A really long bicycle ride...

Sometimes it's easier to break a large undertaking into smaller pieces.  With that in mind, I went for spins on the bike between snacks, slugged against headwinds and sailed with tailwinds one pedal stroke at a time, inched over mountain passes, coasted the downhills, and eventually bicycled 740 miles, from Sedro-Woolley, Washington, USA to Jasper, Alberta, Canada.

Le Tour!

I went east on Hwy 20, but this was a more scenic road sign.

There were parts of the trip where I broke even the smaller pieces into pieces: climbing over Washington Pass (this was grueling!), a very wet, cold morning on the way to Golden, BC, and possibly the last 20 miles of every day.  But all things considered, I was very lucky.  Beautiful weather filled most days.  I caught the tail-end of peach season in the Okanogan, and the beginning of the really vibrant fall colors on the Icefields Parkway.  My lovely bike suffered only two mechanical issues; 1) a flat tire, which leaked slowly during my rest day until I found it and repaired it before starting out again, and 2) split-open cable housing of my front derailleur, which led to pedaling in my little chainring for about 60 miles until I reached Revelstoke.

Trans-Canada Highway sign in Field, BC.

And though the loneliness of a two-week, solo tour left me positive I'd prefer company on future trips, some things made it more manageable.  The people I met along the way were generous, friendly, encouraging, and full of stories.  More than once I was treated to coffee or food.  Hearing the stories of other peoples' adventures was inspiring, and often made my own feel pretty tame.  Surely the positive reactions I got had a lot to do with being alone.  I could watch the mountains getting closer, let my mind really wander, and sometimes just listen.  The ability to check email at cafes, public rest stops and (crazy!) at some campgrounds for the majority of the trip, also added to the relative ease of keeping in touch.  Little things along the way made me feel looked-out for, too.

Technologically, I toured like Mr. Gadget.  So that I could check email and read without carrying books, I brought a kindle (thank you, Mom!).  My newest addition to the touring gear collection was a set of front panniers (thank you, Andrew!) which proved to be really wonderful.  And maybe the most tech-dorky of all, was a Spot satellite messenger loaned to me (thank you, Dad!) that sent GPS fixes of my location almost every 15 minutes for the duration of the trip.  This made me feel like Truman, but small price to pay, I suppose.  How lucky am I to be able to do this?!

I plan to break the two week trip up into three posts (and hopefully I'll really do it!!):

1) Washington State

2) Canadian border to Field, BC

3) Field, BC to Jasper, AB via the Icefields Parkway

Sunwapta Pass along the Icefields Parkway.  Jasper National Park.  

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

 -Ernest Hemingway

It's a new year, and if I can manage three posts I'll have tied my blog efforts for 2011.  Originally I'd hoped to use this as a better means of keeping in touch with friends and family, or at least share some adventures, but let's face it...I'm just not a good blogger.

So instead of an eyeful of rambling, here are some nice pictures from the latter half of '11...

Bigleaf Maple in the other, temperate, rainforest.  Olympic National Park, WA.

Mt. St. Helens and Spirit Lake from a hike on Johnson Ridge.

Alpine Lake.  Sawtooth Wilderness, ID.

More Sawtooths!

Kirkham Hot Springs, ID.

Stanley, ID.

Star-gazing from Lucky Peak, home of the Idaho Bird Observatory.  Boise, ID.

Because you never know when you might need a canoe...

Like here:  Crater Lake, OR.

Kayak camping trip in the Puget Sound.

Rainy work in the old growth.

The Olympic mountains along Hood Canal, WA.

We have the pleasure of catering for Starkey's tame elk heard.  Near LaGrande, OR. 

Some real sweeties!

Yellowstone National Park in December:  

The road warrior.

Of course.....

....Old Faithful.  

Eva named him Bob, because he looked kind of Rasta.

I can only hope that, like last year, 2012 will keep me too distracted by adventures to be a prolific blogger.  I'm amazed by the people I know who manage both!  

Best wishes to you all! (:

Little Hermit Hummingbirds: What are you doooing?

