As I said before, the internet situation is not great. But I'm learning to manage! Turns out it's not worth it at all to do the 4-hour round-trip bus into town for an internet cafe - that internet is just as bad as ours, but they're charging you money to sit and wait as opposed to playing cards with people. Instead I'm taking advantage of my late nights doing metabolic experiments on birds to use the internet while everyone else is sleeping. It's much faster at 2am! And by "much faster", I mean I can usually load my email, I can use Facebook messenger pretty reliably, and I can upload 5 pictures to Facebook in only four hours! Hooray!
So I guess the work is a good place to start. There are three main jobs here - nest searching, mist-netting, and metabolic experiments. The mist-netting crew is meant to have lots of experience already, and our station has two very skilled mist-netters (Ian and Felicity). Currently they are out mist-netting in some other region for 20 days, so they'll be back in a week or so. Nest searching is exactly what it sounds like - you search for nests. No experience necessary, so anyone can do this. It's one of the main things that I did in Texas this past summer, but this seems more difficult here because I'm not looking for nests of a particular species, I'm looking for ANY nest. Yes, it means that any nest I find counts, but it also means that I get distracted by any species that happens to be in the area. I could just find this particularly difficult at the moment because nesting season hasn't quite begun yet, so we spend six hours nest searching every morning and most of us don't find anything. Gets a bit off-putting even after only a couple weeks. The last job is metabolics, which is actually a combination of the three jobs. Every afternoon we have to catch birds in the mist nets to use for metabolic experiments during the night, so the metabolics people have to run their own nets to catch those birds. Then one person stays up each night to run the experiments, which consists of sticking the birds (up to three) in a mini fridge and changing the temperature from 10 degrees C to 20 to 30 to 34 and recording changes in oxygen consumption, mass, and temperature. Unfortunately the data collection process is really slow (the software can only record oxygen consumption for one bird at a time), so each different temperature takes up to nearly two hours. And that doesn't include the time required to increase the temperature of the fridge, the time to take the birds out and record mass and temperature, or the time to turn everything off in the middle of the night to fill the generator up with gas again. The first night that I did metabolics we ended at 4:15am, and that was even with cutting the last hour of data collection. Tonight seems a lot better - it's looking like I'll be wrapping up around 3am with all of the data.
If it wasn't obvious, I'm on the metabolics team. I jumped at that opportunity because you get to do a little of everything! I'm learning to run a mist net, band and measure all kinds of birds, run metabolic experiments, and I get more reliable internet! What's not to love? There are three of us doing metabolics - Meaghan (American), Juliana (Colombian), and myself. We do all of our tasks on a rotation basis - tonight I'm up doing metabolics and I'll sleep in in the morning while the other two (and everyone else, really) is out nest searching. Everyone comes back for lunch, and then I'll go to open the mist nets with Meaghan, and Juliana can either come with us or nest search, but the idea is that she's back at 4pm to start getting things set up for metabolics (starting the generator, cooling the fridge, etc). Either Meaghan or I will get the birds back to the lab by 5 so Juliana can start metabolics, while the other closes the nets. Then it cycles through again. Right now it's slightly different from what I just explained because Juliana and I need more practice with getting birds out of the net. Fortunately we have Jack (Brit), who also has a lot of mist-netting experience and is helping us with the afternoon netting. Our station is unique in that our two mist-netters want to do some nest searching (typically they would only be netting all day), but Jack is eager to mist-net, so he's going to be rotating out with them (when they're back). Great for everyone! Camilo (Colombian) and Cynthia (Peruvian) are both nest searching, and Julian (Canadian) just showed up yesterday, so we don't yet know what he'll be doing in the long run. Oh, also - the afternoons are generally also when people set up nest cameras and sensors (if they found a nest in the morning) or for weighing and measuring nestlings.
The nice thing about staying up late every now and then in exchange for sleeping in is that you get some free time during the day to do laundry, take a shower, or just do whatever. And let's be honest, my first choice is usually not to shower (I think I mentioned this in my last post, but it's bad enough to mention again). In Tambopata (where I was last year) we had cold showers. That was fine because it was really warm and humid and a cold shower felt great. We were told ahead of time that we'd have cold showers here, but what they actually meant was that we'd have ice water showers, which are extraordinarily unwelcome when it's about 15 degrees C outside with no sun and a whole bunch of cold air and mist blowing in. As a result we've taken to showering every 3-4 days, or when the sun is out. It's been a long time since the sun has been out, so I braved a shower on one of my mornings when it was down to 10 degrees - absolutely miserable. Couldn't even bear to stick my head in the water, so it was just a body wash. The good thing is that the cold forces us to wear layers, so I like to think that by layering up I'm keeping the smell contained. I didn't say that it's true, but it's what I like to think. Amazing that none of us really realized that our station would be the coldest of the three - I surely thought it would be the highest station because, you know, that altitude, but apparently they have hot, sunny days because they're ABOVE the clouds, whereas we're forever trapped below them. Dang! Jack and I have our week off together and are planning on buying all kinds of warm clothes in Cusco. Also accommodations with beds, a hot shower, and fast internet. Plus we're getting pizza, bacon guacamole cheeseburgers, meat, cheese, peanut butter, and beer. And probably lots of other crap. I'm so excited!
Time to wrap up tonight's metabolic stuff - will try posting a picture sometime soon (no promises)!
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