First "Week" in the Field

I survived my first week (and a bit) at the field house! And what a hectic and crowded time it was. Saturday (4/13) I dropped my mom off at the airport and then went back to the house (Flying X Ranch). There is an older couple (some volunteers) staying in a trailer next to the house. They both came out when I pulled up, introduced themselves, and offered to help me carry things into the house. Very nice couple. Chelsea, another research assistant, was the only one home, so we chatted as I unpacked in our room upstairs. She told me about the Bluebonnet Festival that was going on in Burnet (that’s BURN-et, not bur-NET… we were definitely corrected by several Texans), so later that evening we went with Marisa, one of the grad students leading the research.

Our field house! My window is on the 2nd story, facing the sun.

Our backyard!

My corner of the room - note the antlers under my bed that I found on my first day.

The festival was really cool – there were carnival rides, booths with trinkets and whatnot, and food. We grabbed dinner and, due to a lack of seating, sat at a picnic table with an older couple. Once we told him we were all from out of state, he went on and on about how great Texas is and how many things there are to do here. Really friendly guy, and really chatty, up until his wife dragged him away to see the rest of the festival. After finishing dinner (a pizza), I grabbed a dessert consisting of a bucket of lemonade and a fried snickers, which I split with Chelsea (good thing because I could already feel my arteries clogging). Then we drove to where they were hosting a demolition derby! That was exciting because it was my (and Marisa’s) first demo derby, but there were only four cars so it wasn’t *amazing* (all the regular spectators were pissed because apparently last year there were ten cars). One interesting thing that I saw was how Texans (or at least the guy at that derby) do the national anthem – before they actually sing the anthem (and EVERYONE sings), the announcer gives a spiel about America, freedom, peace, etc. It was kind of weird at first, but also kind of cool how much patriotism and pride everyone has. I feel like you don’t find that very much in other areas. I definitely haven’t seen that in California. Another interesting thing that I saw – the Texans in front of me were making fun of the southern accents on some passing spectators. I’ll just leave it at that.

So that was my first night at my field house – small town festival, bucket of lemonade, fried snickers, bought some jerky, and went to a demolition derby. Hello, Texas!

The next day I met more people who had shown up overnight – Brianna (another field tech, who was actually sleeping in the third bed in our room when we got back from the festival), Ronnisha (another grad student who is based in Kerr Wildlife Management Area), Matt (the last field tech – he got in late and didn’t want to have to figure out where to sleep so he slept outside in his sleeping bag; someone leaving early the next morning was given the warning to not hit “that guy sleeping in the driveway”), and then Michaela and Diane (grad students) who I had met briefly on Friday. We spent the morning chatting about work we’ve done and random other stuff, and then Chelsea and I went back to the festival with Brianna so we could watch the wiener dog races! I did not know that so many people in such a small town would own wiener dogs. I also got another bucket of lemonade, tried my first pork rinds, and bought a cowboy hat!

Monday (4/15) was our first day of training, and it started off with a big breakfast prepared by the grad students! There were pancakes, biscuits, fruit salad, eggs, bacon, and orange juice – so delicious! We spent a while learning about the house rules, research objectives, the birds we’d be studying, field equipment we’d be using, etc. After lunch all of the grad students had to drive to Texas A&M for their one weekly class (which sucks for them because it’s a 2.5 hour drive to the university), so Ashley, a PhD candidate who supervises the research, took over the training by taking us on a field trip! We went in a restricted area past some kind of nature overlook, but didn’t exactly hear our birds on that trip. We got stopped by a Fish & Wildlife Ranger who saw our “abandoned vehicle” in the parking lot, though! He kindly escorted us back to our vehicle (hand on taser, because five people wielding binoculars is terrifying, apparently) to check that we had the proper paperwork authorizing us to be in restricted areas. We found out where all of that paperwork is kept, so I guess that was still a learning experience. After that we went back to the house, ate dinner, listened to bird calls, and met Drew (she was a field tech on this project last summer and is back to lead the research at the site in Oklahoma).

