Photos from Mississippi!

I know how much my Gram and Mom enjoy seeing pictures- so here's a few recent ones!


Trailer sweet trailer: our home in Yazoo.


There is a butterfly garden/deer exclosure in our front yard . . . complete with about a dozen park benches. The fence is there to keep the butterflies in. (Just kidding!)


Sunset at a bayou near Alligator Pond.


I can't say that I am much inclined to harass alligators . . .


Anne, Megan and me freezing our butts off in 20F weather on our first day of telemetry at Ferry Road. We lost that bird for a few days but picked her up again once we found a night roost.


An adult male NOCA looking fierce, after being caught at our Palasini site.

If I survive this job, I will be invincible

There are days when this becomes my mantra. This is definitely the hardest I have ever worked either in or out of the field. Good prep for grad school, right? The combination of inconvenient internet access and long hours have taken their toll on the blog, so here’s what I’ve been up to in 2010 . . .
The goal of our research is to find out as much as we can about Rusties since they are the fastest-declining songbird species in North America. While I thoroughly enjoy the insect sampling (see previous post), the other major responsibility of my job is following Rusties. Unlike my langur following in Thailand, I won’t identify my focal animals by looking at their natural characteristics- rather, we band our birds and track them using radio telemetry. That means we have to catch these wily birds, successfully put on a transmitter, and then keep track of them!
I’m happy to say we have two active transmitters out at our Ferry Road site. After many hours of observation, we chose bait sites, cracked pecans -a favorite food- along the side of the road with our feet and the car, and came up with time-saving ways to set up nets. (When you have to be in place well before the birds wake up, you learn to be as efficient as possible, and this job is definitely challenging me to come up with creative solutions. Case in point: we now use 1” binder rings to quickly attach our nets to ropes on trees. This makes take-down much faster, which is key when we are putting out transmittered birds. Since Rusties are neophobic and sensitive to change, we also used camouflaged duct tape and nail polish to hide these shiny rings from the birds, minimizing the chances of them detecting the nets.)
Catching is incredibly stressful and testing, but ultimately rewarding. We get up ridiculously early so everything ready before the birds arrive on site. We band our birds in one of our two field trucks, a new experience for me and often awkward at best. There is never enough room in the car to have all of our necessary equipment immediately on hand, and once we decide to put a transmitter on a bird, we have to quickly change gears from banding to telemetry, with the associated negotiation of equipment. One of the hardest parts for me at this point is that I have mixed feelings about catching Rusties and putting transmitters on them because it means at least two 12+ hour days tracking our focal birds. That said, I’ve worked 40+ hours within three days twice in the past two weeks, and it is getting a little easier (at least psychologically). It didn’t help that at the same time Mississippi went into the coldest cold snap for decades and our pipes froze twice. But telemetry is what we need to do to collect the necessary data for this species. No one knows why they are declining so severely and steadily, and this winter research may highlight what Rusties need to be successful.
With two birds at Ferry Road, my days have more variability. We take at least one “day point” on each active bird every day: we try to get as close as possible without scaring the bird, take a GPS point, and record habitat data. So you don’t have any misunderstandings, I do not actually see the birds with transmitters. Once we release them, we have few opportunities for visual observations. So we listen through static for the tell-tale one second click of our birds and try to zero in on their location. In addition to the daily day points, we take one full day of telemetry on each bird each week. This involves following the bird (in our car), asking homeowers for permission to walk around their property, and GPS points/habitat data collection every five minutes. Plus we’ve still got the suite of food availability surveys, processing leaf litter samples, observing pecan orchards, and trying to figure out how to catch birds at our other site, Palasini.
Telemetry is a whole different ball game from the other research I’ve done. I’ve never done something so tech-heavy or reliant on specialized equipment. I’ve also never worked with a species so scared of people. We work in teams of two, which gives us the ability to safely track birds and drive, and have the opportunity to trade off telemetry duties to reduce fatigue (one can only listen to clicks through static for so long!). I had a gratifying experience the other day when we were attempting to follow one of our Ferry Road birds all day. At this point, we knew very little about the birds we had put out at Ferry, but I listened to our bird at the night roost before dawn, and heard her there at sunset. It didn’t matter that we had lost her multiple times during the day- what was most satisfying was that I was there when she woke up and put her to bed nine hours later.
I hope to have more illuminating experiences like that in the coming weeks . . . it makes the long hours worth it!

