Joining the Banding Team

Recently several people from our station left the project or moved to another station, which means that those of us remaining here have shuffled around jobs a bit. Actually, I'm the one with the biggest change - I moved from the metabolics team to the banding team, which is actually what I wanted to do in the first place! Now, instead of just netting in the afternoons to catch birds for metabolics, I do 8 hours of netting every day starting at dawn.

Here is how the netting is organized - there are 11 net sites at San Pedro, and each site has 10 mist nets. The banding team spends 3 days (8 hrs per day) at each site banding and recording all birds that get caught in the nets. After a site is finished (which may take longer than 3 days if it rains), the nets are taken down and moved to the next site. It usually takes a full day to move the nets because you have to find suitable straight paths for the nets to go, and then hack out the vegetation with a machete. So with the day to move nets, 3 days of banding, plus extra for rain delay, it takes about a week per site. Before I joined, the banding team had completed 7 of the 11 sites, meaning that I get to help out with 4! Today was our (Jack is the other person on the team) last day at the 2nd of the 4 sites, and the last 2 sites are far enough away to require us to camp at them. So, tomorrow we'll take down our nets and pack up our gear for a camping trip! We won't leave until Wednesday, though. The nice thing about these camping sites is that we don't delay for rain, so if it turns out that it rains for 1 of the 3 banding days, too bad - we only band for 2 days. I only say that that is nice because we have to hike up with all of our food, so we've got a limited time to get the work done unless we want to hike back down to restock, which neither of us fancies.

Since these first two sites have been fairly close to camp, we've been waking up at 4:15 to eat, pack, hike, and have the nets open by 5:15ish. after opening the nets, we go around and check them for birds every 30 minutes (not so often that you scare birds off, but often enough that they aren't stuck for ages). The morning is usually the busiest time since that's when birds are most active. I think we've gotten as many as 6 or 8 in one round of checking, which isn't a huge number, but we have to band, measure, and collect samples from everything in time to check the nets again in 30 minutes. On a REALLY busy morning, one person will keep processing birds while the other checks all 10 nets (instead of splitting it 5 and 5). Usually only the morning of the first day is really busy because the birds haven't learned where all the nets are. It's nice when things slow down to only 2 or 3 birds per check because it's plenty of time to process the birds without feeling rushed. However, it's quite boring when you go a couple hours without catching anything.

The cool thing about being on the banding team is that I'm getting more experience extracting birds from mist nets, banding them, describing molt patterns, and taking samples. The descriptions of molt are certainly more indepth than anything from metabolics banding, mostly because I'm now working with someone with a lot of experience who can teach me new things and point out interesting patterns. The samples are completely new. During our first day of banding training back in August we learned to take feather and ectoparasite samples, but we never continued doing that in metabolics banding. Now, however, we take tail and breast feather samples from every bird and collect ectoparasite samples from some birds (by rubbing a special powder into the bird's feathers and collecting parasites that fall off). The new one is blood! Jack taught me to collect blood samples from birds, which is actually really cool. It turns out that I'm pretty decent at it, and since Jack prefers collecting the ectoparasite samples, I'm the one that collects most of the blood samples. Yay, experience!

Apparently I joined the team at just the right time because these first two sites were the best ones they've had yet. We caught nearly 70 birds at the first site and over 50 at the second. Plus, they included some really awesome catches, including a chestnut-tipped toucanet, band-tailed fruiteater, plushcap, black-streaked puffbird (so puffy!), and tons of others. Those names obviously don't mean as much without pictures, so I'll post pics when I return to Cusco (in one month). These next two camping sites should be awesome as well because they are at an elevation of 2000m, which is 600m higher than our station (400m higher than the site we just finished). That means we should hopefully get some species with higher ranges that we don't normally see down below. Who knows what we'll catch! It should be a fun trip. :)

The Crappiest of Days

I know I haven’t *really* updated this thing in ages, but I also can’t think about one thing to write extensively about, so this is going to be a couple random things.

During metabolics, we have to take bird temperatures after they’ve been “cooking” at 10 and 34 degrees C (with 20 and 30 degrees thrown in there as well). To do this, we stick a little thermometer up their butt. They don’t seem to like that. Some birds wriggle the entire time while others are paralyzed with fear. (Don’t worry – the thermometer doesn’t hurt them and they are fine afterward.) Of course, some of them like to get back at us for shoving things up their butt by waiting until the best (worst) time to decide to poop. They just sat in a nice little box lined with paper for over an hour, but a number of them decide that they have to go right when the thermometer starts going in. With smaller birds it’s not really a big deal – you get some poop on your hand. It’s the bigger ones that are more terrifying. For instance, one night I had a motmot in metabolics. Motmots are … as big as a breadbox, if you ignore the tail. Maybe marginally smaller? (I’ve forgotten how big loaves of bread are.) Anyways, with bigger birds, they’re not just squeezing out a tiny little turd into your hand… it’s a big one. And they seem to expel it from their bodies with much more force than the little birds. So when I stuck the thermometer up the motmot’s butt right when he decided to drop a deuce, it was like sticking my thumb over a garden hose. I had motmot shit on my forehead, glasses, hand, knee, and the floor. The person who was standing next to me to get her first ever look at a motmot actually took several steps back while saying, “oh jesus”. I would be mad at the motmot, but considering I was keeping it trapped in a box all night and shoving things up his butt, pooping on me was pretty much his only defensive mechanism. I should also say that that was not the first bird to poop on my face, and it probably won’t be the last.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, so I was pretty excited to dress up this year. I told people weeks in advance that there would be a costume contest and that they should start planning how to use jungle materials. It turns out that I would be the only contestant. For several days I made mental notes of where certain types and colors of leaves were, which types of grasses were best to use as string, and what tools I would need to construct my Scaly-Naped Parrot masterpiece (I had to get the details right because I’m working with bird-people!). The morning of the 31st I spent several hours gathering materials and weaving everything together so that it was … as perfect as perfect can be when you’re in the jungle and weaving leaves together with more leaves. In other words, it was awesome. It didn’t matter that no one else dressed up because, let’s be honest, they would’ve come in second (in my completely unbiased opinion). That day the lodge staff invited us to have lunch with them, and then to play volleyball. Unfortunately I couldn’t really play, given the wings and all, so I was a designated cheerleader. By that point most everyone was used to the fact that I was dressed up as a parrot for the day… except Senior Demetrio, the guy who lives next to the field we were playing on. He walked past me a couple times and just stared, but kept on walking. I sat on a stool on the sidelines (couldn’t sit on the ground because of the tail) and took pictures and whatnot, until it started raining. We all went to take cover in Senior Demetrio’s place, but there were nearly 15 of us so it was a tight squeeze. That is, 14 people and 1 parrot. Senior Demetrio – and now his wife, too – was still staring at me. When my tail bent funny as I tried to sit on my stool, he asked someone next to him (in Spanish) why I looked like that. I responded enthusiastically that it was my “clothes for Halloween”! One of the Peruvian lodge employees explained that Halloween is really only celebrated in big cities like Cusco and Lima, and usually only the children dress up. Whaaat?! I’d like to think that I brought some culture down the Manu Road that day. That, or I’m just the crazy white girl who wore green long johns and covered herself in leaves.

More later!