Mishana - Part I

Sorry that I only did one update last break! I got a little distracted because I found out that my family's plans for Thanksgiving were probably going to be cancelled. That was the main reason I was leaving Peru on November 20th, so when I heard the news, I decided that it would be more valuable for me to stay in Peru longer. So instead of heading home on November 20th, I'll be leaving on December 9th. It's quite an expense to change my flight ticket (damn American Airlines) and I'll be missing out on Thanksgiving with my family, but I feel like more experience I gain on this trip, the better. Now I will be at the last field site for a good 3 weeks instead of just 1 week, and I'll be able to go with some of the other volunteers to Cuzco and visit Machu Picchu! I am so pumped. The job technically ends somewhere between the 9th and the 12th, depending on the weather once the rainy season starts, but I am leaving a little early so I can travel and also start working at a chocolate store upon my return to the states. I have a job lined up at Teuscher through connections - thanks Jenny!

I didn't really do an update about the field at San Martin because it's all pretty standard at this point, and we didn't catch many "cool" birds at that site. We caught a ton of really interesting birds in Mishana though!

Mishana is a river community on the Nanay, and takes about 3-4 hours by boat to get there from Iquitos. It's right on the water, so we didn't have to do any hour-long hikes this time with our gear. Normally Judit and her crew stay in the community house, but right now in Mishana there is a lot of construction going on because they are adding sidewalks. Oh and when I'm talking about these small communities, I mean really really small! San Martin had maybe a dozen or so families, but Mishana is a little bigger. The sidewalks are for walking - no cars or motorcycles or even bikes in these tiny villages. Mishana actually has a "store" which is just a family who sells some stuff out of their house, but it was very exciting for us because sometimes they had beer. :)

Anyways, because of the construction the community house was full of constructions workers. So we ended up staying at an ayahuasca lodge on the edge of the village. Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic plant brew concocted by shamans that has a lot of history in Amazonian tribes, and is suppose to invoke huge spiritual revelations and stuff. I'm pretty sure Anthony Bourdain tried it in his Peru episode. The downside is that it makes you vomit and the leaders put you on a strict diet with many rules (no sex!). We were able to stay at the lodge because there was no one there at the time. It was SUPER luxurious for us - toilets (that flushed), sinks in the bathrooms, a kitchen area with a sink, common area with a dining table and chairs, roofs - everything!

Tent city - we crammed 13 tents onto this platform!

Our meals usually consist of rice and lentils, or rice and beans, or rice and different beans...

We had a common area! For hanging out!

We were a little separated from the center of this community, so we didn't interact with them quite as much as the last sites. We also had a few issues with them, like some of our things getting stolen. Despite the issues, though, it was a really nice place to stay at though. Bathing in the river was really nice at the end of the day, and we caught a lot of really neat birds in the forest here. I was sad to leave!

On the way to the forest trails.

San Martin - Village Life

I can't believe we've already finished with 3 field sites! Time flies in the field.

On the break in between Nueva Esperanza and San Martin, some of us decided to go to a butterfly place, a mariposario, a little ways down the Nanay River. It actually turned out to also be a rescue/rehabilitation center for any rainforest animals that have been confiscated by the Peruvian police,  so we got to see a lot of interesting animals, like a coati, capybara, ocelot, jaguar, and many species of monkeys, including some endangered species and pygmy marmosets! Unfortunately, I forgot my camera that day, so I'll have to steal some pictures from someone else and upload them later.

San Martin is a community on the Nanay River. We drove to a port about 40 minutes away, and then took a 2 hour boat ride down the river. In this community Judit and her crew usually stays in the schoolhouse because the town is small and they only use like 2 of the 4 rooms. However, when we arrived we found out that the teacher had locked the doors of the school house and left for an indefinite period of time, so the children of the community hadn't had school for a long time.

We stayed in the two rooms to the left!

One of the village's families lives right next to the schoolhouse and have become very close with Judit over the years (this is her fourth year doing fieldwork). So close, in fact, that last year when the mother had her 6th baby, she named it Judit! As such, the children would constantly hang around whoever was on their day off and would get very excited when the rest of the crew got home that day. It was fun to hang out with them and most of us got pretty close to them. I left the older girls some of my clothes when I left, and their only son, Pablo (Pablito to us!) is the one who scaled the sides of the schoolhouse to open the doors from inside for us.

