The first day of the ONR (Office of Naval Research) conference was absolutely chock full, 7am till 11pm at night. About 20 of us scientists, plus the 3 Navy guys who run the marine mammal program (and also a curious NOAA person sitting in a corner "spying", as he put it). The bulk of the day was a series of 20-minute talks. Basically, everybody at the workshop got up and summarized what they've been working on recently, one at a time. (My own talk was on right whales and also on my recent sea turtle stress research, which uses some techniques applicable to marine mammals.) Since the 20 people in the room are basically everybody who's studying stress in marine mammals, worldwide, what the Navy guys were getting - and what they wanted - was a great summary of the state of the art in marine mammal stress research.
Despite a severe case of jet lag and sleep deprivation, I can safely say that this was the single most interesting day of scientific talks that I can ever remember attending. (At most scientific conferences I start to space out about halfway through the day. But today I was riveted, right to the last talk.)
So, next I'll post a few summaries of the ongoing research projects that people were describing. First up: Dorian Houser's dolphin experiment
******
Talk #1 - Stress indicators in dolphins
Of all the experiments described today, this one was the one that will most directly answer the question of: Does sonar atually stress ut a dolphin? Dorian, the fellow giving this talk, has what some (including me) would consider to be a dream job: working with the 70 tame, trained bottlenose dolphins kept by Navy dolphin trainers at their facility in San Diego. "We've got known life histories, they're trained, they'll wear harnesses, we can get voluntary blood samples." he said. For a physiologist, that is a dream situation. (The blood samples are taken from the tail - the dolphins know they will get a fish if they turn upside down and put their tails in the trainer's hands).
Yes, the Navy has 70 bottlenose dolphins. They also have about 30 sea lions. They used to have pilot whales and killer whales and belugas. They've had marine mammals for a long time, originally to study their swimming mechanics and streamlining (for torpedo design). Then later they realized dolphins could "assist the Navy with various activities", as Dorian rather mysteriously put it. I've read a few books about this, including one written by a former Navy dolphin trainer and the "activities" are just what you would guess: dolphins can find things on the ocean bottom, and can scope things out. (They don't use dolphins for offensive warfare - because dolphins can't distinguish friend from foe! They're just trained to find and tag things.) Mostly they are trained to search for ocean mines and swimmers (downed friendlies, enemy spies). My general impression from reading the books is that the Navy seems to treat their animals well. If they didn't, the animals would just take off, since many of the animals work in open ocean, in completely free situations and could leave at any time.
The dolphin training at the Navy, like dolphin training anywhere, works entirely by positive reinforcement. A dolphin will do just about anything for a fish. Dorian got onto an interesting tangent at one point about how many fish a dolphin needs per day, and how many fish he is allowed to use to "pay" the dolphins to participate in the sonar experiment. The classic dolphin-training approach is to use a small percentage of the dolphin's daily fish needs for that day's training activities - but only a small percentage, meaning, the animal won't starve if it choose not to participate. Typically, if the dolphin doesn't choose to participate in the activity, they get all of their remaining allotment of fish anyway at the end of the day.
Dorian said that you can gauge how much a dolphin likes or dislikes a certain activity by how many fish it demands to do the activity. (or, to put it more precisely, what % of the animal's baseline food intake comes from training.) Some activities just cost a lot of fish. Apparently dolphins have a finely calibrated sense of economics, and fish is the currency of choice!
Interestingly, sonar does not "cost" much to dolphins - most dolphins are willing to sit and listen to a sonar ping for relatively few fish, and don't have to be very hungry to be willing to take part in a sonar experiment.
So here's Dorian's study design. He hasn't done the experiment yet - it's all designed and ready to go. As you're reading this, think about: What do you think of the study design? Could anything be improved? Are there any flaws?
He's got 30 dolphins and 15 sea lions lined up for this experiment. Every animal is already trained on an "ABA task", which means that they know that they are supposed to start at a certain position in the pool (position A), swim to position B and touch a paddle, and then swim back to A.
In the middle of this task, Dorian is going to play a very brief, fraction-of-a-second, very loud, sonar sound at them. PING! He's testing several different decibel levels, ranging from loud to louder to extremely loud. Each animal will hear just 1 of the decibel levels. And then he'll watch, basically, for signs of distraction and annoyance. Stress, in other words..
So how is he planning to measure that ever-so-amorphous concept of "stress,", in dolphins and sea lions? Here's what he's planning to look at:
1. Distractability. Do they complete the ABA task in the normal amount of time? Might they abandon the task entirely?
2. Do they change their behavior in any other way? "We'll especially be looking for chuffing and tail slaps," Dorian said. Apparently that's what a dolphin does when it's annoyed or agitated. (I wanted to ask what "chuffing" is, but didn't get a chance.) Dorian's got cameras mounted all around and above the pool, plus a microphone running above water - there will be dolphin trainers will be stationed around the pool, calling out verbally when the dolphins dive or do any behaviors that the cameras might miss. There will also be underwater microphones (hydrophones) to pick up any vocalizations the dolphins make themselves. I was impressed at the pool set-up (he showed us photos) and I was also grateful that I am not going to be the person who has to go through all the recordings!
3. Heart rate. There will be ECG heart rate monitors strapped right on to the dolphins! (just like we use in physiology lab at UP - except the 3 electrodes are stuck on with suction cups.). When you are stressed or scared, of course, your heart rate speeds up. The same thing happens in any mammal. It's the hormone epinephrine - also known as adrenalin- that's doing that. BUT, there's a big complication in marine mammals: heart rate plummets when they dive. It can drop to shockingly low levels in deep divers on a long dive, as low as five beats per minute in certain species. Then it speeds up to above normal when they first surface. Dolphins are only "surface divers," meaning that they don't go deep, but, even so, their heart rate definitely drops a bit. So, Dorian's going to have watch when the animals are diving, how long they've been under, whether or not they've just surfaced, and he'll have to factor all that in to the analysis of the heart rate data.
4. Stress hormones. He's planning to take blood samples (every sample paid for with a fish or two, of course) at several times: several days prior to the event (to establish that animal's baseline), immediately after the event, and one week later. He'll assay these samples for epinephrine, glucocorticoids, and several other measures too.
What do you think? What would you do differently? A bigger sample size would always be nice, of course, but thirty dolphins is the best sample size I've ever heard of for a controlled experiment with captive marine mammals.
I love this study. It's perfect. It's exactly what we need! The rest of us can just go home! In fact, I want to go to San Diego to watch! Trained dolphins and sea lions... That he can get blood samples from... I couldn't get over it. I kept muttering to myself "Thirty trained dolphins wearing harnesses." (It's the contrast to the impossibility of getting a blood sample from a baleen whale that was so entrancing. I work on baleen whale physiology, which is pretty much an exercise in frustration from start to finish. It's like trying to study Martians. You can't capture them, you can't even see them, and sometimes you wonder if they even exist at all. And a baleen whale is the only type of animal, on the entire planet, that cannot be captured alive.)
I can see one thing that could be added to the experiment, though, which is to grab fecal samples too! In many marine mammals, such as the baleen whales, we can only get fecals, never blood. (And sometimes small changes in stress hormones show up only in the feces and are not detectable in blood.) If we're going to want to extrapolate the results of this dolphin experiment to other species... well, it would be great this experiment included fecal hormone!
So later that evening, when we're all at dinner and the wine is flowing freely, I lean over to Dorian and say "You must get poops! You have to get poops. Please get poops from your dolphins!" We get into a discussion about feasibility: what consistency are the dolphin poops, anyway? What do they look like? How "scoopable" are they? I'm shouting all this across Sam Wasser, who is sitting between us (Sam being the guy who invented the poop hormone assay technique, and also the guy who found a way to get DNA out of elephant ivory, but that's another story.) So Sam chimes in with a great design for a poop-scooping Pepsi bottle device that he's been using with free-swimming killer whales in Puget Sound. That's it. That'll work great.
Dorian then says to Sam & me, "Hey, you want to do anything with these dolphins? We've got 70. They wear harnesses and everything. Whatever you want to do. Let me know." SEVENTY TRAINED DOLPHINS! Are you kidding? We could test all our fecal hormones - see if they correlate to blood - test the new thyroid hormone assay - do an ACTH challenge - I've immediately got a dozen ideas. Here's hoping.
I'm muttering "Seventy trained dolphins wearing harnesses," under my breath for the rest of the evening.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Navy sonar: Background
Imagine that you're a dolphin peacefully swimming through the sea, with all of your buddies, happily hunting fish. You're squeaking and whistling to your friends, communicating all sorts of information to them, and they're squeaking and whistling right back. You're also echolocating to find the fish - you're making constant little "clicks", and all around you, you can hear echoes of the clicks coming back from the fish that you're trying to catch. You're also keeping an ear open for killer whales.
In a nutshell, you're exquisitely sensitive to every sound in the sea.
So you're swimming along, and all of a sudden:
BONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
... the loudest sound that you have ever heard in your life blasts out from a U.S. Navy ship a mile away. You're so dazed afterwards that you can't seem to hear right.
What happens next?
Nobody knows!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The U.S. Navy periodically uses a type of sonar that is so loud that there has been a concern that the sonar might affect, or even kill, marine mammals that are near the ships. It's called "low frequency active sonar", and its purpose is primarily to detect quiet submarines. Navy ships emit these sonar pings at astonishingly high decibel levels - up to 180 dB and higher, sometimes over 200 dB. If you were sitting in the water next to one of this ships, the sound level would be the equivalent of standing next to a NASA rocket at takeoff. But just for a fraction of a second, which is how long the "ping" lasts.