Happy New Year!

I’m writing this post offline on the first and hoping that I’ll get the chance to put it up in the next few days. I hope everyone had a great evening of revelry. Megan and I went to a dinner party with some other Forest Service employees near Greenville, but left well before midnight because we had an hour drive home and work this morning. Lucky for us, this morning went splendidly, and our boss gave us the rest of the day off (which means we had the chance to go back to bed around 9:30 am!). I’m by writing this on the steps of our trailer- the day is clear and the sun is great! We work long hours and spend a lot of time in the car driving and observing, so it is nice to have a chance to be outside during the day, epecially when the weather is nice.
We’ve been pretty busy since I came back from Chicago last weekend. We sample “food availability” at 15 or 20 sites in this area. These are places where my boss has caught Rusties in previous years, so we know that at least at one time they were good habitat for the species. While our food availability surveys involve A LOT of driving and several days to complete because some of the sites are so far apart, I really enjoy it. We go out to a site and count pecans and acorns, plus we take leaf litter samples.
Processing has two parts: finding the food and identifying it. First, we go through the leaves, turning them over “just like a Rusty” as my boss would say, and pick out all of the invertebrates. Important note: spiders run really, really fast. But I guess I would too if I had 8 legs and someone was chasing me with a pair of forceps! After dropping all of the insects, spiders, snails, worms, ticks, etc. into alcohol (sorry, Evan!), we look at each individual under a microscope to identify it to species. We have a working “library” of every invertebrate we’ve found, but it is growing significantly considering this is only the second year of this sampling method. Getting the samples from a bag of leaves to an Excel file of invertebrates can take two hours or more, and considering we sample the sites every 10 days, this occupies a good chunk of our time. We can “pre-process” the dead inverts at the trailer with a small dissecting microscope, but we need the big ‘scope at Stoneville to identify some of the smaller stuff and to take pictures to add to the library if we find something new.
All in all, though, I have a secret love of processing the leaf litter sampling. For one thing, I really enjoy catching animals of any kind, and fast-moving insects in a plastic tub are no exception. I never know what we are going to find in any given sample, and it probably is influenced by time of day and local weather, so even knowing what might be a site from previous experience doesn’t guarantee that you won’t find something new. I’m also excited too see all of these tiny critters under a ‘scope. They look completely different up close, and the high-resolution equipment with the camera up at Stoneville is incredible. What looks like a speck with some antennae to the naked eye reveals itself to be an awesome collembolan (springtail) . . . yeah, I’m a science nerd. It’s great to be able to develop insect identification skills, though, and since the whole team has a history of invertebrate sampling from school and other jobs, I think we’ll be able to improve the library and the sorting protocol.
Besides the “bugs” we’ve still got some wily Rusties to contend with. At this stage in the season, we are searching for sites to catch Rusties, and have found three that we feed daily. This morning Megan and I were observing at the Ferry Road site, where we know Rusties are present, but where they haven’t been eating the bait. Rusties are known to be one of the more neophobic species of blackbirds- they are afraid of new things- but they can also be pretty curious. By observing them in the mornings, we can figure out where they like to feed and what their flight paths are, giving us a better idea of possible net locations. They are certainly tricky to catch as we learned earlier this week at Anguilla! Plus, we need calm days for netting because wind catches the mist nets so easily, and, naturally, once the Rusties realize the net is there they won’t go in it.
Megan and I had a great morning at Ferry Road with a couple of dozen Rusties present and feeding. We’ve got some new ideas of where to bait and put up nets, and if the weather cooperates we should be able to try to catch some birds later this week. At Anne’s suggestion, Megan and I are also trying to read the significance of our first bird of the new year. What does it mean that we saw a female Rusty first? With Rusties being the fastest declining songbird species on this continent, is the year all downhill from here? Will our year be characterized by neophobia and inquisitiveness? These might be hard traits to maintain as a field technician . . . but I’ll keep you updated!