our area and other people don't really come up there, but it can also get quite warm up there, despite all of the open windows/gaps. There are seven rooms, and I think five of them have multiple beds, but for now everyone has his/her own room. We have three hammocks, a couple tables and chairs, a bookshelf half filled with biology/reference books and half with fiction, and in general it's a cool little space to live in for two months! The one downside (to the lodge in general) is that there is no private space anywhere. Yes, I have my own room, but the walls are made of bamboo and they only go up about three meters, while the ceiling is nearly twice that. In fact all of the walls here are made of bamboo, and there is no room that is fully enclosed on all sides. There are also no doors - we have curtains for bedroom and bathroom doors. So basically you can't expect privacy anywhere, and you assume that someone is always listening. The nice thing is that we share the bathrooms with the guests, so they are really nice - toilet seats and everything! Having a nice bathroom was one of the best surprises, especially after using the staff bathrooms at Refugio. So we are in the loft at one end of the lodge, and below us are the guide rooms, the manager's desk/room, and the room with our climbing gear/other equipment/fridge. If you head down the main walkway, the wing with the bathrooms is on the left, and then you pass through the stretch of tourist rooms, reception and the five guest hammocks (which don't smell like mold!), and you end up in the guest dining room. There is also a bar and a little lounge area here. If you take a left at the bar you end up in the kitchen, and turning right you end up at the kitchen staff's bedrooms and the staff dining room, where we eat most of the time. Every other night or so one of us researchers eats with the tourists and their guides, and then gives a presentation afterward about the research that we are doing. But yeah, that is the entire lodge!

The next day (Saturday 11/10) was my first day of work! Every day we have the same basic work schedule, which is broken into three sections: early morning (work from 5-7am-ish), morning (work from 9am-12pm-ish), and afternoon (work from 3-5pm-ish). These are rough times which change based on the activity we are doing. (We have breakfast at 8am, lunch at 1:30pm, and dinner at 7:30pm.) The activities that we do include colpa, arrivals, census, climbing, foraging walks, nest fights, phenology, and nest observations. Colpa is where we go to the clay lick where the birds eat clay during the early morning and count the number of birds of each species that are on the clay lick every 5 minutes. For this we have to get up at 4:15am and take a boat to the island we observe from at 4:45am (this is our earliest activity). Usually we only stay an hour and a half to two hours, but we have to do ten full-day colpas a month, where one person leaves at the usual time but the other stays for 6 hours. At 11am a different person comes to take over, and they stay for 6 hours. I initially thought that job was the devil, but then I realized it's really not bad at all because you only need to pay attention for 30 seconds every 5 minutes, which means you can spend the other 4.5 minutes reading, writing in a journal, listening to music, or napping. Nest observations, which we started this past week, are the devil. We do these when a macaw egg is going to hatch - we start a couple days before we think it will hatch, and then do 3 full-days (12 hours split between 2 people) of observation after an egg hatches, followed by 2 full-days and 5 half-days (6 hours) every week. There are no breaks during nest obs - you have to stare at a nest for 6 hours and record any and all macaw activity. It seems easy, but staring at something for 6 hours is exhausting, and you can bet that even if nothing has happened for an hour, the minute you look away the birds will try and mess with you. On my first day doing nest obs I had been staring for an hour and I knew there was one macaw in the nest (because we have a camera in there). She decided to come poke her head out, and so I noted that down, and when I looked up she had moved on top of the nest, so I noted that down too. When I looked up again, there was another macaw coming out of the nest. I have no idea where that macaw came from, or at least which macaw I had seen on the camera. I really think they know we're watching them and just coordinate when to screw with us.

Anyways, all of the other activities fit into one of our three work times. Arrivals is an early morning activity which requires you to sit on the island across the river from Colpa Island (geography lesson: the colpa (clay lick) is attached to the mainland, Colpa Island is separated from the colpa by a little river and is where we observe the colpa from, and Lost Island is separated from Colpa Island by the main Tambopata River and is where we usually record arrivals from) and count the number of birds of each species flying to the colpa. You have to record the time, direction, size of the group, and number of subgroups (if any). The thing that makes this incredibly difficult is that the sun isn't up, so you can't see color on these birds - you have to identify them by flight pattern and sound. I don't know flight patterns at all, but I've got a number of bird calls down (not enough to do arrivals on my own, though). Census is an afternoon activity where you go to certain locations to listen/watch for birds for 10 minutes. The activity itself is very short, but it often requires a 40 minute walk (or even a boat ride) to get to the census point, so it ends up taking a while. Foraging walk is where you walk along a specified route to listen/watch for birds and note down if they are eating anything (and if so, what). The routes are usually pretty long, so this activity can take a couple hours. Nest fights are where you go to specific trees and watch for birds fighting over the nests. However, it's rare that you will actually see a nest fight - there either won't be any birds at a location, or there might be some in the nest who peek their heads out when you arrive. Phenology is something that our field leader, Gustavo, is mainly in charge of - he goes around to specific trees and determines if they have buttons, flowers, unripe fruit, or ripe fruit, and how many of each. We don't know the trees, or how to identify those items, so our job is to basically wander around with him and be his scribe as he tells us what he sees.

