Hello again! So… my yearlong hiatus didn’t go unnoticed.
Woops! But who really liked 2016 anyways? I’ll give you the short version of
what happened:
I worked in Canberra, Australia for 3 months helping a
graduate student with her studies. She was trying to compare the coevolution of
the Eastern Koel (a nest parasite) and its hosts (Red Wattlebirds, Noisy
Friarbirds, and Magpielarks) between Sydney, where koels have historically been
located, and Canberra, where koels only started moving into in the last couple
decades. Koels lay their eggs in the host’s nests, and then those birds end up
raising koel chicks. Most of my time was spent looking for host nests. It paid
off because I found the project’s first ever koel egg in a wattlebird nest in
Canberra!! We also found a second koel egg, and two koel chicks in wattlebird
nests (also a project first for Canberra). When we were nest searching, Remi
and I explored the surrounding area and got to see all of the other interesting
birds and creatures that Canberra has to offer. I even got to make a couple
trips up to Sydney!
At the end of that project, I flew to Cairns and spent
three weeks working my way down to Brisbane. I went snorkeling on the Great Barrier
Reef (saw a white-tipped reef shark, giant clams, and amazing coral beds!),
took a tour of the Atherton Tablelands (lots of cool birds and wildlife),
searched for cassowaries in Mission Beach, hiked and swam on Magnetic Island
(one of my favorite places of the entire trip; wild koalas, very laid back, and
stunning views), swam in the “lagoon” (giant shallow public pool) at Airlie
Beach, took a tour of the ginger beer factory in Bundaberg, had a 3D/2N
adventure on Fraser Island (swam in Lake McKenzie which has water so clean and
fresh you can drink while you swim, checked out the shipwrecked S.S. Maheno,
floated down Eli Creek, and partied it up Aussie style), then ended in Brisbane
where I went to the Australia Zoo (home of the Crocodile Hunter!) and watched
my first ever Cockroach Races for Australia Day. It was a whirlwind of a trip,
but it was fantastic, fun, and highly memorable. I met a lot of interesting
people and discovered numerous places that I’ll have to come back to explore
someday!
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| S.S. Maheno |
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| My crew on Fraser Island |
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| The Croc Hunter family at the Australia Zoo |
From Brisbane I flew home to San Jose, where I finally
had to face my mother after scaring her with that whole pulmonary embolism
thing. Oh yeah, that was my first long flight since the PE. My dad mailed me a
variety of compression socks for Christmas (I actually asked for them… ugh),
which I’d been wearing on the longer bus trips through Queensland. But the
flights were annoying – I’m used to having the window seat and sleeping for 90%
of the flight. Now I request the aisle seat and get up to walk around every
couple of hours. I was pacing the plane with 80-year-olds and people with
infants. I felt like I’d aged 40 years. :-| Anyways, that week at home was far
too short – enough time to unpack and wash everything (I didn’t do laundry my
entire three weeks in Queensland), and then repack for another season in
Hawaii. Also lots of niece and pup time!
For the first time I returned to do a second season at
one of my previous field jobs (the Hawaii Forest Bird Demography Project with
USGS). Not bad that I chose Hawaii! There were actually several people
returning from the previous season, so it was nice to have some familiar faces
there, plus the other friends who I knew on island. That season went about the
same as the first one – lots of bird banding, re-sighting color bands, putting
transmitters on birds and hand-tracking them later, and working on our aging
and sexing guide. That guide FINALLY got published as a technical report later in
summer! There’s still a lot we can do to improve it, but for now it’s a good
resource for anyone banding birds in Hawaii.
During that season I took a trip to Kauai with some
friends, and another to Maui with some other friends. Both trips were great in
their own way, but I think I preferred Kauai since it was so different from Big
Island. We took another project trip to the summit of Mauna Kea, played lots of
board games (but far fewer than the previous year because George and I were put
on opposite crews… who would do that?!), my dad came to visit in the spring, I
officially moved into the guys’ house in Hilo, a large group of us went on a
3D/2N camping trip in Waimanu Valley, I FINALLY got to see lava up close, and the landlords wanted to sell so we
had a helluva time packing and moving to a new place.