When the Navy started using this kind of sonar, there occurred some "mass strandings," events in which whole groups of whales (usually a type called beaked whales) suddenly piled up on beaches - and died. This happens occasionally all over the world; there are always some mysterious mass strandings that happen for unknown reasons. It's always been a puzzle what causes mass strandings. But in a couple of cases, the strandings occurred directly after a Navy sonar exercise nearby. So the Navy started to come under increasing public pressure to demonstrate that they were not harming marine mammals.
In conservation biology terms, the Navy is creating a unique type of habitat degradation - acoustic disturbance. It's not a contaminant, it's not pollution, it's not a fishing net. It's just noise. But it's VERY LOUD noise, and it's not natural for that environment. What might it be doing to the animals?
The first suspicious strandings were noticed in the early 1990s, and since then the Navy's been focusing on this issue more and more. They now have several people working full-time, year-round, on "the marine mammal problem", as they call it, looking for a "solution" - by which they mean, a clear answer, about exactly what volume of sonar causes exactly which problems in marine mammals, at exactly which distance, and exactly how that affects the animals' health, welfare, reproduction and survival afterwards. They need a clear answer in order to know how much they need to quiet down their sonar pings, and under what conditions they shouldn't use sonar at all.
Yesterday I talked to the guy who is in charge of the entire Navy marine mammal program. He told me "You wouldn't believe how far the Navy's come about awareness of this issue. I've been working on this since maybe the mid 90's, and I talk to everyone in the Navy, from the top down. I talk to the secretary and all the generals. At this point, every single four-star general in the Navy, every single one of them, knows all about the "mammal issue". When I walk through the Navy offices, people all know who I am and what I'm working on - they're always calling out 'Hey, it's the mammal guy! Hi mammal guy! Mammal guy, have you solved the problem yet?' "
He added, "And I always say 'Not yet.' "
He went on, "They started off giving me a budget of $700,000 a year to fund research on this problem. That was ten years ago. Now it's $10,000,000 a year."
Actually this coming year it will be $12,500,000. They keep doing more and more research, because the "clear answer" they're seeking gets more and more murky.
Interestingly, the Navy's already solved the major problem: Stopping the strandings. Quoting again from my new Navy friend (paraphrasing, actually - I didn't have a tape recorder so this is from memory): "There's no doubt those couple of early strandings in the 90's were caused by us. We caused those strandings. That was our fault. Clearly. So I studied everything about those events and I made up a list of the conditions that had contributed to the strandings. And now we use that list to decide when not to use sonar."
I asked about the "conditions" and he started reeling off descriptions of exactly which stranding, where, in which year, was related to sonar, and every single detail about each of those strandings - from the number of animals to the species to the weather that day. It became apparent that he knew, by heart, the details every single marine-mammal stranding event in the world in the last 20 years (so did most other people nearby, who were chiming in details like, "Tell her about the Canary Islands!" "Tell her about the melon-headed whales!").
He concluded with: "Here's my list: A deep, narrow channel with no egress. Whales in the channel, especially beaked whales. A shallow ramp out of the channel that goes up to a sloping beach. Three Navy ships cruising back and forth at the other end of the channel. Multiple ships all doing the sonar at once." That'll cause a stranding, he said.
I asked, what's Navy policy now?
He said: "What has happened is, I got them to use my list, and today it is FORBIDDEN in the US Navy, it is absolutely VERBOTEN [you could hear the capital letters in his tone of voice], to do a sonar exercise when those conditions are in place. The conditions of my list. We absolutely never use the sonar in that situation. And we have not had a single mass stranding in ten years caused by the U.S. Navy. That is, not counting those events where a mass stranding occurs for some other reason and the media all says "Oh, there was a Navy ship here doing sonar exercises only a month ago, a thousand miles away, so it must be due to that!" That is the most frustrating thing.... Yes, there have been mass strandings caused by navies recently, but it's not the US Navy. It's the European navies! Because the European navies don't use my list. Actually they don't really have any tough sonar regulations in place. They don't have a clearly defined set of criteria of exactly when they must not use sonar."
He added one more detail: "Oh, and, if we're doing a sonar exercise in any other location, if there's any marine mammal sighted, the sonar is turned down, and if it swims closer to a certain level it's turned down further, and further."
So I asked if a dolphin could "turn off" a Navy ship entirely just by swimming right up to it, and he said "Yes, sure, that happens sometimes." (And I wondered whether some dolphins might actually learn to do that on purpose.)
So here is my impression of where it stands right now: The mass-strandings are not happening any more (not with our navy, anyway), and the Navy's got a pretty good policy of not using sonar, or turning it down, when marine mammals are known to be nearby. It's also become apparent, after an immense amount of testing, that the sonar doesn't kill the animals outright and (at the levels and distances typical in the sea) does not physically damage them. Or as he put it "The sonar's not a Death Ray. It's really not."
But - even if they're not dying, even if they're not stranding, couldn't the sonar still be affecting the animals somehow? Basically: does it STRESS the animals, in some way that might affect their health or survival later?
For example, consider these three possibiltiies:
- Hearing. Loud sonar has been shown (by Navy-funded research) to make a dolphin's hearing less sensitive temporarily. It's called a "Temporary Threshold Shift" - a temporary shift in the threshold of hearing. It's the same effect experienced by a person who spends all night in a loud dance club, walks out on the street later, and realizes that he's shouting at his friends. Because everything sounds muffled. For the human, no big problem. But for an echolocating dolphin - could this ruin its ability to find food, temporarily? Or to communicate with its social group?
- Driving animals away. The most prominent behavioral reaction by beaked whales to sonar is simply that they stop foraging and leave the area for a few days. They just "go quiet, dive deep and leave" as one scientist put it. A couple days later, they come back, and they seem fine. But suppose the consequence was that they went hungry for a few days because of having to leave their feeding grounds. If this happens over and over, would they lose weight? Would they start starving, or not breed as often? Or - is it no problem? How can we tell if it is a problem for a beaked whale to move away for a couple days?
- Chronic stress. The most subtle effect is that loud sonar may simply cause an incresae in stress hormones. In other words, it might just "stress out" the dolphin (or sea lion, beaked whale, etc.), even though the animal might actually be physically just fine. The potential problem here is that long-term chronic stress is well-documented to interfere with health, reproduction, and the immune system.
So it has come down to this: How "stressed out" does a marine mammal feel after it's heard a loud sonar ping? And how often can a marine mammal get "stressed out" before its health, reproduction, and general quality of life really start to suffer?
At this point the Navy is groping for what to do next. They've pretty much stopped the mass strandings, they've shown the sonar doesn't actually kill the animals, but they know the public will not be satisfied with that. So they know they have to somehow tackle this vague, intractable question of: what makes a dolphin feel "too stressed out"?
So what they did was: they have invited all the top stress physiologists and all the marine mammal physiologists from around the world to come to D.C. for a two-day conference, to tell them the state of research in stress physiology, and to advise them what their research priorities should be. They sent out the call worldwide - they got pretty much every marine mammal researcher worldwide who has ever studied any aspect of stress, and they also invited most of the world's experts in general stress physiology. (I apparently got on the list because of a study I did some years ago on measuring stress hormones in North Atlantic Right Whales.) They flew us all here to Washington, D.C., paid our plane tickets, our hotel, our taxis and food and just asked us to talk to them for two days. They're going to use our advice to decide what to do with the $12,500,000 per year that they currently receive for research.
What I think they are only just realizing is that they have strayed into a research minefield. "What stresses a dolphin?" might seem like an easy question, but it's got to be one of the most difficult field biology questions possible. Because it's bedeviled by two of the most complicated and impossible questions of field biology:
(1) How can we study ANYTHING about marine mammal physiology - animals that we can't catch, can't take a blood sample from, and can't even see most of the time?
(2) How can we measure stress? What is stress anyway? What does "stress" even mean?
Poor Navy. I wonder if they know what they've gotten into! These are two of the thorniest problems in biology, and the best minds in the field have not solved either of them in over a century of trying. I once swore I would never get involved in stress research, becuase it's so difficult, so impossible to study, so impossible to get a clear answer; and I also once swore I would never get involved in marine mammals, because they are so difficult, so impossible to study, so impossible to get a clear answer.... So of course here I am at the Office of Naval Research's Workshop on Assessing Acoustic Stress in Marine Mammals.
Well, that's the background. And here we all are in DC!
posts coming next (to be written more slowly):
- summaries of some of the really exciting research projects that I am learning about
- a Navy lament, told to me over several glasses of beer at the Wednesday night social
- the Pie-in-the-Sky list: if you could have all the money you wanted to invent any new research technology to study marine mammals - if you could invent any crazy little robotic gizmo or sequence any genome, what would you do?
- What happens next?
In a nutshell, you're exquisitely sensitive to every sound in the sea.
So you're swimming along, and all of a sudden:
BONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
... the loudest sound that you have ever heard in your life blasts out from a U.S. Navy ship a mile away. You're so dazed afterwards that you can't seem to hear right.
What happens next?
Nobody knows!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The U.S. Navy periodically uses a type of sonar that is so loud that there has been a concern that the sonar might affect, or even kill, marine mammals that are near the ships. It's called "low frequency active sonar", and its purpose is primarily to detect quiet submarines. Navy ships emit these sonar pings at astonishingly high decibel levels - up to 180 dB and higher, sometimes over 200 dB. If you were sitting in the water next to one of this ships, the sound level would be the equivalent of standing next to a NASA rocket at takeoff. But just for a fraction of a second, which is how long the "ping" lasts.
When the Navy started using this kind of sonar, there occurred some "mass strandings," events in which whole groups of whales (usually a type called beaked whales) suddenly piled up on beaches - and died. This happens occasionally all over the world; there are always some mysterious mass strandings that happen for unknown reasons. It's always been a puzzle what causes mass strandings. But in a couple of cases, the strandings occurred directly after a Navy sonar exercise nearby. So the Navy started to come under increasing public pressure to demonstrate that they were not harming marine mammals.