Cesi, Silvana, Elizabet, Pablo, and Mima, I think...

I think this is how you are supposed to pose in Peru

Pablito and baby Judit!

Baby Judit and mama!

Our crew split up into each room, and we stored gear in one room and food/kitchen utilities in the other. Judit bought a small portable burner so we could make hot water at our leisure (we drink a LOT of coffee/hot chocolate in the field, it's kind of ridiculous). It's always nice to stay under a roof because then you don't have to worry about the rain as much, although the windows in the school building did not have glass. Most of the houses actually did not have walls, they were just open platforms.

There was some drama in the beginning because the boss of the park reserve has been spreading nasty rumors about Judit for reasons unknown (and denied every time Judit talks to him), so the president of San Martin told the villagers that Judit had to pay a 150 soles fine for any birds we killed in the net, and that she had to pay a villager to accompany us everyday to monitor our activities and make sure we were researching in the appropriate areas with the correct number of nets and not doing anything harmful to the forest. Which is ironic considering that the villagers themselves often exploit the rainforest unsustainably (e.g. cutting down the largest trees to sell for lumber). In any case, we were forced to pay a "vigilante" to accompany us on the days we opened nets. Most of the villagers didn't really care and weren't very interested in this job - we only paid them 20 soles for a full day (10 soles on the half days), and it was a huge waste of their time. They usually just sat around, bored, while we worked and sometimes also sat around, bored, for 10 hours. It's not in the villagers' best interest to be unkind to us, because we leave them things and Judit hires the women of the village to cook for us, so she's bringing in a source of income. One of the men, though, was kind of a dick about it and argued more fiercely when we had the discussion about the vigilantes. He is also one of the villagers we found out was illegally logging in the forest, and we saw a puma and ocelot pelt (that he illegally hunted) in his giant house which also has a satellite dish (probably bought with his logging profits). He's called was Don Rafael, but we called him Don Asshole.

For some reason this looks wrong to me...

Anyways, other than that awkwardness, life in the village was nice. The schoolhouse had toilets we could use (they don't have seats and you flush them by pouring a bucket of water into the bowl, which didn't always work so well...) and next to the schoolhouse was an outdoor pump where we got our drinking water and bathed.

While we were in the village, we met two men from Spain who were working with the sweat bees here. They were transferring colonies of honey-producing bees to boxes that they made so that the families here could produce and sell honey, as part of a community service-type thing. We got to watch the process, which is very interesting because nobody really studies these wild bees. Luckily they didn't sting. They honey they produce is really unique-flavored - the first hive's honey was a mixture of sweet, spicy, fruity, and a little tangy. The second hive was a different species of bee, and their honey tasted a little more like the honey we are used to, but still a tiny bit spicy.

They put the main hive part in these boxes, and then put wax and honeycomb in other layers stacked on top.

There was also some personal drama going on among the volunteers, as certain people are starting to not get along as well. It hasn't affected me personally (I like everyone here!) but it has been causing some strife among the group, which is unfortunate. Despite this, we have been getting really close with each other and are like a little family. The last few days at San Martin we started to lie around and make shadow puppets after dinner with our headlamps, and we have a lot of (nerdy) bird-related inside jokes. I'm going to miss these people a lot when I'm gone!

This was actually from back between Km28 and Nueva Esperanza - photo by Oona.

Nueva Esperanza - Part II

Ok, here is my second post about Nueva Esperanza, as promised!

I felt like the conditions at this field site were rougher, but it was probably just because I wasn't on the platform so my tent got a lot dirtier. The bathing site here was really nice though. We had to walk down a trail a little ways to get to a stream, but it was really pretty and deeper than the last stream. No buckets necessary! Also, since the net-lines at this site were a little closer, at the end of the day we usually returned with just enough time left to bathe while it was still light out.

Our bathing stream!

I talked about one cool bird that I got to see, the motmot. But that same day, the other net-line caught even more cool things! First they caught two Flame-crested Tanagers, which aren't quite as vibrant as other tanagers (such as the Paradise Tanagers that I didn't get to see, also). And later in the day they caught a Royal Flycatcher! I'm super jealous of this one - the royal flycatcher this big, extravagant red crest and, when caught, does this weird thing where it opens its crest and mouth really wide and slowly turns its head back and forth, to scare away predators. It looks kind of like a slow, confused, drunk bird with its mouth wide open. It's pretty ridiculous.