Climbing is my favorite activity - we climb trees with natural or man-made nests in them to check for eggs, and eventually to take the chicks out to weigh and measure them. The trees that we climb have small ropes strung through them that cross in front of the nest. The non-climber has to tie the end of this rope to our fat climbing rope and then pull that one over the tree (we can't leave our climbing rope in the tree because our equipment doesn't work if the rope is wet, and this is the rainforest so it's always wet). Also, pulling the rope is surprisingly difficult/tiring, which is why the climber doesn't do it. Once the climbing rope is set up and tied to a tree, the climber uses umars (sp??) to climb the rope. The top umar is attached to the harness and supports the climber's body, and the bottom umar is attached to foot holds. The umars catch on the rope and can't slide down, but they can always slide up. So the technique is to stand on the foot loops and slide the top umar up, which will then catch and hold your weight, and then you sit in the harness and pull your legs up so you can slide the bottom umar up. Now your legs are curled up, so you straighten them and stand on the foot loops and again move the top umar up. You repeat this like a hundred times and then you're at the top of the tree! It's quite tiring, but you get better over time. Before you're allowed to climb trees you have to practice climbing in the lodge - there is a practice rope that hangs next to the staircase up to our loft. But yeah, there are... maybe 30 trees with nests in them? Some we climb more frequently than others, and a few of them have cameras so we don't need to climb them. Each tree is different and has certain benefits or drawbacks - some are shorter and are easier to climb, but some of the taller ones have amazing views. Some of the nests are really easy to check, but some you have to climb to the top and then pull yourself up and over a branch - not what you want to do after just climbing 30m. Some trees have a ton of ants on them, and if the rope brings you close to the trunk you have to climb while trying to avoid rubbing into the tree. Then there are trees with bee or wasp nests in them, so you have to climb in a bee suit. Now, climbing in general is quite a workout and makes you hot and really sweaty. Climbing in a bee suit is like climbing in a sauna. You end up climbing faster because you can think of nothing else besides getting the hell out of that devilish contraption. When you do get out of it, there are seriously just rivers of sweat running down your body. None of what you are wearing will be dry by the end of a climb in a bee suit.

Let's see... oh yeah, so my first day of work I did arrivals with Carlitos in the early morning, watched Carloncho and Carlitos climb in the morning, and did census points with Carlitos in the afternoon. I think it was that day that Katharine, another researcher arrived. She had already been here a month but was using some of her days off to go renew her visa. I was pretty happy to have Katharine around because she is from England and speaks fluent English. Carloncho speaks fluent English (and German and Spanish), Carlitos speaks pretty decent English, Yessenia speaks some English, the guides speak decent English, Gustavo speaks minimal English, and I speak some Spanish, so I've been able to communicate with everyone, but I'm actually able to have a conversation with Katharine without things getting lost in translation. It turns out that she and I are leaving at the same time, so we'll be taking the same boat back to Puerto and sharing a hostel there. She was happy to have me around because for a while she thought she would be the only one here during Christmas (Carloncho left yesterday, Carlitos, Yessenia, and a lot of the staff here will be going to their homes in Puerto for Christmas, so that leaves me, Katharine, Gustavo and his girlfriend Deysi (who showed up this past week), and any guides who happen to be around at that time). Also, Katharine taught me to wait around in the morning after eating our breakfast for the tourists to finish eating their breakfast, because the leftovers get wheeled into the kitchen for us to devour like savages. For some reason the staff breakfast here always consists of rice, chicken, and other lunchy-type foods, as well as bread, and sometimes eggs and pancakes. Katharine and I can't eat rice and chicken for breakfast because it's just too heavy, but the tourists get fruit, yogurt, and cereal, so we wait around for that. If we're lucky they even have leftover bread. Actually, just a couple days ago Gustavo talked to Agusto about how we can't eat much for breakfast but are expected to climb all morning, and now suddenly they are setting aside bowls of fruit, bread, and pancakes for each of us. Hooray!

On my second day I went to the colpa with Gustavo and Yessenia. Gustavo was really good about helping me learn to identify birds - he found them all through the telescope and told me what they were, and then later he went back through and had me identify them all. That day I also watched more climbing and learned to do nest fights with Carloncho. After lunch it was super hot, so Manuel and I went to swim in the river (by swim I mean hold on to the rocks on the river bottom so you don't get carried downstream). Unfortunately no one told me that the river in the middle of the afternoon is pretty much the worst place you can be, because I got the shit eaten out of my legs by sand flies. Those things are the worst because you can't feel them biting you, but there are little drops of blood where they bite, and I had about 50 on each leg. It's one thing to try and show restraint and not scratch a mosquito bite or two, but when you have about 17 bites in 2 square inches of leg, restraint isn't even possible. Well... lesson learned.