In conservation biology terms, the Navy is creating a unique type of habitat degradation - acoustic disturbance. It's not a contaminant, it's not pollution, it's not a fishing net. It's just noise. But it's VERY LOUD noise, and it's not natural for that environment. What might it be doing to the animals?
The first suspicious strandings were noticed in the early 1990s, and since then the Navy's been focusing on this issue more and more. They now have several people working full-time, year-round, on "the marine mammal problem", as they call it, looking for a "solution" - by which they mean, a clear answer, about exactly what volume of sonar causes exactly which problems in marine mammals, at exactly which distance, and exactly how that affects the animals' health, welfare, reproduction and survival afterwards. They need a clear answer in order to know how much they need to quiet down their sonar pings, and under what conditions they shouldn't use sonar at all.
Yesterday I talked to the guy who is in charge of the entire Navy marine mammal program. He told me "You wouldn't believe how far the Navy's come about awareness of this issue. I've been working on this since maybe the mid 90's, and I talk to everyone in the Navy, from the top down. I talk to the secretary and all the generals. At this point, every single four-star general in the Navy, every single one of them, knows all about the "mammal issue". When I walk through the Navy offices, people all know who I am and what I'm working on - they're always calling out 'Hey, it's the mammal guy! Hi mammal guy! Mammal guy, have you solved the problem yet?' "
He added, "And I always say 'Not yet.' "
He went on, "They started off giving me a budget of $700,000 a year to fund research on this problem. That was ten years ago. Now it's $10,000,000 a year."
Actually this coming year it will be $12,500,000. They keep doing more and more research, because the "clear answer" they're seeking gets more and more murky.
Interestingly, the Navy's already solved the major problem: Stopping the strandings. Quoting again from my new Navy friend (paraphrasing, actually - I didn't have a tape recorder so this is from memory): "There's no doubt those couple of early strandings in the 90's were caused by us. We caused those strandings. That was our fault. Clearly. So I studied everything about those events and I made up a list of the conditions that had contributed to the strandings. And now we use that list to decide when not to use sonar."
I asked about the "conditions" and he started reeling off descriptions of exactly which stranding, where, in which year, was related to sonar, and every single detail about each of those strandings - from the number of animals to the species to the weather that day. It became apparent that he knew, by heart, the details every single marine-mammal stranding event in the world in the last 20 years (so did most other people nearby, who were chiming in details like, "Tell her about the Canary Islands!" "Tell her about the melon-headed whales!").
He concluded with: "Here's my list: A deep, narrow channel with no egress. Whales in the channel, especially beaked whales. A shallow ramp out of the channel that goes up to a sloping beach. Three Navy ships cruising back and forth at the other end of the channel. Multiple ships all doing the sonar at once." That'll cause a stranding, he said.
I asked, what's Navy policy now?
He said: "What has happened is, I got them to use my list, and today it is FORBIDDEN in the US Navy, it is absolutely VERBOTEN [you could hear the capital letters in his tone of voice], to do a sonar exercise when those conditions are in place. The conditions of my list. We absolutely never use the sonar in that situation. And we have not had a single mass stranding in ten years caused by the U.S. Navy. That is, not counting those events where a mass stranding occurs for some other reason and the media all says "Oh, there was a Navy ship here doing sonar exercises only a month ago, a thousand miles away, so it must be due to that!" That is the most frustrating thing.... Yes, there have been mass strandings caused by navies recently, but it's not the US Navy. It's the European navies! Because the European navies don't use my list. Actually they don't really have any tough sonar regulations in place. They don't have a clearly defined set of criteria of exactly when they must not use sonar."
He added one more detail: "Oh, and, if we're doing a sonar exercise in any other location, if there's any marine mammal sighted, the sonar is turned down, and if it swims closer to a certain level it's turned down further, and further."
So I asked if a dolphin could "turn off" a Navy ship entirely just by swimming right up to it, and he said "Yes, sure, that happens sometimes." (And I wondered whether some dolphins might actually learn to do that on purpose.)
So here is my impression of where it stands right now: The mass-strandings are not happening any more (not with our navy, anyway), and the Navy's got a pretty good policy of not using sonar, or turning it down, when marine mammals are known to be nearby. It's also become apparent, after an immense amount of testing, that the sonar doesn't kill the animals outright and (at the levels and distances typical in the sea) does not physically damage them. Or as he put it "The sonar's not a Death Ray. It's really not."
But - even if they're not dying, even if they're not stranding, couldn't the sonar still be affecting the animals somehow? Basically: does it STRESS the animals, in some way that might affect their health or survival later?
For example, consider these three possibiltiies:
- Hearing. Loud sonar has been shown (by Navy-funded research) to make a dolphin's hearing less sensitive temporarily. It's called a "Temporary Threshold Shift" - a temporary shift in the threshold of hearing. It's the same effect experienced by a person who spends all night in a loud dance club, walks out on the street later, and realizes that he's shouting at his friends. Because everything sounds muffled. For the human, no big problem. But for an echolocating dolphin - could this ruin its ability to find food, temporarily? Or to communicate with its social group?
- Driving animals away. The most prominent behavioral reaction by beaked whales to sonar is simply that they stop foraging and leave the area for a few days. They just "go quiet, dive deep and leave" as one scientist put it. A couple days later, they come back, and they seem fine. But suppose the consequence was that they went hungry for a few days because of having to leave their feeding grounds. If this happens over and over, would they lose weight? Would they start starving, or not breed as often? Or - is it no problem? How can we tell if it is a problem for a beaked whale to move away for a couple days?
- Chronic stress. The most subtle effect is that loud sonar may simply cause an incresae in stress hormones. In other words, it might just "stress out" the dolphin (or sea lion, beaked whale, etc.), even though the animal might actually be physically just fine. The potential problem here is that long-term chronic stress is well-documented to interfere with health, reproduction, and the immune system.
So it has come down to this: How "stressed out" does a marine mammal feel after it's heard a loud sonar ping? And how often can a marine mammal get "stressed out" before its health, reproduction, and general quality of life really start to suffer?
At this point the Navy is groping for what to do next. They've pretty much stopped the mass strandings, they've shown the sonar doesn't actually kill the animals, but they know the public will not be satisfied with that. So they know they have to somehow tackle this vague, intractable question of: what makes a dolphin feel "too stressed out"?
So what they did was: they have invited all the top stress physiologists and all the marine mammal physiologists from around the world to come to D.C. for a two-day conference, to tell them the state of research in stress physiology, and to advise them what their research priorities should be. They sent out the call worldwide - they got pretty much every marine mammal researcher worldwide who has ever studied any aspect of stress, and they also invited most of the world's experts in general stress physiology. (I apparently got on the list because of a study I did some years ago on measuring stress hormones in North Atlantic Right Whales.) They flew us all here to Washington, D.C., paid our plane tickets, our hotel, our taxis and food and just asked us to talk to them for two days. They're going to use our advice to decide what to do with the $12,500,000 per year that they currently receive for research.
What I think they are only just realizing is that they have strayed into a research minefield. "What stresses a dolphin?" might seem like an easy question, but it's got to be one of the most difficult field biology questions possible. Because it's bedeviled by two of the most complicated and impossible questions of field biology:
(1) How can we study ANYTHING about marine mammal physiology - animals that we can't catch, can't take a blood sample from, and can't even see most of the time?
(2) How can we measure stress? What is stress anyway? What does "stress" even mean?
Poor Navy. I wonder if they know what they've gotten into! These are two of the thorniest problems in biology, and the best minds in the field have not solved either of them in over a century of trying. I once swore I would never get involved in stress research, becuase it's so difficult, so impossible to study, so impossible to get a clear answer; and I also once swore I would never get involved in marine mammals, because they are so difficult, so impossible to study, so impossible to get a clear answer.... So of course here I am at the Office of Naval Research's Workshop on Assessing Acoustic Stress in Marine Mammals.
Well, that's the background. And here we all are in DC!
posts coming next (to be written more slowly):
- summaries of some of the really exciting research projects that I am learning about
- a Navy lament, told to me over several glasses of beer at the Wednesday night social
- the Pie-in-the-Sky list: if you could have all the money you wanted to invent any new research technology to study marine mammals - if you could invent any crazy little robotic gizmo or sequence any genome, what would you do?
- What happens next?
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Bear country
I've got to get caught up on the rest of the story of our first bird, and our second bird and third bird too. But a bear interlude first...I spent most of yesterday bushwhacking by myself through the back woods, off trail, of Emma Matilda Lake, which is pretty serious grizzly country. In the last five years Jackson Hole has been recolonized by grizzlies. It's a new enough development that the locals seem almost paralyzed by bear paranoia - many people won't even hike any more, and many of the old-timers in the area will no longer visit their favorite upcountry fishing spots. The park is a bit late on the uptake getting ready for this - they don't even have bear boxes (bear-proof containers to put your food in) in the campsites yet.
And yes, there have been a few attacks. But almost all my fieldwork has been in grizzly country (in northern Alaska), and what I notice about the accounts of the attacks here in Jackson Hole is that they all involved a female with cubs being taken by surprise by a silent, lone human. Given the tiny number of attacks, compared to the thousands and thousands of tourists in the area, and (by logical extension) the thousands and thousands of times that grizzlies must have seen people and NOT attacked them, it seems to me that the grizzlies of Jackson Hole must be what I think of as "sensible bears". A sensible bear is one that will always do its utmost to avoid humans, given a halfway decent chance to detect the human first.
Most of the bears around my old field site at Toolik, Alaska, were also sensible bears - yeah, well, except for that one time that crazy aggressive grizz came through the camp when we had all the Russian ecologists visiting, but that's another story. Anyway, I am enough used to the concept that I just take the usual precautions and don't worry about it. The usual precautions are: wear a jangly bear bell on your backpack, and sing songs and talk loudly to yourself (which I do all the time anyway, so it's just business as usual for me). Basically you're hoping that (a) the bear will hear you coming, and (b) it is a sensible bear that will then decide to go the other way.