Tuesday was another day of training, but without a fancy breakfast. We went over all the different protocols and practiced territory mapping, nest searching, re-sighting banded birds, and setting up nest cameras. Territory mapping is where you find a bird and record its location over some amount of time to determine the areas it is using. Our protocol is to take 30 minutes upon entering a territory to hear/see a bird. If no birds are detected in that time, you move on to the next territory and it is a “no detection”. If at any point during those 30 minutes you detect a bird, that’s when you start a new, hour-long timer for how long you have to map the bird’s territory by taking GPS points of its location every 2 minutes (when you actually know where the bird is). So an individual mapping could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours.

Black-capped vireo nest

Nest searching is what it sounds like – go find a nest! Conveniently they had some nests from last season that they were able to hide in the shrubs near the house for us to find. It wasn’t like there were three shrubs to choose from – it was a 100x100m plot with “shrubs” taller than people. Needless to say it took awhile… even with the help of foil-wrapped chocolates inside! Real eggs are cool, but if these birds were laying Cadbury Crème Eggs, I might be extra inclined to find some nests…

Re-sighting birds is simple enough in theory – some birds have colored bands on their legs (up to two per leg), and some don’t. You just have to get a look at their legs and see if the bird is banded, and if so, what the color combination is (order matters – left top, left bottom, right top, right bottom). It gets trickier when you consider that these bands are basically on toothpicks that keep turning in place (don’t confuse left and right!) and hopping around through thick shrubs or tall trees, right in front of the sun or hidden behind leaves.

The nest cameras were pretty easy, except for the fact that they are just as finicky here as they were in the jungle. Everything might be plugged in right, but then it turns out your battery is dead, or the wires were chewed through by some animal, or for some reason you just need to unplug and re-plug everything… it’s something new every time. Fortunately we won’t be dealing with nest cameras for a little while though (I think).

Tuesday night there were a lot of people coming and going – a couple of women (the supervisors on the whole project, I think) showed up to help out on Wednesday, and Ronnisha, Drew, and Brianna moved to the Kerr. So here’s the deal with our locations – there are three main sites for this project: Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge (the central location, NE of Austin), Kerr WMA (outside of San Antonio), and a third location in Oklahoma (I don’t even know the name, we just all say Oklahoma). Marisa and Michaela are the grad students based at Balcones, Ronnisha is the grad student based at the Kerr, and Drew came back for the summer to lead work at the Oklahoma site. It sounds like Ashley and Diane will be bouncing between the three sites all summer as needed. So one of us techs (Brianna) will be at the Kerr, two (me and Chelsea) will stay at Balcones, and one (Matt) will go to Oklahoma. We have no idea how they decided who would go where, or if we’ll be switching at some point during the summer. We’ve heard conflicting things about how we would rotate locations throughout, but also that we might only have week-long trades (which seems like a pain). We’ll see what happens.

Wednesday was our first official day of work! We were up at 6:00, ready to leave by 6:40 (that’s an extra hour of sleep compared to TRC!). I spent the day with Marisa at a property called Hickory Ridge, which only has black-capped vireos (BCVIs). We had about seven territories to check out that day. It was a pretty overwhelming day because we learned everything individually in training but we had to put it all together in the field. It was a tad difficult to record GPS points every 2 minutes WHILE keeping an eye on the bird(s) WHILE writing things in your notebook. Plus, having a second person there (we usually do all of this on our own, but we each had a grad student with us on the first day) actually made it more difficult because we weren’t sure who was supposed to be doing/recording what. I’m happy to report that it was really just the first day that felt like complete mayhem.

The walk to one of the territories - pretty happy with my commute.

