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!