When the funding unexpectedly ran out on that project, I
quickly jumped onto a two-month internship with the Alala Project. The Alala is
the Hawaiian Crow which went extinct in the wild in 2002. The goal of the
project is to release birds from the captive breeding program into the wild so
the Alala can establish a self-sustaining population. I joined the project
before the birds were released into the wild, so my job was mainly predator
control. I went around our predator control grids checking and resetting a
variety of traps for rats, mongoose, and cats. It wasn’t the most glorious work
that I’ve done, but it was important nonetheless. The release at the end of 2016
didn’t go as smoothly as hoped – 5 birds were released, but 3 of them died
within the first week. The remaining 2 were brought back into captivity while
the working group comes up with solutions and ways to avoid the problems
encountered in the first release. Hopefully the next cohort that is released
sometime this year will be more successful than the first!
After my stint with the Alala Project, I went back to
California for a 3-week vacation before starting a 10-month internship with the
Natural Area Reserves System (NARS). Lots of time with family and friends,
helped Chris get into birding (so lots of birding trips), learned a thing or
two from Bob Ross, and generally enjoyed living in a place where things aren’t
constantly moldy.
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| Putting a transmitter on a Hawaii Creeper |
In October I started my internship with NARS. I was hired
as the “bird intern”, but NARS is mainly focused on management of the natural
area reserves. They build and maintain fences, control for non-native animals
and plants, out-plant native species, and monitor the areas to help guide
future management decisions. So far I’ve done a little bit of everything, but
most of my work is with the birds. Once a week we try to go banding in Pu’u
Maka’ala NAR. The goal is to catch the endangered birds (Akiapola’au, Hawaii
Creeper, and Hawaii Akepa; we caught these guys in Hakalau, too!) and put
transmitters on them so we can map their territories and hopefully find their
nests. If we find nests we can put out predator traps in the area to directly
help their chances of nest survival. If we can only map their territories it
will at least give us estimates of home range and how many individuals might be
living in the NAR, and from there help us track habitat health.
Most of the work that NARS does is highly manual labor
(i.e. fencing), and the guys have had years of practice so they’re really good
at it. I have years of practice working with forest birds, so I’d say that I’m
pretty comfortable and confident with that. But those two areas have very
little overlap, so it’s always funny to see one of the guys be able to pound
fence posts for hours but lose it when faced with a tangled mist net. I’m just
the opposite – I can untangle for days and do all of the fine details of bird
handling, but after a half dozen posts I’m spent. I’m working on it though!
Besides my field work, I took three trips in 2016 –
Montreal/Ithaca, Florida, and Mexico. In June I went to Montreal with Chris,
the kids, Erin, and her family to watch the Formula 1 race. I’d never been to
one before, so that was super cool to watch in person. After that we went down
to Ithaca, NY for a week with Erin’s brother’s family. We ate lots of good
food, swam in the lake, checked out the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and went to
the science center where we learned that Chris has lower brain activity than
his infant son. In November I went to Florida for my Grandma’s 90th
birthday! But first Chris, Erin, Caroline, Nick, and my mom all went to Disney
World for several days! We went to the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Magic
Kingdom again, and Epcot. I haven’t been to Disney World since I was a kid, so
it was cool seeing how Caroline liked everything. Granted, it was still pretty
overwhelming for a 3-year-old, so there were times we just went back to the
hotel to chill at the pool… until she got diarrhea in the pool, then we just
chilled in the hotel room and tried not to show our faces. The birthday
celebration in Tarpon Springs was pretty great, too. Got to see a lot of
relatives I haven’t seen in years, joke around with Grandma who – at 90 – was
inappropriate as ever, go birding with Chris, and eat delicious Greek food! The
last trip was to Mexico for New Year’s where I joined Erin and her family for a
few days. I had just spent a week and a half taking care of my roommates’
overly energetic puppy and our two cats, so that trip was a much needed break.
I met lots of cool relatives, ate more food than I’m proud of, partied it up
for New Year’s, and drained the bars. One of my favorite activities was
probably having a bartender deliver me a Bloody Mary every time I made a lap
around the endless river. Or releasing baby sea turtles into the ocean. Or a
day of birding with Chris and a local bird guide. I guess I’d say the entire
trip was pretty amazing!
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| First bartender in Mexico |
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| Caroline as the Beast! |