I should have been carrying pepper spray, too, but Jamie had the pepper spray - we thought originally that we'd be travelling together, but of course we ended up hiking miles away from each other, and ironically I ended up doing the grizz area with no pepper spray, while Jamie, with the pepper spray, was down south more in black bear country.
So anyway, we did see several black bears, but no grizz. I saw plenty of bear scat, but couldn't tell whether it was black or grizz. Several times I heard something or other moving away from me - a loud CRACK as something stepped on a branch, a "Hmppph" of something sighing, a sudden shaking of branches in a clump of bushes nearby. It seemed very Stephen King sometimes, standing there alone in the eerily silent, dark, beautiful woods, wondering what huge Thing had just passed me by. Elk, moose, or bear? Impossible to tell. Once I definitely saw the rack of a bull elk gliding through the forest. The other times, I don't know what it was.
And if you're wondering how to tell a grizz from a black:
Q. How do you tell a grizzly bear from a black bear?
A. Climb up a tree. If it climbs up after you and kills you, it's a black bear. If it knocks the tree over and kills you, it's a grizzly bear.
Q. How do you tell grizzly bear scat from black bear scat?
A. The grizzly bear scat has little bells in it, and it smells of pepper.
And yes, there have been a few attacks. But almost all my fieldwork has been in grizzly country (in northern Alaska), and what I notice about the accounts of the attacks here in Jackson Hole is that they all involved a female with cubs being taken by surprise by a silent, lone human. Given the tiny number of attacks, compared to the thousands and thousands of tourists in the area, and (by logical extension) the thousands and thousands of times that grizzlies must have seen people and NOT attacked them, it seems to me that the grizzlies of Jackson Hole must be what I think of as "sensible bears". A sensible bear is one that will always do its utmost to avoid humans, given a halfway decent chance to detect the human first.
Most of the bears around my old field site at Toolik, Alaska, were also sensible bears - yeah, well, except for that one time that crazy aggressive grizz came through the camp when we had all the Russian ecologists visiting, but that's another story. Anyway, I am enough used to the concept that I just take the usual precautions and don't worry about it. The usual precautions are: wear a jangly bear bell on your backpack, and sing songs and talk loudly to yourself (which I do all the time anyway, so it's just business as usual for me). Basically you're hoping that (a) the bear will hear you coming, and (b) it is a sensible bear that will then decide to go the other way.
I should have been carrying pepper spray, too, but Jamie had the pepper spray - we thought originally that we'd be travelling together, but of course we ended up hiking miles away from each other, and ironically I ended up doing the grizz area with no pepper spray, while Jamie, with the pepper spray, was down south more in black bear country.
So anyway, we did see several black bears, but no grizz. I saw plenty of bear scat, but couldn't tell whether it was black or grizz. Several times I heard something or other moving away from me - a loud CRACK as something stepped on a branch, a "Hmppph" of something sighing, a sudden shaking of branches in a clump of bushes nearby. It seemed very Stephen King sometimes, standing there alone in the eerily silent, dark, beautiful woods, wondering what huge Thing had just passed me by. Elk, moose, or bear? Impossible to tell. Once I definitely saw the rack of a bull elk gliding through the forest. The other times, I don't know what it was.
And if you're wondering how to tell a grizz from a black:
Q. How do you tell a grizzly bear from a black bear?
A. Climb up a tree. If it climbs up after you and kills you, it's a black bear. If it knocks the tree over and kills you, it's a grizzly bear.
Q. How do you tell grizzly bear scat from black bear scat?
A. The grizzly bear scat has little bells in it, and it smells of pepper.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
The battery hike
We had an inordinate number of equipment crises on this first day, the most critical being when we realized that none of our rechargeable batteries had charged. That meant that our radio receivers, MP3 recorders, GPSs and two-way radios all were dying. Without the receivers, we couldn't find our bird; without the MP3, we had no way to record our precious heart-rate data; and without the GPS and the two-way, no way to find each other.
I volunteered to go get batteries, which I thought would not be too hard; I only had to find my way back to my car, which I knew was close to the main road, and I knew there was 1 trail through this area a bit to the south of us. So: hike south till I hit the trail, then follow the trail to the spur road, follow the spur road to the main road, follow the main road to my car, then get in my car, drive to the nearest tourist store and get batteries. Then find Jamie again.
The scramble south got to be a bit eerie. I walked and walked and walked, but no trail. I KNEW the trail had to be there, and since the trail did a huge loop around us, there was no way to avoid hitting it eventually. Yet it was strange to be plunging off into unknown territory in a strange direction. I walked and walked and walked, down ridges and through woods and down ridges and through woods. Could I have missed it? Could it be such a tiny, unmarked trail that I had marched right over it without noticing?
I'd popped out of the woods by now. I was in a huge flat mesa of beautiful sagebrush desert, hiking through wildflowers. I took one more step and suddenly there it was, right underfoot, stretching away to me left and right, clear as day, a trail!
So then I followed the trail, and it seemed to go on for a long, long, long way. (two miles, I figured later, but it seemed longer) It curled up and down through the enchantingly beautiful sagebrush flats, then climbed back up to the mountain ridges, past magically beautiful views of the Tetons, then dropped down past a beautiful pond, and then, with that same shocking sense of suddenness as when I'd found the trail, there was the spur road, right under me. Freshly paved and shockingly black, it seemed like an alien landing strip in the middle of all that wilderness.
Now all I had to do was follow it a little ways to the main road.
A "little ways". I turned left and started walking. Plod, plod, plod. It was mid-day by this time and the black asphalt was bakingly hot. The sun was blazing down. Plod, plod, plod. Plod, plod, plod. I could not believe how slowly the road moved past me. I started noticing tiny details of the repaving job - oh, here's where the steamroller had to back up a bit; here's where they must have dropped a new load of gravel.
It was extremely hot. I started zigzagging from tree shadow to tree shadow. Tourist cars zoomed past occasionally and I thought vacantly "I should ask somebody for a ride," but by the time the thought drifted into my head, the car was already long past.
An extremely long time passed and I was still walking in the sun, on the hot black road.
f-i-n-a-l-l-y came .. The Main Road! yay!
Now I just had a little ways to go.
plod, plod, plod.
- whoosh - [car going past] "maybe I should ask somebody for a ride..."
plod, plod, plod
AT LAST the turnoff to where my Forester was parked! A tiny bit more plodding and there was my Forester. It looked magical and surreal, like a spacecraft. Could this vehicle actually propel me without my having to walk?? I unlocked it - got it - started it up - so strange to suddenly be seated in the plush seats of car, driving. The Forester whisked me at what seemed an impossibly fast velocity - forty miles an hour! my god! it was incredible! - right past that spur road entrance, right past all those Signal Mountain woods that I'd been hiking through, till I reached tourist central, Signal Mountain Lodge. Dozens of RVs driving around, women with thick make-up tottering on high heels to the Signal Mountain cafe, people getting gas, kids running around, two or three Harley bikers, people with rafts and kayaks. And a little convenience store surrounded by tourists buying bad coffee and horrifically disgusting snack food. I walked in and said "I'd like to buy all your double-A batteries."
Batteries in hand, I sat still in the car for a moment, chowed down a huge bag of Smartfood popcorn at enormous velocity, then drove back to Signal Mountain. Jamie and I were communicating by text message on our cell phones now, since our two-way radios were dead. But both cell phones were near dying too. Jamie told me "Just go up to the lookout at the top of the mountain, come down that same trail again, and about 1 minute after you go past a hairpin turn, turn right and hike up the next ridge. I'm on top of that ridge."
What Jamie didn't know was that it wasn't 1 minute past the hairpin, it was 6 minutes past the hairpin; and that there wasn't 1 ridge, there were five parallel ridges, (at least), steeply divided from each other by scrambly steep gullies full of those perfectly round little rocks. I scrambled up and over one. It was completely exhausting. Jamie wasn't there. I scrambled down the other side, nearly falling a dozen times, and plodded up the second. Jamie wasn't there. I scrambled down the other side, saw a third ridge, started to get a very bad feeling about this whole thing, started scrambling up the third....
Finally, five ridges later, there was Jamie! Perched bright as day by a gigantic fallen trunk on skinny ridgetop #5. Nearly mute with exhaustion at this point, I just collapsed next to her.
"THERE HE GOES!" said Jamie. She charged down ridge 5. I called out, "Wait, wait! The batteries!" "Oh yeah," We swapped batteries, got our two-ways going, and she charged down ridge 5 and up ridge 6, while I trailed contentedly behind, battery quest over.
I volunteered to go get batteries, which I thought would not be too hard; I only had to find my way back to my car, which I knew was close to the main road, and I knew there was 1 trail through this area a bit to the south of us. So: hike south till I hit the trail, then follow the trail to the spur road, follow the spur road to the main road, follow the main road to my car, then get in my car, drive to the nearest tourist store and get batteries. Then find Jamie again.
The scramble south got to be a bit eerie. I walked and walked and walked, but no trail. I KNEW the trail had to be there, and since the trail did a huge loop around us, there was no way to avoid hitting it eventually. Yet it was strange to be plunging off into unknown territory in a strange direction. I walked and walked and walked, down ridges and through woods and down ridges and through woods. Could I have missed it? Could it be such a tiny, unmarked trail that I had marched right over it without noticing?
I'd popped out of the woods by now. I was in a huge flat mesa of beautiful sagebrush desert, hiking through wildflowers. I took one more step and suddenly there it was, right underfoot, stretching away to me left and right, clear as day, a trail!