"Sarah Paaaalin!  Sarah Paaaalin!"  Squealing his song, MBA (Mauve-Blue-Azul) perches in his territory on lek six.  Like other Little Hermit Hummingbirds, his song perch is less than two feet off the ground.  Save for a yellow gape (the inside of his bill) and the white tips of his tail feathers, which he bobs incessantly, he blends with the forest.  Up close, Little Hermits have a subdued beauty; slightly iridescent green-brown feathers, a dark brown mask over the eye, and a long diamond-shaped tail.  From afar, the details fade.  And though definitely still beautiful, something about the hunched posture, decurved bill, and drab coloration brews a jizz that's more adorably grumpy than anything. If he's average, he weighs around 2.5 to 3 grams...about the same as a US penny.

VRN (maybe).  First capture of the season and main subject of a fantastical windchime/desert/aquatic hummingbird dream.

MBA's neighbor to the south, OAP (Orange-Azul-Purple), is visually identical (in our eyes), but he's singing "You'readouchebag!  You'readouchebag!", a sped up version of MBA's song.  Note:  most of the dialects had already been given mnemonics during previous field seasons, I just thought this pair was an amusing example.  On other leks ( a lek is an area where the males of a species go to display and/or sing for the females) and within leks, groups of hermits are singing very different dialects.  Julian would do a better job at explaining this, but here goes.  This song business is an energy expensive endeavor.  Energy expensive on an individual basis because males will spend a great deal of their youth learning to sing, practicing on and off the lek, then establishing a territory, either by taking over a pre-existing one or by setting up shop on the outskirts of a lek, and then maintaining their tiny kingdom through adulthood.  As adults, they are seemingly bound to the lek;  breaking for food and nighttime roosting, but otherwise devoting most of the daylight hours during the breeding season to their manly Hermit duties.  Evolutionarily, song-learning is costly because of the sheer amount of brain structure needed to be developed and devoted to that arena.  All this from a bird in a taxonomic order not known for its singing prowess!  

Back tag:  Affixed with crazy glue, and created with melted down pearler beads and our superb crafting skills.  This one RYP (Red-Yellow-Purple).  Photo taken by Julian Kapoor.

Another bird from the ridge lek.  A lot went into catching these ridge birds, including a mostly in the dark hike up to a cloud forest, overnight camp, and scramble down the next night.  Awesome!  Photo taken by Julian Kapoor.

Julian's Ph. D. work with the Little Hermit, the reason Rachel and I are in Trinidad, is an attempt at deducing 'why?'.  What's the point of different groups of the same species, on the same lek, singing different songs?  Are they imitating a dominant male of that song group?  Is it kinship based?  Are certain song characteristics inherently more attractive to females?  Could it be due to the nature of sound itself...traveling and reverberating differently in varying environments?  To answer these questions, he's doing a number of things.  The information we gather during the field season falls into three main categories:   Behavioral observations, genetic sampling, and audio recording.

The nitty-gritty of all this means there's a lot of work to do, especially with the genetic sampling category.  We need to catch every male from at least five different leks on the field site.  Some kept their tags and therefore already have had samples taken for genetics.  Those guys are home free.  We sample at a number of other leks farther from the main site too, but they have slightly lower priority.  Each of the males that we capture are fitted with a colored back tag and a leg tag attached to a uniquely numbered band.  The back tag generally falls off by the end of the season as the bird molts, but is very useful for identifying flying birds.  The leg tag will hopefully stay for future seasons, though sometimes is rendered unreadable due to fading, or dirt or cobwebs.  For genetic analysis, Julian plucks a few pin feathers or collects a drop of blood from the bird's foot.

An individually created, 5.1mm long, numbered hummingbird band (on my middle finger).  