The next day I went to the colpa again, and then Carloncho taught me how to climb! I spent the rest of the morning practicing in the lodge. In the afternoon I went to do census points with Gustavo. They were really far away, but on the walk back I saw something move in the bushes and pointed it out to Gustavo. It looked like some kind of dog, which looked back at us and growled. It (and another one) walked away from us, and then we saw that there were four babies! They were adorable and small and curious little things. Gustavo got really excited when I pointed them out and used my camera to take pictures. When we got back he pointed them out in one of the guide books and found out they were short-eared dogs, which are apparently incredibly rare. Like... it's more likely that you will see a jaguar or a puma here than a short-eared dog... and we saw a whole family! On my third day! I think everything here is pretty cool, so I was just normally excited, but when I got back and told Carlitos and some of the other guides, they were all really jealous. Carlitos has been here two years and hasn't seen a single one.

The next day (I think this is now Tuesday 11/13) I did a census with Katharine and then practiced climbing for much of the day. That was also Agusto's birthday, so Carloncho made brownies and we had a little fiesta that night (the lights stayed on past 9:30pm!!). I chatted with some American tourists and then joined Carlitos and some of the guides/staff. Turns out my Spanish is much better after a couple Cuba Libres. Eventually went to bed around midnight so I could get up a few hours later and climb my first tree!

I kept hearing how some previous researchers were scared of heights and would occasionally panic at the top of a tree, so I was concerned I wouldn't do well with the heights. But just as with the climbing in Cusco, turns out I had no problem with it. But yes, my first tree was supposed to be Angeles, but the camera turned out to be working so I didn't need to climb it. I didn't need to climb the next two either because their cameras were also working. Those were the only ones for me, Carlitos, and Gustavo to do that morning, and I was sad that all of my trees had just been stolen, so we ran ahead to steal one from Katharine, who was also climbing in the area. My first nest ended up being PVC, and there was an egg in the nest! There was also a curious macaw who came out to bite at my rope. I was relieved that I found out the night BEFORE that the birds might decide to bite at my rope, because if they started doing that without me having some notice, I bet I would've been less calm. That morning I climbed Cuba, and then later Max (which is on Colpa Island and requires a bee suit). Fortunately for me it was just before a storm, so it was kind of cool and not very sauna-like in the suit. Unfortunately, the boat took a little too long to come back and get us, so we got absolutely drenched. We could see the wall of rain making it's way down the river. The fun thing was that just before that, a capybara swam over to where we were on the edge of the island and started rolling in the mud. It was adorable! I took a video of it. That night we played lots of Jenga, and I was exhausted from my first day of real climbing, so I went to bed by like 8:45pm.

The next day I climbed Pukakuro, which has bees but according to Carloncho they never attack women (I found out a couple weeks later that this is false), so I didn't wear the suit. The macaws here are very protective of their space, though, because he said they might come out and try to bite me. This was true. I got to the top with one of them peeking down at me the whole time (kind of cute). But when I needed to go back down, every time I reached for the top umar, the bird in the nest would lean forward and try to peck my hand. It was like some kind of game  getting the macaw to lean out of the nest. I even tried moving slowly, and then the bird just moved slowly. It was fun, until the other one jumped onto the rope and started climbing down toward my umar to bite at me from above. That's when I had to get my other glove out and start waving it around to scare them off. In the afternoon I went to the colpa for 6 hours, during which time the water level rose at least a meter from rain upstream. It was crazy to see how much land disappeared from the time the boat dropped me off to when it picked me up again. That night I ate dinner with the tourists and gave the presentation. Unfortunately there was a really annoying tourist there who was pissing everyone off... including the other tourists. There was a collective sigh of relieve when he decided to not stay for the presentation. One of the really awesome things was that one of those tourists gave us some chocolate and tea bags that she had. I love friendly people!!

The day after that we all had a free day, which is unheard of. We still don't know why it happened, but we didn't dare question it. I spent most of that morning in my PJs just relaxing in hammocks. Katharine and I got evicted from the guest hammocks when some new guests arrived (apparently we are unsightly or something), so we went to sit at the bar lounge, but we got evicted from there too. We ended up sitting on the couches in front of Agusto's desk, being very bitter, and then one of the new tourists came over to chat with us, and eventually invited us to the bar with him to have drinks for his brother's birthday. Take that! No amount of evictions can stop us... when we're with tourists! These guys also said they had chocolate, and that they would definitely give us some before leaving. How do people know this is what we desperately need??

Okay, this is enough for one day, I think. Now I'm only like two weeks behind!