So then I followed the trail, and it seemed to go on for a long, long, long way. (two miles, I figured later, but it seemed longer) It curled up and down through the enchantingly beautiful sagebrush flats, then climbed back up to the mountain ridges, past magically beautiful views of the Tetons, then dropped down past a beautiful pond, and then, with that same shocking sense of suddenness as when I'd found the trail, there was the spur road, right under me. Freshly paved and shockingly black, it seemed like an alien landing strip in the middle of all that wilderness.
Now all I had to do was follow it a little ways to the main road.
A "little ways". I turned left and started walking. Plod, plod, plod. It was mid-day by this time and the black asphalt was bakingly hot. The sun was blazing down. Plod, plod, plod. Plod, plod, plod. I could not believe how slowly the road moved past me. I started noticing tiny details of the repaving job - oh, here's where the steamroller had to back up a bit; here's where they must have dropped a new load of gravel.
It was extremely hot. I started zigzagging from tree shadow to tree shadow. Tourist cars zoomed past occasionally and I thought vacantly "I should ask somebody for a ride," but by the time the thought drifted into my head, the car was already long past.
An extremely long time passed and I was still walking in the sun, on the hot black road.
f-i-n-a-l-l-y came .. The Main Road! yay!
Now I just had a little ways to go.
plod, plod, plod.
- whoosh - [car going past] "maybe I should ask somebody for a ride..."
plod, plod, plod
AT LAST the turnoff to where my Forester was parked! A tiny bit more plodding and there was my Forester. It looked magical and surreal, like a spacecraft. Could this vehicle actually propel me without my having to walk?? I unlocked it - got it - started it up - so strange to suddenly be seated in the plush seats of car, driving. The Forester whisked me at what seemed an impossibly fast velocity - forty miles an hour! my god! it was incredible! - right past that spur road entrance, right past all those Signal Mountain woods that I'd been hiking through, till I reached tourist central, Signal Mountain Lodge. Dozens of RVs driving around, women with thick make-up tottering on high heels to the Signal Mountain cafe, people getting gas, kids running around, two or three Harley bikers, people with rafts and kayaks. And a little convenience store surrounded by tourists buying bad coffee and horrifically disgusting snack food. I walked in and said "I'd like to buy all your double-A batteries."
Batteries in hand, I sat still in the car for a moment, chowed down a huge bag of Smartfood popcorn at enormous velocity, then drove back to Signal Mountain. Jamie and I were communicating by text message on our cell phones now, since our two-way radios were dead. But both cell phones were near dying too. Jamie told me "Just go up to the lookout at the top of the mountain, come down that same trail again, and about 1 minute after you go past a hairpin turn, turn right and hike up the next ridge. I'm on top of that ridge."
What Jamie didn't know was that it wasn't 1 minute past the hairpin, it was 6 minutes past the hairpin; and that there wasn't 1 ridge, there were five parallel ridges, (at least), steeply divided from each other by scrambly steep gullies full of those perfectly round little rocks. I scrambled up and over one. It was completely exhausting. Jamie wasn't there. I scrambled down the other side, nearly falling a dozen times, and plodded up the second. Jamie wasn't there. I scrambled down the other side, saw a third ridge, started to get a very bad feeling about this whole thing, started scrambling up the third....
Finally, five ridges later, there was Jamie! Perched bright as day by a gigantic fallen trunk on skinny ridgetop #5. Nearly mute with exhaustion at this point, I just collapsed next to her.
"THERE HE GOES!" said Jamie. She charged down ridge 5. I called out, "Wait, wait! The batteries!" "Oh yeah," We swapped batteries, got our two-ways going, and she charged down ridge 5 and up ridge 6, while I trailed contentedly behind, battery quest over.
Day 1, the scramble
That day, and the following day, have become a tremendous blur in my memory. Wild dashes over incredible landscapes. Scrambling up and down steep lines of parallel ridges - up and over one ridge, up and over the next, up and over the next. Sliding down ravines in a rubble of glacial-moraine round stones - a forty-five degree slope composed entirely of perfectly round 4" rocks that tumbled under foot endlessly like huge marbles. Clambering over literally thousands of fallen tree trunks that continually reached up with their broken branches to try to trip you as you leapt over. Coming abruptly to a halt as you realized you'd walked into a complicated three-dimenstional trap of huge fallen trunks in all direction, and negotiating your way out like a monkey, always thinking: where can I climb out where I only need one hand, and will not trip?
You never knew where your foot was going to come down - in a hole between boulders, in a nest of interlocking branches deceptively covered with grass; I developed a secret horror of getting my foot trapped, falling forward with my own momentum and breaking my ankle.
It is a beautiful state of mind, to be hiking straight through a patch of wilderness with absolutely no idea what is in front of you, with no regard to terrain, topography, habitat direction or trails. Just following the "WOOOO" of the radio hum on your antenna, wherever it leads you. One minute I'd be scrambling through a deep, dark pine woods filled entirely with eerie fallen silver trunks draped in moss. The next second I'd pop out into the sun and be sprinting through an open glade full of thousands, thousands, THOUSANDS of tiny blue lupines underfoot. Then into an eerie shaded glade with a single glowing red lily spotlit in the center. Next another sheer ledge of those tiny, round boulders that shifted and spun underfoot as I scrambled down them. I'd stagger around a turn, puff my way up a ledge, wedge my way through a dense tangle of scratchy branches, burst through the trees, and BOOM there would be the Tetons, the mighty mountain range rearing across the whole western horizon, and a vast field of tiny sunflowers all facing exactly in the sun's direction. Scramble, scramble, scramble - now we're in sagebrush - now a lily-covered pond - uh-oh, now another hill to climb - back into the dark pine woods -
I've never ever been so relentlessly exhausted in my entire life. There was no way to ever take a break - if you wanted to take your jacket off, take a drink of water, get a stone out of your shoe - you couldn't, because - there goes the bird! "THERE HE GOES, THERE HE GOES!"
You never knew where your foot was going to come down - in a hole between boulders, in a nest of interlocking branches deceptively covered with grass; I developed a secret horror of getting my foot trapped, falling forward with my own momentum and breaking my ankle.
It is a beautiful state of mind, to be hiking straight through a patch of wilderness with absolutely no idea what is in front of you, with no regard to terrain, topography, habitat direction or trails. Just following the "WOOOO" of the radio hum on your antenna, wherever it leads you. One minute I'd be scrambling through a deep, dark pine woods filled entirely with eerie fallen silver trunks draped in moss. The next second I'd pop out into the sun and be sprinting through an open glade full of thousands, thousands, THOUSANDS of tiny blue lupines underfoot. Then into an eerie shaded glade with a single glowing red lily spotlit in the center. Next another sheer ledge of those tiny, round boulders that shifted and spun underfoot as I scrambled down them. I'd stagger around a turn, puff my way up a ledge, wedge my way through a dense tangle of scratchy branches, burst through the trees, and BOOM there would be the Tetons, the mighty mountain range rearing across the whole western horizon, and a vast field of tiny sunflowers all facing exactly in the sun's direction. Scramble, scramble, scramble - now we're in sagebrush - now a lily-covered pond - uh-oh, now another hill to climb - back into the dark pine woods -
I've never ever been so relentlessly exhausted in my entire life. There was no way to ever take a break - if you wanted to take your jacket off, take a drink of water, get a stone out of your shoe - you couldn't, because - there goes the bird! "THERE HE GOES, THERE HE GOES!"
Day 1, the beginning
My trusty iPhone alarm went off at 4:30am, and I poked my head out of my sleeping bag. Where was I again?? Oh yeah - in the back of my Forester, curled up against all my radio equipment, on a rough rocky clearing near the romantic Sewage Lagoons by Signal Mountain, by the edge of the forest, near our bird.
Our goal was to get up and packed before the wild birds, including our crossbill, woke up. It was still pitch black; bright stars overhead; the whole Milky Way spread against the sky. A single brilliant light shown especially brightly - Venus or Jupiter. Not a single bird was singing yet, not even the Western Wood-Pewees (they seem always the first ones up) or the Swainson's Thrushes (usually the second).
Time to get going. I staggered out of my chilly car and packed up my 3 days' of food, water, camping gear and radio gear into my big pack. I was wearing the same clothes I'd worn yesterday; I'd slept in them and I'd be wearing them for up to two more days.
I drove my car up a rubbly, craggly hill, got my pack on and hiked out the other side of the fence to meet Jamie near the bird. She was just finishing packing up her stuff. The woods around me started to say "Peeeer" over and over - Western Wood-Pewees. And few minutes later, the gorgeous fluting warble of the thrushes, one of most beautiful birdsongs of the northern woods. Bird after bird joined in; the sky began to lighten; Jamie and I chatted for a bit, and then suddenly - "HE'S MOVING!" said Jamie. "THERE HE GOES!" Jamie spun around with her antenna, waved it around till she found the direction with the loudest signal, and we charged off in that direction.
Through woods and up ridges and over deadfall and down ridges and up and up and up - we suddenly popped out onto the main National Park road and recognized where we were. "He's headed for Signal Mountain!" said Jamie, and we ran across the road and straight into the Signal Mountain woods.
Everyone had told us we'd never be able to follow crossbills. When Jamie met with the transmitter gurus in Germany, the people who have done more bird-tracking than anyone in the world, and told them she was going to try crossbills, "they laughed!" she said. ("Just wait till a few months from now!" I'd said. "They'll .... well, they'll probably still be laughing.") Crossbills are supposedly the most nomadic birds in the northern hemisphere. A single bird could zoom clear from Nova Scotia to British Columbia if the mood takes him. So Jamie and I had both been half-expecting our bird to arrow off into the sky like a feathery meteor, for parts unknown, leaving the entire Grand Tetons National Park in the dust behind him. But amazingly, our little bird was moving in little short hops, from tree to tree, almost casually - and we were actually able to follow him.