Photos courtesy of Angie!

Its crest looks much sadder than usual because it was raining that day.

We also saw interesting wildlife up close this time, too. One day we found a squirrel really tangled in the net and we had to get him out. He actually bit one of the girls before I managed to untangle him. Squirrels get caught in the net every once in a while, and sometimes you can just bounce them out if they aren't too tangled, but this time was much harder.

One day at the other net line (not where I was), they found a bushmaster! Bushmasters are one of the most dangerous vipers - my professor from Ecuador, Kelly, once said that he would rather walk on top of an anaconda than walk past a bushmaster, because they are so unpredictable.

Bushmaster! These photos are from Eileen

They also caught a bat in the other net-line that same morning! I was very jealous! But unfortunately I've forgotten all my bat knowledge so I can't really identify this little guy, other than that he is in the family Phyllostomidae (Leaf-nose bats).

D'awwww

Since we were in a community this time, we had some interactions with the locals. One night they were having a fiesta celebrating the 25th anniversary of the village (I think) and so they invited us over. It was a little awkward, but we got to try a local alcohol that was made with like egg whites or something. It was actually pretty good. Once when it was my day off, the senoras offered us chicha, which is another liquor they make using fruit, which was also good. None of us got to try the infamous yuca beer that village ladies make by chewing up the yuca and spitting it back out (Anthony Bourdain had it when he went to Peru or Ecuador or one of those), but apparently we may get to try it at one of the other communities. If they offer it to you, you cannot refuse because that would be incredibly rude, and it's supposed to be really sour. 

Our last day we went to the school house and did an activity with the children of the community. We brought them color-by-number pictures of birds and colored pencils and taught them about the importance of the birds here. Even if we couldn't speak much Spanish, it was still fun. The children are very neat and precise all the time (they color very carefully) - maybe it's a result of growing up in such poverty, where they don't waste anything. We took a lot of pictures and did a lot of coloring! I didn't know that this would be an aspect of our work in Peru, but I'm happy it is! :]

I worked with this little girl for most of the morning - her name was Laura!

Ok so I will be leaving for our next site, San Martin, in about an hour and a half. Hooray! I will be returning on the 14th of October! See you all then!

Nueva Esperanza - Part I

Yesterday I returned from the second field site! I already uploaded pictures - the reason why I don't put a lot of pictures on this blog is because most people who are reading this can see the pictures on my Facebook anyways, so I don't want to be redundant and repost them all here, too.

Nueva Esperanza is a small, poor community 22 kilometers from Iquitos. Like I said before, from the road to Iquitos, you have to hike an hour down a trail to get to the community and the building where we stayed. Judit usually hires men from the village to meet us at the road and help us carry our gear and food, so we are just responsible for carrying our own backpacks. This year, however, apparently the people who Judit told never passed on the message, so no one showed up when they arrived and they had to carry most of it in two trips!  I feel like miscommunications like this are pretty typical here.

The new volunteer and I arrived 3 days later. Since we didn't have to help with the gear and only had to bring our own backpacks, the hike wasn't too bad. We were staying on a smallish piece of land with a single building on it. We stored our gear and food inside the building, but the thatched roof leaked in many places when it rained. There was a small platform in front where we would hang out, eat dinner, and leave our backpacks and various belongings, and an outdoor "kitchen" on the side - just an elevated fire pit, a shelf and a table. Judit hired señoras from the village to come and cook lunch and dinner for us everyday. Sometimes they would bring their children with them, and sometimes they would sell us things like fruit and fish, so we had fish for dinner two nights! They were little fish that you had to pick all the bones out of, but it was worth it after so many nights of rice and beans.