The interesting part of that day was when we got lost on the property. I’m not talking about wandering around in the wilderness with no compass or anything… we were in the Jeep following what we thought was the only road. Marisa must have taken a wrong turn somewhere because we found ourselves going down a rocky cliff. Maybe not a cliff, but a path steep enough that you couldn’t actually see the road you were about to drive down from the top. Marisa decided to go for it, but then couldn’t actually get the Jeep back up it when we realized we had gone too far. So we continued on, encountering more and more forks until we hit another similarly-steep hill, at which point she called someone affiliated with the property to get us directions out of there (something I’m not used to – needing directions out of someone’s back yard). To give you an idea of how lost we were, we got home 1.5 hours after we should have. Good first-day experience! That night we also found out that we’d be getting our first day off a bit earlier than anticipated due to thunderstorms predicted for the next morning. So we had two days of training, one day in the field, and then a day off. Nothing like working hard at a new job! I think Ashley and Diane left that night, which put us down to five in the house – Marisa, Michaela, Chelsea, Matt, and me.

Thursday I slept in until 6:45 (woo!) but didn’t get my butt out the door until 11:00. I had to complete several online training courses required by Texas A&M, but because that would be “data intensive” (come on, guys, the training is not going to be any more interesting with your completely unnecessary use of Flash), I had to go into town and use the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks. Unfortunately the training took about three hours, and THEN I did my own things, so I was there for about five hours that afternoon. Now, I’ve spent a lot of time at different coffee shops over the years, but never have I seen so many cowboys in a Starbucks before. Seriously – every other person was wearing a cowboy hat! The four guys at the table next to me were all wearing cowboy hats, boots, talking about diesel in their pick-ups… and drinking Starbucks coffee. That was super weird. Texas, you never stop surprising me.

Friday I went to a territory with Michaela that had both BCVIs and golden-cheeked warblers (GCWAs). BCVI territories are nice because they nest in shrubs and it’s usually pretty easy to walk between the shrubs (not always). GCWA territories are more challenging because they nest in tall trees that seem to all have scraggly low-hanging branches which will rip your skin to pieces. There are obviously other benefits/drawbacks to each type of bird/territory, but that’s the general picture. At one point Michaela radioed me to have me help her follow a GCWA. She was only about 250m away, so I thought, “perfect, I’ll be there in a couple minutes”. TWENTY FIVE MINUTES LATER I found myself stuck in a scraggly-tree-and-thorny-vine-filled ravine, feeling like Frodo when he was caught in Shelob’s web in The Return of the King. Every time I tried to move forward I could feel that another part of me was caught in something. I kept checking my progress on my GPS, happy that I was slowly getting closer… and then Michaela updated her location and had somehow moved 150m further away. Great.

BCVI territory (shrubs over 6ft, but pathways between)

GCWA territory... and this section didn't even have the thorny vines.

This was my first day in GCWA territory. Not too bad, but considering that's a daily thing, even through my pants, it's not great.

That trek was worth it, though, because when I finally got to Michaela I managed to spot a female GCWA by sheer coincidence. We couldn’t hear any GCWAs in the area, so I looked down to put my notebook in my pocket. When I looked up, the female landed on a branch about 3m in front of my face in direct sunlight (that was a National Geographic worthy pose), looked at me for a few seconds, pulled some bark off of the tree trunk (nest material), and then flew off. That was awesome, and Michaela found her nest within 10 minutes, so that was even more awesome. Other highlights of the day: saw 6 deer, a gang of wild turkeys, and a hunting blind made out of an old car body.

Saturday was a particularly terrible morning because of the thick understory I had to navigate through. I feel like I lost a significant amount of hair that day and I came home with sticks in every pocket. I don’t mind getting scratched now and then, but when the branches are so dense that you can’t move through it, it makes it really difficult to keep track of the birds. I did get a full re-sight on a bird, though, so that was cool.

Pulled this out of my hair after the fourth grooming.

 

Sunday was our first day of point counts for the month (I think we have 3-5 days of point counts every month). I went out with Marisa, and between points we would map any territories we passed through. During training I had been warned about wild hogs in the area, but I just thought, “what’s wrong with a cute little pig?” I kept imagining something along the lines of Babe wandering through the trees. Shoot, if Babe had wandered by I’d have stopped mapping territories in a heartbeat to play with and cuddle him. Turns out wild hogs are not like Babe – they can weigh over 200 lbs and will get pissed if you get between them and their babies. I still stopped mapping in a heartbeat because I heard what can best be described as a low growling coming from the shadows 10m away (my first thought was a bear). In fact I nearly wet myself before bolting in the complete opposite direction. Turns out you can blast through the understory pretty well when you think there is an angry, gigantic hog chasing you down!