Let me rephrase that. Jamie was able to follow him. Jamie is a soccer-playing surfer girl, while I have more recently moved into the role of pudgy middle-aged professor who spends all her time sitting in cafes grading. Having tested myself several times in my human physiology lab, I knew I was in reasonable shape but not excellent shape. We were running straight up hill, tripping endlessly on rolling rocks and scrambling over huge fallen trees every couple of paces - carrying our fully-laden packs and all our radio gear and always with one arm in the air holding up the antenna. Jamie was zooming along in front of me like a woman possessed. I'd soon reached that level of desperate panting that I knew, from those physiology tests, meant I was at or exceeding my theoretical maximum heart rate - the point at which you will soon either pass out or have a heart attack. I was certain I was about keel over when Jamie stopped suddenly and turned to me and said "Wow, this is fun! Isn't it?"
And she was right. It really was fun. We were charging through the wild woods, off the path, in bear country, in the Tetons. We were actually following a crossbill!
Our goal was to get up and packed before the wild birds, including our crossbill, woke up. It was still pitch black; bright stars overhead; the whole Milky Way spread against the sky. A single brilliant light shown especially brightly - Venus or Jupiter. Not a single bird was singing yet, not even the Western Wood-Pewees (they seem always the first ones up) or the Swainson's Thrushes (usually the second).
Time to get going. I staggered out of my chilly car and packed up my 3 days' of food, water, camping gear and radio gear into my big pack. I was wearing the same clothes I'd worn yesterday; I'd slept in them and I'd be wearing them for up to two more days.
I drove my car up a rubbly, craggly hill, got my pack on and hiked out the other side of the fence to meet Jamie near the bird. She was just finishing packing up her stuff. The woods around me started to say "Peeeer" over and over - Western Wood-Pewees. And few minutes later, the gorgeous fluting warble of the thrushes, one of most beautiful birdsongs of the northern woods. Bird after bird joined in; the sky began to lighten; Jamie and I chatted for a bit, and then suddenly - "HE'S MOVING!" said Jamie. "THERE HE GOES!" Jamie spun around with her antenna, waved it around till she found the direction with the loudest signal, and we charged off in that direction.
Through woods and up ridges and over deadfall and down ridges and up and up and up - we suddenly popped out onto the main National Park road and recognized where we were. "He's headed for Signal Mountain!" said Jamie, and we ran across the road and straight into the Signal Mountain woods.
Everyone had told us we'd never be able to follow crossbills. When Jamie met with the transmitter gurus in Germany, the people who have done more bird-tracking than anyone in the world, and told them she was going to try crossbills, "they laughed!" she said. ("Just wait till a few months from now!" I'd said. "They'll .... well, they'll probably still be laughing.") Crossbills are supposedly the most nomadic birds in the northern hemisphere. A single bird could zoom clear from Nova Scotia to British Columbia if the mood takes him. So Jamie and I had both been half-expecting our bird to arrow off into the sky like a feathery meteor, for parts unknown, leaving the entire Grand Tetons National Park in the dust behind him. But amazingly, our little bird was moving in little short hops, from tree to tree, almost casually - and we were actually able to follow him.
Let me rephrase that. Jamie was able to follow him. Jamie is a soccer-playing surfer girl, while I have more recently moved into the role of pudgy middle-aged professor who spends all her time sitting in cafes grading. Having tested myself several times in my human physiology lab, I knew I was in reasonable shape but not excellent shape. We were running straight up hill, tripping endlessly on rolling rocks and scrambling over huge fallen trees every couple of paces - carrying our fully-laden packs and all our radio gear and always with one arm in the air holding up the antenna. Jamie was zooming along in front of me like a woman possessed. I'd soon reached that level of desperate panting that I knew, from those physiology tests, meant I was at or exceeding my theoretical maximum heart rate - the point at which you will soon either pass out or have a heart attack. I was certain I was about keel over when Jamie stopped suddenly and turned to me and said "Wow, this is fun! Isn't it?"
And she was right. It really was fun. We were charging through the wild woods, off the path, in bear country, in the Tetons. We were actually following a crossbill!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Day 1
Near the end of the afternoon, it was time to head back to camp with a couple of blood samples we'd taken on a female crossbill, the only crossbill of the day so far. I piled the cooler into my car and took off on the 30 minute drive at the foot of the magnificent Teton range, to camp. I got to camp, fired up the generator, started spinning down the blood in our tiny field centrifuge, when I got a text from Jamie: "Birds around. Might get one." That meant there was a crossbill hopping around near the net. I hurriedly finished processing the blood and had just hopped back in my truck when I got another text:
"Got him"
I charged back to the netting site, chafing furiously when I got penned behind a biker gang that was moseying past the Tetons at 30mph. I can't really blame them - it is, indeed, perhaps the most beautiful drive in North America - but I was vibrating with the need to get back to the netting site and get that radio on that bird.
I finally pulled in, 45 minutes after Jamie'd caught the bird, screeched my car to a halt and sprang out, took 30 seconds to calm myself down, and then fished the bird out of the little cloth "bird bag" he'd been sitting in.
I braced my elbows on the truck tailgate and held the bird in my left hand, belly down, his head cradled between my index and middle fingers. I spread his wings gently out of the way, took a firm grip on his primary feathers to make sure he didn't flutter his wings just at the wrong time, and Jamie bent close to put the tiny copper wires in place.
Five minutes later Jamie got the transmitter fully glued on, and instantly the "WOOOOOO..." of the transmitter, that we'd been hearing in the radio receiver, began to wobble like a fast siren: "WEEOO-EEOO-EEOO-EEOO..."
"That's his heart rate!! That's heart rate! It's working!" I was sure it was his heart rate. We both grinned hugely at each other. The radio was working!
And then we realized we had better be ready to track! I held the bird a few minutes longer, to give Jamie time to get her backpack ready and change into her hiking shoes, strap on all her radio gear and get hold of the portable antenna that she'd be carrying.
As soon as she was ready, I opened my hand. The crossbill flew straight as an arrow to a tree just outside the fence of our netting site. Jamie raced to the gate, to follow him around the fence, and I flew into action packing everything up.
Jamie's job: Follow That Bird.
My job: pack up all the netting gear, the live birds, drive back to the campsite, set the live birds up so they would be okay for three days on their own, process the new blood sample and get it into the freezer, and then race back to the last place I'd seen Jamie. Jamie was going to leave flagging tape on the trees for me, like a trail of bread crumbs, to help me find her.
Netting poles in the car, nets in the car, net buckets in the car. Pack up all the banding gear. Blood sample in its little container, in the little cooler, in the big cooler. Live birds, in their cage, carefully into the back of my car. Drive Jamie's truck outside the fence. Run back inside, get my own car, drive all the way back to camp.
Arrive at camp. Birds first: Fresh water, lots of food, more extra water, more extra food, some pine nuts for good luck, and a fresh change of paper.
Haul the generator outside, power it up; run the centrifuge, spin the blood, pipet the samples, write out the tiny little labels, label everything, write down the hematocrits, toss them in the freezer.
Power down the generator, haul it back inside.
Take a minute to be sure I've got everything: Sleeping bag, sleeping pad, change of socks and underwear, as many water bottles as I can carry, three days' worth of trail mix and food; binoculars, radio receiver, antenna, MP3 recorder (to record the heart rate), headphones. iPhone (my GPS), two-way radio, emergency whistle. Bear bell. Tons of extra batteries.
Race back to Jamie. It was almost night by the time arrived. I'd been worried I wouldn't be able to find her flagging tape in the dark, but I found her all of ten feet from where I'd left her - and she'd dutifully tied a piece of flagging tape where she'd started, and another one ten feet away where she was standing now. "Gee, good thing you put that flagging tape up, or I'd never have found you," I said, and she said "He hasn't moved at all! He's still in the same tree - I think he's roosted for the night." After some conferral we decided she'd camp right under his tree, and I'd sleep in my car on the other side of the fence - in case he flew over the fence suddenly.
We were both almost too excited to sleep. Jamie set up her sleeping bag right under the tree while I inched my car down a steep stony slope, trying to get it in the best place to keep tabs on the bird (I was not at all sure I could get the car back up again). The mosquitoes were horrific, but ever since Toolik that hasn't bothered me. I curled up in the back seat of the car with all my equipment piled next to me, ready to go in the morning.
Night fell, gradually, slowly, and the stars emerged. Nighthawks were calling overhead.
I heard a man singing bear songs nearby: "Don't come NEAR me, don't come NEAR me, don't come NEAR me, Mister Bear! I've got a BEER, got a BEER, but you can't HAVE it, Mister Bear! " (Bears are much less likely to attack if they hear you coming and don't get surprised, so hikers in bear country usually either sing songs when they're on their own, or wear bear bells.)
The bear man went away. Hours passed. I was way too wound up to sleep. Around midnight I saw a mysterious light floating through the woods - headed straight for Jamie. It was somebody walking with a flashlight! Either that or bears have discovered batteries. What on earth was somebody doing out in the woods at midnight in bear country on an unmarked trail? I watched as the light silently bobbed closer, and closer, and closer... ready to spring out of the car if they caused any trouble with Jamie... but they went right past Jamie; they hadn't seen her. (the next day Jamie told me it was two people, dead silent. Guess we'll never know what that was about.)
Finally, around 2am the temperature started to drop, and I curled in my sleeping bag and fell asleep.
"Got him"
I charged back to the netting site, chafing furiously when I got penned behind a biker gang that was moseying past the Tetons at 30mph. I can't really blame them - it is, indeed, perhaps the most beautiful drive in North America - but I was vibrating with the need to get back to the netting site and get that radio on that bird.