Hanging out on the last day

Like the last site, we had 4 net-lines to run here. Since there were 14 of us though, including Judit, we easily could run 2 of them simultaneously in 4 days - 1 day of set up and 3 days of netting. That means we really only had 8 days of work this time, so we had a day off on Sean's birthday (cake, alcohol, and dancing with headlamps) and the day before we left (I think they also had a day off the first day, but I wasn't there yet!). We would have 2 people stay behind to guard our stuff, fetch water, tell the señoras what to prepare for meals, and hike out the lunches to the netlines. That left 6 people for each netline, but two of the Colombians are working on their thesis projects for university, so they would help but would be doing their own thing most of the time. Having 5 people on each netline is plenty, though, so I feel like things went pretty smoothly the whole time.

We caught of lot of really cool birds here! I don't have pictures of most of them because I was always at the other netline (unlucky!) that day, but I did get to see one really cool one I was excited about: Momotus momota, or the Blue-crowned Motmot!

Serrated bill!

Beautiful colors!

Racket-tail!

Motmots are very bright, cool-looking birds. With a lot of the species, the barbs on the middle tail feathers fall off to make the racket-shape you see there. It's said that when they are nervous, they twitch their tails back and forth, kind of like a pendulum.

I'm going to try and steal pictures of the other cool things we saw, so stay tuned!

Schedule and Updates

I forgot to give you guys my (tentative) schedule, from Judit:

August 25 - enter the field

25 August - 13 Sept  --> km 28

16 Sept - 27 Sept --> Nueva Esperanza

1 Oct - 14 Oct --> San Martin

18 Oct - 1 Nov --> Mishana

Here there is conference between 5-10 Nov, we will discuss how to proceed

12 Nov - 9 Dec --> Yuto/Porvenir (this is tentative)

So the days I'm not in the field, I will be back in Iquitos, with internet! I fully expect to have emails and comments waiting for me and to see you all on Skype on those days! :D

You maybe be wondering why I am posting on September 18 when the schedule says I should be in Nueva Esperanza right now. That is because the day we were supposed to leave, I got quite sick - I couldn't hold down water. :[ This site is also the most challenging to get to, since the site is a one-hour hike from the road we get dropped off at, so it was decided that I should stay and rest a few days. So I will go to the field tomorrow with a new volunteer who is arriving today.

This trip is quite short, so I will be back in a little over a week! I'm also not sure what I'll be doing for the last trip, because I am leaving Peru on November 20th. We will see!

Kilometro 28

I talked a little bit about Kilometro 28 in a previous post, but here's a little more about life in the field!

We had to bring all the food we'd need for the time with us. As you can imagine, for 9-13 for 20 days, this was quite a bit of food. Since this site was so close to Iquitos and Judit had to go back halfway to pick up Eileen anyways, she brought some more food back then. But at the other sites I don't think we'll have that option. At then end, any leftover fresh food or opened packages we left for the park guards who were hosting us. We would also share our leftovers with them if we had any.

Right when we get up, we don't really have time for breakfast, so we just have some coffee or hot chocolate and oatmeal and/or crackers. Once we get to the field and the morning rush of birds is over (they want breakfast too!) we have a "real breakfast" of yogurt, fruit (bananas or oranges) and bread or crackers with a spread. We won't be able to have bread at the next field site(s?) because it isn't as readily available, and the bread goes bad after a few days in the hot and humid conditions. On the few days when we didn't have to get up super early (set up days, group days off) we would make pancakes or eggs for breakfast.

As I said before, we took turns cooking dinner for the group. I found cooking for 10+ people with ingredients I don't normally use super stressful, since most people turned out to be very good at cooking and every meal was quite yummy, so I felt like the standards were high. However, this was the only field site we had to do this for - at all other field sites we hire the locals to cook for us. Usually we cooked rice with some type of legume (beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc.) or pasta, and almost always had a salad on the side. One unique salad that's popular here is Ensalada Ruso (Russian salad) - cooked carrots, potatoes, and beets, cut into cubes and mixed with a mayo/vinegar/sugar dressing. It's actually really good. Stir-fry was pretty easy to make, and once in a while we made quinoa. Some people got really creative - we had some yummy things like tuna cakes, lentil burgers, sweet potato fries, potato fritatas, and once Phebe made a "Chinese roti" (Indian bread?).

Phebe's bread creation!