So that's all for the male hermits...what about the ladies?  One of the main things we focused on this season was attempting to radio-tag females in order to look at the feasibility of tracking them back to nests (more on radio tagging later!!) They don't visit the lek frequently enough to catch them there, like the males, so we spend a surprising amount of time watching for foragers.  Thats a short way of saying we go back to places we've heard or seen hermits, or even just go to patches of the species of flowers that they like....and wait.  Little hermits are 'trapline' feeders, i.e. they follow the same foraging route repeatedly, sometimes even visiting the exact same flower, throughout the course of the day or week, or longer.  If we see a bird foraging on one of our watches, there's a good chance it will be back within an hour.  Catching birds this way is HARD.  And our criteria is very specific.  Ideally we want adult, actively nesting, females.  Using bill striations, the adult thing isn't difficult to figure out.  Determining sex is trickier.  There is slight sexual dimorphism, with females weighing a bit more and also usually having a thicker tarsus than males.  Supposedly the male sports a darker 'goatee' but this wasn't something I could really see.  We rely heavily on the process of elimination.  If all of the adult male birds in our study area have been color-tagged...who's left?  The last thing, 'actively nesting', is mostly a cross-your-fingers sort of deal.

Behavioral observations, although they comprised the bulk of our time, are simpler to explain.  In order to figure out how much time birds are spending on the lek, and what they're doing during this time, we watch and record everything.  There's more to it than that, but this is already getting bulky (high fives and wow(!) to those still reading).  Plus, I'm thinking of doing a (slightly risqué) post on the one copulation I saw, during a watch, so that would pretty much cover that...  Lastly is audio recording data.  Over the course of the season we record every bird on our three core leks.  On the other leks, we try to get at least one recording from each song group.  Sometimes recording is quick and easy, and other times it's painfully slow and fraught with equipment woes.  Elaborations to come!

"God is a Trini and She will take care of you"

Every night in Trinidad, we sweep the termite dust off our beds, tend to the previous day's crop of chigger and mosquito bites, and stretch out on twin-size foam mattresses.  Fireflies ease into the house through open spaces; the shutters and gaps between a corrugated steel roof and earth/straw walls, then drone around in the rafters.  Most nights I sleep well.  Well enough to not wake up to tropical screech owls flying around and calling inside the house, but not well enough to sleep through a toppling Rachel.

Morning, and the 'pwooof' of gas igniting starts the day.  Julian's usually up first, boiling a pot of water for tea and milk-making.  Rachel follows, doing a bit of yoga to wake up.  If I'm not rolling around (under the guise of yoga) by then, her more ambitious poses are a good back-up alarm.  Our mattresses are side by side, and balancing at 5:15am with stiff and sore bodies is quite a feat.  Then we start the kitchen dance...probably the easiest way to describe three or more people making their breakfasts, in a kitchen the size of a dinner table, in darkness.  Low light means the threat of a flour/powdered milk mix-up looms (this equals a bit of ziploc groping to differentiate).  Rachel discovered quickly that dry 'kibble' (soy chunks) is no substitute for granola.  Outside, a Kiskadee shakes off the night with its sunrise gargling song.  Thrushes play round robin with echoing and fluting songs.  The Oropedulas whoosh around, and the day breaks.

Typical breakfast:  two figs (small bananas), 1/3 of a papaya,
an orange, and muesli.  Not pictured:  tea and grapefruit.

Bean Cat, in one of many napping poses.

View from one end of the kitchen.  Oranges on
 the porch, cassava on the counter.

Commute to lek seven.

We separate and walk to different leks to get started on our 7:00 watches.  I'll write a more in depth post about what work is like later, but here is a quick summary.  Mostly, we (Rachel and I) spend our time doing behavioral observations.  Each day we watch six different birds, at an appointed hour, for one hour.  Wrapped up in babydump-green colored sheets we record, to the second, the activities of the focal bird....when he starts singing, when he leaves his territory to go forage or harass a neighboring male, if he comes back with pollen on his bill, how long he chases or displays or inspects his territory...everything is recorded in pictograph form on data sheets.  Sometimes the bird won't show up at all.  Other times they battle and go through displays, song bouts, and chases in rapid succession.  We frantically peer through binoculars trying read the tiny color tags of visiting males.  Those times are chaotic, but entertaining.  When the bird is a no-show, it leaves time to watch, and listen, and think.  The rest of what we do includes mist-netting to tag and sample the lekking males, watching flowers (for real), attempting to capture foraging birds, audio recording, visual nest searching, data entry, a bit of radio telemetry, and mending the most abused mist-nets I've ever seen.   People in the village logically come to the conclusion that we are crazy.

Can you see the hummingbird?  Neither can I,
 at least not without zooming in.