I finally pulled in, 45 minutes after Jamie'd caught the bird, screeched my car to a halt and sprang out, took 30 seconds to calm myself down, and then fished the bird out of the little cloth "bird bag" he'd been sitting in.
I braced my elbows on the truck tailgate and held the bird in my left hand, belly down, his head cradled between my index and middle fingers. I spread his wings gently out of the way, took a firm grip on his primary feathers to make sure he didn't flutter his wings just at the wrong time, and Jamie bent close to put the tiny copper wires in place.
Five minutes later Jamie got the transmitter fully glued on, and instantly the "WOOOOOO..." of the transmitter, that we'd been hearing in the radio receiver, began to wobble like a fast siren: "WEEOO-EEOO-EEOO-EEOO..."
"That's his heart rate!! That's heart rate! It's working!" I was sure it was his heart rate. We both grinned hugely at each other. The radio was working!
And then we realized we had better be ready to track! I held the bird a few minutes longer, to give Jamie time to get her backpack ready and change into her hiking shoes, strap on all her radio gear and get hold of the portable antenna that she'd be carrying.
As soon as she was ready, I opened my hand. The crossbill flew straight as an arrow to a tree just outside the fence of our netting site. Jamie raced to the gate, to follow him around the fence, and I flew into action packing everything up.
Jamie's job: Follow That Bird.
My job: pack up all the netting gear, the live birds, drive back to the campsite, set the live birds up so they would be okay for three days on their own, process the new blood sample and get it into the freezer, and then race back to the last place I'd seen Jamie. Jamie was going to leave flagging tape on the trees for me, like a trail of bread crumbs, to help me find her.
Netting poles in the car, nets in the car, net buckets in the car. Pack up all the banding gear. Blood sample in its little container, in the little cooler, in the big cooler. Live birds, in their cage, carefully into the back of my car. Drive Jamie's truck outside the fence. Run back inside, get my own car, drive all the way back to camp.
Arrive at camp. Birds first: Fresh water, lots of food, more extra water, more extra food, some pine nuts for good luck, and a fresh change of paper.
Haul the generator outside, power it up; run the centrifuge, spin the blood, pipet the samples, write out the tiny little labels, label everything, write down the hematocrits, toss them in the freezer.
Power down the generator, haul it back inside.
Take a minute to be sure I've got everything: Sleeping bag, sleeping pad, change of socks and underwear, as many water bottles as I can carry, three days' worth of trail mix and food; binoculars, radio receiver, antenna, MP3 recorder (to record the heart rate), headphones. iPhone (my GPS), two-way radio, emergency whistle. Bear bell. Tons of extra batteries.
Race back to Jamie. It was almost night by the time arrived. I'd been worried I wouldn't be able to find her flagging tape in the dark, but I found her all of ten feet from where I'd left her - and she'd dutifully tied a piece of flagging tape where she'd started, and another one ten feet away where she was standing now. "Gee, good thing you put that flagging tape up, or I'd never have found you," I said, and she said "He hasn't moved at all! He's still in the same tree - I think he's roosted for the night." After some conferral we decided she'd camp right under his tree, and I'd sleep in my car on the other side of the fence - in case he flew over the fence suddenly.
We were both almost too excited to sleep. Jamie set up her sleeping bag right under the tree while I inched my car down a steep stony slope, trying to get it in the best place to keep tabs on the bird (I was not at all sure I could get the car back up again). The mosquitoes were horrific, but ever since Toolik that hasn't bothered me. I curled up in the back seat of the car with all my equipment piled next to me, ready to go in the morning.
Night fell, gradually, slowly, and the stars emerged. Nighthawks were calling overhead.
I heard a man singing bear songs nearby: "Don't come NEAR me, don't come NEAR me, don't come NEAR me, Mister Bear! I've got a BEER, got a BEER, but you can't HAVE it, Mister Bear! " (Bears are much less likely to attack if they hear you coming and don't get surprised, so hikers in bear country usually either sing songs when they're on their own, or wear bear bells.)
The bear man went away. Hours passed. I was way too wound up to sleep. Around midnight I saw a mysterious light floating through the woods - headed straight for Jamie. It was somebody walking with a flashlight! Either that or bears have discovered batteries. What on earth was somebody doing out in the woods at midnight in bear country on an unmarked trail? I watched as the light silently bobbed closer, and closer, and closer... ready to spring out of the car if they caused any trouble with Jamie... but they went right past Jamie; they hadn't seen her. (the next day Jamie told me it was two people, dead silent. Guess we'll never know what that was about.)
Finally, around 2am the temperature started to drop, and I curled in my sleeping bag and fell asleep.
Netting for crossbills
Last Wednesday we were netting all day. It's crazy to call this "work"... we just set up the net, right near our tempting "decoy" crossbills (four live, captive crossbills who have an uncanny ability to draw wild crossbills closer)... and we wait. And we wait, and we wait, and we wait. At first in the cool of early dawn, and then in the warming morning, and finally in the blazing heat of mid-day, we wait.
We continually catch other birds who blunder into the net accidentally. We must have caught the same chipping sparrow about ten times - they've got a nest near there - plus I think we had repeated catches of the resident juncos too.
Each bird species has its own "personality" when netted, its own particular way of tangling itself up and its own particular blend of anger, resignation or panic. I'm always impressed by the bravery shown by these little birds against the gigantic two-legged predators that have managed to catch them, and the extent to which they seem angry rather than afraid. We caught a chickadee - they're famed for their pint-size fury when netted, and inevitably they start ripping at your cuticles, unerringly picking the one spot where they can actually inflict some pain. I untangled a green-tailed towhee - a marvelous bird, the first of its kind I'd ever netted. It stunned me with its strength and rage. It was like holding a Molotov cocktail with a bare hand. I could not believe the strength of its kicking! WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! with its little head feathers pointing straight up in fury and its bright eye glaring at me.
A few minutes later we caught a vesper sparrow that just hung calmly in the net as if saying "Oh well, no point struggling, guess I'm done for."
Those poor little chippies get terrifically tangled in the net - their wings are just the right size so that they can get their entire head stuck through 1 square of the net, and both wings completely through adjacent squares, and then they have a habit of grabbing everything with their feet and spinning around a few times. Yikes. Usually I can pop a bird unharmed out of a net in under two minutes (mist nets don't hurt birds at all - you just have to untangle them and they are perfectly fine). But we had one chippie who was so balled up, and had twisted so many times, that it took both Jamie and I, all four hands, for ten minutes, to get him free.
The hours whiled away, a chipping sparrow here, a junco there. Jamie sat in her camp chair playing beautiful songs on her guitar. I dozed in the back of my Forester, where I'd set up a cozy nest with a couple of pillows, and ready trashy science fiction novels, ate a ridiculous amount of Triscuits and finally fell asleep for a couple hours. This is work??
But no crossbills... yet....
We continually catch other birds who blunder into the net accidentally. We must have caught the same chipping sparrow about ten times - they've got a nest near there - plus I think we had repeated catches of the resident juncos too.
Each bird species has its own "personality" when netted, its own particular way of tangling itself up and its own particular blend of anger, resignation or panic. I'm always impressed by the bravery shown by these little birds against the gigantic two-legged predators that have managed to catch them, and the extent to which they seem angry rather than afraid. We caught a chickadee - they're famed for their pint-size fury when netted, and inevitably they start ripping at your cuticles, unerringly picking the one spot where they can actually inflict some pain. I untangled a green-tailed towhee - a marvelous bird, the first of its kind I'd ever netted. It stunned me with its strength and rage. It was like holding a Molotov cocktail with a bare hand. I could not believe the strength of its kicking! WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! with its little head feathers pointing straight up in fury and its bright eye glaring at me.
A few minutes later we caught a vesper sparrow that just hung calmly in the net as if saying "Oh well, no point struggling, guess I'm done for."
Those poor little chippies get terrifically tangled in the net - their wings are just the right size so that they can get their entire head stuck through 1 square of the net, and both wings completely through adjacent squares, and then they have a habit of grabbing everything with their feet and spinning around a few times. Yikes. Usually I can pop a bird unharmed out of a net in under two minutes (mist nets don't hurt birds at all - you just have to untangle them and they are perfectly fine). But we had one chippie who was so balled up, and had twisted so many times, that it took both Jamie and I, all four hands, for ten minutes, to get him free.
The hours whiled away, a chipping sparrow here, a junco there. Jamie sat in her camp chair playing beautiful songs on her guitar. I dozed in the back of my Forester, where I'd set up a cozy nest with a couple of pillows, and ready trashy science fiction novels, ate a ridiculous amount of Triscuits and finally fell asleep for a couple hours. This is work??
But no crossbills... yet....
My office
The only wi-fi - and best coffee - that I can find in all of Grand Teton National Park is this little cafe in the tiny burg of Kelly, Wyoming. So this picnic table is my office right now. Please note the view... and notice the sign on the napkin holder. It's not a joke!
Transmitter Trouble
We started bright and early at 4:30am last Monday morning, planning to put a radiotransmitter on the first male red crossbill that we caught.
The mammal people have it easy - they can slap a big ol' collar on one of their gigantic animals, with a honking huge battery, plenty of battery life and a huge signal range. They can have movement sensors, GPS devices, automatic collar-releases, light sensors, all kinds of stuff. But birds are different. Our birds only weigh about 30 grams (lighter than an iPhone, to put it in terms that modern folks can understand). And they fly. So the transmitter has to weigh very, very little, and has to be attached somewhere near the bird's center of gravity and somewhere where it won't mess up its flight ability. Usually the transmitter is glued to the feathers of the back, like a tiny fanny pack, or sometimes mounted in a teeny-tiny backpack. These transmitters are designed for birds, and they are miniaturized miracles - an infinitesimal battery, a little radio crystal and a few other micro components, encased together in a minute teardrop of acrylic, with a long antenna sticking out the end:
The worst culprit, for weight, is the battery. Generally we have to keep the battery so small that it will only work for a couple of days.
