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| Do not enter... unless there are scrub-jays. |
By now you might be wondering what it is that I’m
actually doing here in Florida, other than giving myself an excuse to drive
across the country (really, how many people can say they’ve done that??). As I
said before, I’m studying Florida Scrub-Jays on the Avon Park Air Force Range.
I actually work for Archbold Biological Station, which is an hour south of us
near Lake Placid, but they have a small office located on the range to study
some of the bird species that are located up here. Emily and an unknown
technician will be working with Red-Cockaded Woodpeckers, Greg and an unknown
technician will be working with Florida Grasshopper Sparrows, and a different
Greg is the lead biologist up here. (The two other technicians are moving in
this weekend.) So there will be seven of us based out of this office, with
myself and the other two techs living in the trailer.
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| Inside my trailer! |
I have to say, as nice as it is having the trailer to
myself at the moment, it might be nice having some more people around. In the
evenings I walk over to the office (100m away) to use the internet and watch TV
shows. That’s not a problem or anything, but after watching dark, intense shows
like Breaking Bad, walking back to my trailer alone… in the dark… next to a
prison… creeps the hell out of me!! (Oh yeah, besides this being an Air Force
Range, there is a Youth Academy for moderate risk teens on one side of us and a
Correctional Facility for minimum and medium custody inmates on the other.
Plenty of barbed wire, so it’s totally fine! Just don’t tell my grandma.)
Anyways, the scrub-jays are cooperative breeders, which
means that other birds (juveniles or non-breeding adults) help the breeding
pair establish territory boundaries, defend against predators, feed nestlings,
and other family things. They are surprisingly friendly birds and fly over to
find out what you’re up to. The population here on the range has been monitored
for nearly 20 years, and almost every single bird has been color-banded so we
know who is who. My job is to go find the nests in the nearly 60 territories
that are established here. This was the first week that Michelle (my boss) and
I started looking, and we already found seven nests! I’ll be monitoring the
nests to find out when the birds lay eggs and when the eggs hatch. When the
nestlings are around ten days old, I’ll take blood samples from each of them
(to determine sex – the scrub-jays are monomorphic) and put color bands on them
so we can tell who they are once they fledge.
These birds make it fairly easy to find their nests. A
lot of bird species try and throw you off their trail by flying in different directions
before heading to their nests. The scrub-jays just fly straight to their nests,
no lollygagging. They also follow you if you start heading toward their nests
(and squawk if you get really close), so it’s basically a hot/cold game.
“Are the jays following me? Yay! I’m heading in the right direction!” The better part is that sometimes they fly right to the shrub that their nest
is in and really screech at you. It’s like the scene in Little
Miss Sunshine when the cop wants to inspect their trunk-
Cop: “You have something in your
trunk?”Richard: “No! Nothing! There’s nothing. It’s just… Don’t open it.”
So basically, the scrub-jays are pretty awesome, but there
is a ton of other wildlife here on the range (it’s a lot of open land with
limited bombing areas… and yet, some of the jays still have territories near
those bombing sites). I’ve seen a lot of new bird species that I haven’t seen
before, which is always exciting, and then there are snakes, gopher tortoises,
cows… and 8ft long gators. I was stopping to admire the calves one day (okay,
pretty much every day) when I saw a massive gator jump from a spot in the sun into
the pond next to it. It was HUGE. It could’ve easily taken that calf down. Naturally,
I got out of my truck to get a closer look. The water was really murky so I
couldn’t really see anything… until it’s nose popped up a few meters from where
I was standing. That was enough for me. I’m told that the baby gators like the
drainage ditches next to the road, which I often have to walk through to get to
jay habitat. They’re only there when the ditches are full of water, but the
rainy season is about to begin. :-| There is a lake near the Archbold Station
which I hear is really nice to swim in (for Archbold employees only, not open
to the public). I also hear that there is a big ol’ gator in the lake, but to
not worry because “he’s real friendly”. There go any hopes I had of swimming
while in Florida.
Not at all related to work, but last week Michelle and I
helped judge a middle and high school science fair. That was surprisingly
difficult, but a lot of fun! Some of those students were definitely impressive,
but the judges can be CRAZY. Some middle-aged man started arguing with me at
the end because he thought the student he judged had a better project, and he
made sure I knew it. “YOU WEREN’T TOTALLY CONVINCED HERS WAS THE BEST. I KNOW
MY STUDENT’S IS FLAWLESS.” In the end the rest of the judges also picked my student
to be one of two to go to an international competition, so yay! She was
studying new methods for testing for some disease in calves before they mature
into adults when the disease is untreatable. What?! That’s awesome!! Perhaps
the best part of that day was when the organizers saw me as the “poor grad
student” and gave me heaps of leftover free food. I tried to be modest by not
taking an entire tray of chicken or vegetable platter that they offered me, but
I got quite the haul.
Hoping to finally explore the area outside of work on one
of my days off. Maybe that will be more likely once there are new people
around!
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