We bathed in a nearby stream. I think this site is supposed to have the hardest bathing conditions too, because the stream is really really small and shallow (like a foot deep) which means you have to use a bucket to dump the water all over yourself, lather up, and then bucket-rinse. However, the park guards used this water as their drinking water too, so we couldn't rinse right in the stream, we had to rinse on the shore to prevent the soap residue from contaminating their water. It wasn't very fun. And since we usually come back when it's already dark, we have to do this all by the light of our headlamps, with mosquitos!

This was our shower for 3 weeks. No joke.

One thing I learned about myself is that I don't really have any qualms about being completely naked in front of a bunch of strangers in this sort of situation, including the guys (but more at night, in broad daylight it was slightly more awkward). Interestingly, it was the guys who were way more awkward about being naked and being around us when we were naked. Go figure. They never took off their shorts when they bathed and were always like "are you guys naked down there? we can come back later!" It was pretty funny.

The stream is also where we did our laundry. The water here was very soft (or hard? I don't know the difference) so it was nearly impossible to get all the soap out. It just stuck to everything, even our skin when we were bathing. 

At this site we had an outhouse/latrine. It's not really that bad, it's basically like a wooden port-a-potty... that is never emptied. I think some of the other sites will be similar, while others will actually have toilets that you flush by pouring a bucket of water in it.

The Birds

So although I've explained that I am here in Peru to study birds, I haven't really explained how we go about doing so. The majority of what we do in the field is called "constant-effort mist-netting." This mean that we set up mist nets in specific locations and leave them there for a certain amount of time, and process whatever birds we happen to capture in them. As you can guess, this means that we rarely catch canopy birds that spend most of their time at high altitudes (like macaws and hawks). There are other types of mist-netting, including "target netting," which we haven't done yet but we may do in the future. Target netting involves identifying where a target species or a specific bird is and bringing a net to that area to try and capture that bird. Since I haven't ever seen this I'm not really sure how effective it is.

Birds obviously get really stressed out when caught in the nets and being handled by humans, so we do net checks every 20-40 minutes, depending on the weather conditions (more often if it is sunny, really hot, or raining). Detangling birds from nets is very similar to detangling bats, in my opinion. I think it might even be trickier because birds tend to clutch at the nets with their claws, so once you free their legs, if you happen to let them go (this happens to me all the time) they will just tangle themselves up again.

Once the bird is freed, we stick it into a small cloth bag (less likely for them to escape and much more calming for them) and bring it back to the banding station, which is always located a little ways away from the nets so we don't scare away the birds. Then the bird is processed! The first thing we do is band the birds on their legs. All birds get aluminum metal bands on their tarsus. Some birds also get color bands too, although this depends on the bird and the species. We don't color band birds if we can't tell whether they are juvenile or adult (with many species there is no way to tell), or if they never perch in such a way that we would be able to see the bands (certain types of woodcreepers).

One of the first days - I am probably confused.

Second, we cover the bird in an ectoparasite powder to remove all their ectoparasites for analysis. Then we take a lot of data from each individual. We quantify the amount of muscle, fat, molt and feather wear, whether they have a brood patch or cloacal protuberance, take measurements of their culmen, gape, and tarsus, record the colors of the eye, the skin around the eye, and the tarsus, and take their weight, a photo, and blood sample. As you can tell, this takes a while, especially when you are first learning! It's also easy to let a bird escape (even Judit does it sometimes), so you have to pay attention the whole time. Sometimes the birds get really tired or stressed when being handled, so you just collect as much information as you think is safe (probably no blood sample) and let the bird go. We've had an unfortunately large number of bird deaths so far this year. :[

We catch quite a few hummingbirds (maybe 1-2 a day at the last site), which get a little bit different treatment because they are more frail and have basically no tarsus. Instead of banding them, we clip one of their tail-feathers at a diagonal to show that it is a recapture for the future. We also don't take blood or ectoparasite samples from them. I like the hummingbirds a lot, they are very cute, but they escape easily because they are so quick!

If we recapture a bird that we have just banded at that site (from the same day to two days before), we just double-check that we have all the information and let it go. If we recapture a bird from a previous year, we process it fully. Some birds learn very quickly about the nets, and once they are captured you never see them again. But other birds aren't so lucky (or smart) - at least once we caught the same bird 3 times in one day.

I'll update the name of this one later!

This one also!

Saffron-crested Tyrant-Manakin (Neopelma chrysocephalum) - one of our focal species!