Our typical ten hour work days of mostly sitting very quietly, or alone in the forest, for six or more days a week, provides a lot of time for pondering and introspection.  Seasonal work has a way of tossing you into a state of perpetual transition; never coming to truly know a place, but being there long enough to feel it become a part of you.  If flying over the surf was a couple week visit, and sitting on the shore was a lifetime, a four month field season would be like touching down just long enough to sink a few toes into the sand...and coming away with some scrapes and bits of beach lodged beneath your toenails.  Daily routines, the people around you, and the feel of where you are completely changes.  I like how settling into a new place can do that.  Most small things fall away or get replaced with me hardly noticing (see below).  Other things take longer, but they're there- thoughts, habits, beliefs- just waiting to be spun off.  Seeing what's left, and how even that evolves, can be uncomfortable and enlightening.



A Short Comparison of Routines:

In the months prior to Trinidad:                                    Specific to Trinidad:

winter socks                                snake chaps
lotion?                                           citronella oil, repellent, shirt and sock tucking chigger/mosquito blockade
razor                                               NA (sorry Samster)
showers 2-3 per week               shower E V E R Y day
food                                                 fruit fruity fruit fruit!
human house guests                  colossal grasshoppers, termites, katydids, wasps, ants, fruit bats, birds...
Stephanie, Steph, Stephi          All that plus: Rachel, Raphanie, aunty, babyface, white girl, nicey, UFO...

Katydid!

Hunting ants...all those trails
and dark spots are ants.

                                                                       .                                                        

Alive!

I haven't updated this in a while, but do have loads of stories from a recent adventure/field job in Brasso Seco, Trinidad where I worked on a Little Hermit behavioral ecology project.  Hopefully breaking it up into a few posts will make for less rambling.  Though, I don't think any amount of words or pictures could do the experience justice.  The project was fantastic to be a part of, life in Brasso was beyond enjoyable, and I had the pleasure of getting to know some genuinely lovely people.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, to my family and friends for encouragement, support, and understanding!

We rarely made it to the ocean but were fortunate enough to spend a few days here, at Justin's place on Petit Tacarib.  It's only accessible by boat, or an 11 mile hike (8 if you're guided by Carl/GPS).  As such, we had the place to ourselves.

Rambling On

Fare thee well Ridgway banding station!

With 328 birds banded in nine days, we more than doubled the previous record-high season total. This was Ridgway's fifth year running. Since the station is so short-term (two weeks or less), very small shifts in migration timing make an exaggerated showing. For example, last year no Yellow-rumped Warblers were captured. This year? 183. So...were they late, early, or just having a flat-out spectacular year?

Some highlights....
What a *big day is like:

The first net run one day yields 28 birds. And by the time we get back to the station, it's time for another net run. Cheryl (an amazing lady and a founder of the station) starts, I begin banding, and the school kids arrive. Twenty-eight birds wouldn't be too bad, if the next net run was less productive, or if there was more than one person to band, or if there were more than two people to extract. But none of those are the case. Through the willows I think I hear a faint 'help!', and send a volunteer to scope out the situation at the nets. Deja vu. All the bird-bags we have left are in my hands as I go to help Cheryl extract the birds, and collapse nets. We work one net at a time, one bird at a time, and close nets as we clear them. Volunteers shuttle the birds back to the banding station and keep them in order of net run time, and net number (thank you, thank you!). Having a big day is fun, but the pressure is on to be efficient and not endanger the birds. Once our birdiest nets are closed, with more soon to be closed by Cheryl, I go back to the station and do some 'expediated processing'. This means only the essentials; band, wing chord, tail-length, age, sex, weight, next bird. Every bag we have, has a bird in it. So as I remove birds from bags, volunteers take them to Cheryl at the nets. We have birds hanging in the Hawthorne tree next to the station because our normal hooks are full. Some bags quiver with the flutters of an impatient occupant. The small branches of the tree bow. Wide-eyed fourth-graders point and whisper. The educators do a grand job of keeping them entertained while I sift through, and catch up. Select birds go onto the education hook; the educators will take these ones out to show the kids before the group releases them. Reaching for the last bird is a spectacular feeling.