Snake in my path - and I didn't drive over this one!

Monday (4/22) was a really good day, but first a little more background – in addition to the three main sites that we are collectively located at, there is a fourth called Possum Kingdom (about three hours from Balcones). There is not a permanent team living at PK, but instead a couple people from certain sites will go there for one or two nights per month to do point counts and a bit of territory mapping. Matt and Chelsea were picked to go on the first trip, so Ashley, Diane, and Drew stopped by around 3pm Monday afternoon to pick them up. Remember that Mondays are also when the grad students have class, so they left the house around noon. That meant that after 3pm I had the house to myself (until about 10pm)! That was really strange after having up to 12 people around the previous week, but it was nice (and will probably never happen again). Yes, so because Matt and Chelsea had to be ready to go by 3pm with their data from the morning already entered in the computer, we had to work fast that day and cut corners when possible. We ended up getting home by 2pm, which was so much nicer than our usual 3-4pm (especially when you consider that we’re literally on our feet that entire time, starting at 7am).

Checking a BCVI nest with a nest mirror

Tuesday was another good day of work, partly due to light rain in the morning. None of the birds were out because of the weather, so all of us had no detections for our first couple of territories (not great from the data point of view, but nice from the labor side). Things cleared up in the afternoon, though, so I got a couple of re-sights on the guys that did venture out, and I checked a nest that had four eggs in it! On the way home we also stopped to check out a caracara nest on the property. Caracaras are among the smaller birds of prey, but they seemed huge compared to the BCVIs and GCWAs that we follow every day. Pretty cool that there’s a nest right there! The morning of no detections meant that we finished pretty early and were home by 2:30, which was really nice. The group from PK got back by 3:30, about 4 hours earlier than expected, because there were really high winds at the site (can’t hear birds during point counts), so they called it and came home. Too bad considering what a trek it is to get out there.

 

Wednesday was FREEZING (maybe not actually, but the morning definitely started in the 30s). It wasn’t raining or anything, but it was so cold that most of the birds weren’t out (which was good considering I couldn’t feel my hands and therefore probably couldn’t write very well). So much of my time that morning was spent finding patches of sun through the trees to stand in. That day we also had Ashley and Diane helping out with point counts, so I think we got a lot accomplished. That evening Chelsea and I got dressed up and went out to dinner in Marble Falls. Conveniently enough one of the work vehicles needed gas, so we got to take that into town rather than our own cars. I definitely need to plan my trips into town based on the refueling of the Jeeps…

That brings me to TODAY! Today is my (and Chelsea’s) day off. It’s not a particularly beautiful day, so we didn’t really want to go to a park or anything (plus, we spend almost 50 hours wandering around in the wilderness every week… spending my free time doing the same thing does not sound particularly appealing at the moment). Instead I turned this into chore day – went to REI for some gloves for those cold mornings (Did you know that they have gloves that are technology compatible, as in special thumb and fore-finger tips that enable you to use your touch screen devices? Nifty…), IKEA (did not actually plan on buying anything (did anyway), but I just drove an hour to get to this town and it was right next to REI), Barnes & Noble, Starbucks (internet, of course), and then grocery shopping after this. And when I get home I plan on getting in my PJs and watching Dexter all night – turns out Chelsea brought 50+ movies and all of Dexter with her. Hooray! I’ve only seen a few episodes of Dexter (something like the last episodes of season 7), so I get to start from the beginning. Definitely creeped my out last night after realizing our house is miles away from the neighbors with plenty of unused land, perfect for disposing of bodies… *shudder*.

BOOYAH! All caught up. Since I’ll probably be going into town at least once a week (groceries or whatnot), I’ll try to have updates ready so I can post them quickly at Starbucks. Until next time!