*Big is relative. Here, with me banding, 50 birds in a day is big. However we rarely have nets open longer than four hours in a day, and only have 10 nets, several of which are 6 meter, half-size nets (which equals a relatively small number of 'net hours'). At other stations, 100 bird days, or a few hundred bird days are not uncommon.

Once things calmed down, we had time for some pictures

Some of the best questions and comments from kids:

"Look! There's BLOOD on the pliers!" From a boy who's class preparations had backfired. They apparently watched a video where it was unclear that the bander was putting a band on.....not cutting off the bird's leg (It was rust, not blood).

"I have rabbits and if you want to know if it's a boy or girl you push on the belly and if stuff comes out, it's a boy. Does that work for birds?" While talking about how to determine if a bird is male or female. This was actually yesterday, at the Grand Junction station, but I felt it needed to be included. No, that does not work for birds. We skirted around 'cloacal kisses', too.

"Mexican Longbill?" After explaining why you can't look at the skull of woodpeckers (because the the musculature for the tongue wraps over the top of the head) I asked for ideas about what other birds might have the same thing going on......in other words, birds with long tongues. Hummingbird was the answer I was searching for, and got eventually. I have to admit though, I did google mexican longbill when I got home...just to make sure it wasn't the name of a real bird!

"BRAINS!" From most of the students in a class I was describing skulling to....and why areas of the head with only one layer of skull look more pink. Note to self: Be more judicious with the word 'brains'.

"How do you spell ornithologist?" Because that's what she wanted to be when she grew up. (:

One of the fabulous educators, Mrs. Radovich releasing
an Orange-crowned Warbler with a school group.

And the unofficial list for the Ridgway Station:

Total Number of Species:	26
Total Individuals:	328
Species List:
Black-capped Chickadee		2
Brewer's Sparrow		3
Cassin's Vireo		2
Chipping Sparrow		13
Clay-colored Sparrow		1
Common Yellowthroat		2
Dark-eyed Junco
Gray-headed		1
Dusky Flycatcher		1
Gray Catbird		1
Green-tailed Towhee		1
House Wren		13
Lazuli Bunting		1
Lincoln's Sparrow		8
MacGillivray's Warbler		4
Mountain Chickadee		7
Orange-crowned Warbler		22
Plumbeous Vireo		2
Red-naped Sapsucker		2
Ruby-crowned Kinglet		2
Song Sparrow		5
Townsend's Warbler		3
Warbling Vireo		1
Western Wood Peewee		2
White-crowned Sparrow
Gambel's		3
Willow Flycatcher		1
Wilson's Warbler		34
Yellow Warbler		8
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Audubon's		183

Journey to the land-locked sky

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

-William Shakespeare

Bonneville Salt Flats: White salty soil for miles, hearts and initials in stones by the roadside, and mountains in the distance.

Moon rising over the Humboldt Range in Nevada.

From the Nevada campsite...also the Humboldt Range

Anything that can survive and flourish in this kind of salinity (Great Salt Lake), garners my attention. Plus, this is the biggest congregation of thriving sea monkeys (brine shrimp) around, and my sea monkey kingdoms always crashed before their golden days.

Salt in the ripples. Brine flies rose in clouds along the lake shore. Taking off from the sand, they sounded like handfuls of Indian beads clinking onto wooden floors. Soon, many of the shrimp will be manufactured into fish food, and brine flies will be shorebird lunch. Soon my pretties! Pretty compact food chain.

THE ROCKIES (from Brighton, CO)

Hiking in Golden Gate Canyon State Park...and failing with the camera self-timer.

Journey up Pikes Peak....world famous doughnuts at the top! Oh yeah, and a decent view.

My brakes failed the brake temperature test on the way back down. So I had a sandwich while they cooled. I did not share with this handout-happy fellow.

Eleven Mile State Park. The Western Grebes were doing their submarine ping calls all day and all night, and tug-boating their fluffy grebe babies. I was hoping to see some still getting piggy-back rides, but I guess they were too big for that.

Mist rising off the lake in the morning. I did some yoga on big granite globs, which like a lot of my pursuits, turned out to be a romantic idea, but not so much a practical idea.