The next worst culprit, for weight, would be a sturdy switch to turn the radio off. So there is just the tiniest, flimsiest little magnetic switch, deep inside. When the transmitter arrives, it's attached to a little magnet that keeps the switch shut and the battery off. As soon as you take off the battery, the radio springs to life. But the little switch is so flimsy that once it turns on, often it won't turn off. And there's so little battery life that if your radio won't turn off, you can burn right through the battery in a couple days. And so much for your $600 transmitter.
Maybe you can see what I'm getting at: We can't test the radios beforehand. The risk is too great that if we start them up, we won't be able to turn them off and we'll immediately burn through the precious battery life.
And maybe you can see what's coming next. There we were, out in the early dawn light by Signal Mountain with our mist net set up and our 5 precious radiotransmitters carefully taped to pieces of cardboard with their frequencies, and weights, scribbled by each one - and we had no idea if any of the 5 would work. The problem was, we had ordered 20 new radios that hadn't arrived yet (due to the fact that there is only 1 fellow in the entire universe who knows how to make them, and, how shall I put this, meeting deadlines is not one of his most prominent work habits.) All we had was our 5 backup radios, of uncertain vintage.
Anyway, the moment came - we caught a crossbill! We pulled the little magnet off radio #1. Jamie aimed an antenna at it, punched the right frequency into it, and immediately we heard the reassuring "WOOOOOOOOOO" hum of a working radio. Yay!
Now came the really tricky part: attaching it to the bird. Our radios are unusual: they are heart rate transmitters. That means they have two tiny, almost invisible copper wires that have to make contact with the bird's skin. So we had (1) securely sew a tiny bit of cotton fabric to each radio, (2) clip off some back feathers, (3) make two tiny pinpricks in the birds skin, to either side of the back feathers, (4) slip the two slender, fragile, copper threads into those two minute, microscopic pinpricks in the bird's skin so that the electrodes will stay put - while both electrodes are trying to spring in the wrong direction, tiny feathers are blowing everywhere and the whole radio is trying to flip suddenly out of your fingers onto the ground and the bird is, at this point, staring at you with a certain baffled look that clearly means it is wondering what the H*** you are doing; (5) glue the cotton fabric to the bird's back feathers (with cosmetic eyelash glue).
After all of that, it actually ends up very tidy and aerodynamic, right above his center of gravity, and with the antenna sticking out right along his tail feathers. It's an awfully clever rig, and I admire whoever thought this up. It's also relatively low-impact for the bird. He'll shed the whole thing in a couple weeks when he re-grows those back feathers in August.
But it was an intense two-person production. I was holding the crossbill in my left hand, bracing one wing out of the way with my other hand and holding his left wing down with my other other hand. (if you are counting hands, you start to see the problem, right?) while Jamie was using one hand to hold the radio, her other hand to clip the feathers and her other other hand to put the electrodes in place. (In bird work, every finger is doing double duty - you get used to doing 1 job with the base of each finger and a different job entirely with the fingertip.) We were both hunkered down over the little fellow, and he was so tiny that all of our fingers were constantly colliding with each other. We were both practically holding our breath.
Jamie got the first electrode in place. Beautiful. Perfect placement. The bird was fine - tense, of course, and obviously confused, but he was alert and seemed comfortable. (Birds that are not comfortable will let you know it, very clearly.) The radio was still working. "WOOOOOOOO..."
Then Jamie slipped the second electrode into position, and instantly the radio went dead silent.
What the ... ? We stared at each other. The radio had died!! We tried pushing the radio around, repositioning the electrodes, fiddling with the frequency, switching to a different antenna, changing batteries in our receiver... nope, it was dead. DAMNATION! And just when it was all glued on, too, and in perfect position, and the bird was all ready to go.
Dismally we peeled the radio back off and removed the electrodes. We tried another radio... This one was dead. It wouldn't even come on at all.
At this point we'd had the little guy for an hour and we didn't want to stress him out further, an hour being sort of a mental tipping point that Jamie and I both have, when dealing with wild birds. We let him go (with his female - I'll write later about how his female came back looking for him).
They both flew away. Immediately the radio - sitting on our pickup tailgate - said "WOOOOOOO..." It had just started working again. WHAT THE...?? Now the bird was gone... and we only usually catch 1 or 2 crossbills per day. Sure enough, we caught no more that day and returned home discouraged.
Long story short, we eventually verified that that particular radio had a short. Its signal came on and off whenever it was jostled, whenever an electrode was touched, whenever we shook it. Well, that's not a very useful radio to put on a live, flapping, jostling, moving bird, is it?
Three of the other radios were completely dead. Dead batteries.
By the time we figured this out, it was late on Wednesday and we'd spent three days testing useless radios on puzzled birds.
That left ONE WORKING RADIO. Un-be-lievable.
But one is better than zero! And that one radio set us off on our Signal Mountain Adventure the next day. More about that later.
The mammal people have it easy - they can slap a big ol' collar on one of their gigantic animals, with a honking huge battery, plenty of battery life and a huge signal range. They can have movement sensors, GPS devices, automatic collar-releases, light sensors, all kinds of stuff. But birds are different. Our birds only weigh about 30 grams (lighter than an iPhone, to put it in terms that modern folks can understand). And they fly. So the transmitter has to weigh very, very little, and has to be attached somewhere near the bird's center of gravity and somewhere where it won't mess up its flight ability. Usually the transmitter is glued to the feathers of the back, like a tiny fanny pack, or sometimes mounted in a teeny-tiny backpack. These transmitters are designed for birds, and they are miniaturized miracles - an infinitesimal battery, a little radio crystal and a few other micro components, encased together in a minute teardrop of acrylic, with a long antenna sticking out the end:
The worst culprit, for weight, is the battery. Generally we have to keep the battery so small that it will only work for a couple of days.
The next worst culprit, for weight, would be a sturdy switch to turn the radio off. So there is just the tiniest, flimsiest little magnetic switch, deep inside. When the transmitter arrives, it's attached to a little magnet that keeps the switch shut and the battery off. As soon as you take off the battery, the radio springs to life. But the little switch is so flimsy that once it turns on, often it won't turn off. And there's so little battery life that if your radio won't turn off, you can burn right through the battery in a couple days. And so much for your $600 transmitter.
Maybe you can see what I'm getting at: We can't test the radios beforehand. The risk is too great that if we start them up, we won't be able to turn them off and we'll immediately burn through the precious battery life.
And maybe you can see what's coming next. There we were, out in the early dawn light by Signal Mountain with our mist net set up and our 5 precious radiotransmitters carefully taped to pieces of cardboard with their frequencies, and weights, scribbled by each one - and we had no idea if any of the 5 would work. The problem was, we had ordered 20 new radios that hadn't arrived yet (due to the fact that there is only 1 fellow in the entire universe who knows how to make them, and, how shall I put this, meeting deadlines is not one of his most prominent work habits.) All we had was our 5 backup radios, of uncertain vintage.
Anyway, the moment came - we caught a crossbill! We pulled the little magnet off radio #1. Jamie aimed an antenna at it, punched the right frequency into it, and immediately we heard the reassuring "WOOOOOOOOOO" hum of a working radio. Yay!
Now came the really tricky part: attaching it to the bird. Our radios are unusual: they are heart rate transmitters. That means they have two tiny, almost invisible copper wires that have to make contact with the bird's skin. So we had (1) securely sew a tiny bit of cotton fabric to each radio, (2) clip off some back feathers, (3) make two tiny pinpricks in the birds skin, to either side of the back feathers, (4) slip the two slender, fragile, copper threads into those two minute, microscopic pinpricks in the bird's skin so that the electrodes will stay put - while both electrodes are trying to spring in the wrong direction, tiny feathers are blowing everywhere and the whole radio is trying to flip suddenly out of your fingers onto the ground and the bird is, at this point, staring at you with a certain baffled look that clearly means it is wondering what the H*** you are doing; (5) glue the cotton fabric to the bird's back feathers (with cosmetic eyelash glue).
After all of that, it actually ends up very tidy and aerodynamic, right above his center of gravity, and with the antenna sticking out right along his tail feathers. It's an awfully clever rig, and I admire whoever thought this up. It's also relatively low-impact for the bird. He'll shed the whole thing in a couple weeks when he re-grows those back feathers in August.
But it was an intense two-person production. I was holding the crossbill in my left hand, bracing one wing out of the way with my other hand and holding his left wing down with my other other hand. (if you are counting hands, you start to see the problem, right?) while Jamie was using one hand to hold the radio, her other hand to clip the feathers and her other other hand to put the electrodes in place. (In bird work, every finger is doing double duty - you get used to doing 1 job with the base of each finger and a different job entirely with the fingertip.) We were both hunkered down over the little fellow, and he was so tiny that all of our fingers were constantly colliding with each other. We were both practically holding our breath.
Jamie got the first electrode in place. Beautiful. Perfect placement. The bird was fine - tense, of course, and obviously confused, but he was alert and seemed comfortable. (Birds that are not comfortable will let you know it, very clearly.) The radio was still working. "WOOOOOOOO..."
Then Jamie slipped the second electrode into position, and instantly the radio went dead silent.
What the ... ? We stared at each other. The radio had died!! We tried pushing the radio around, repositioning the electrodes, fiddling with the frequency, switching to a different antenna, changing batteries in our receiver... nope, it was dead. DAMNATION! And just when it was all glued on, too, and in perfect position, and the bird was all ready to go.
Dismally we peeled the radio back off and removed the electrodes. We tried another radio... This one was dead. It wouldn't even come on at all.
At this point we'd had the little guy for an hour and we didn't want to stress him out further, an hour being sort of a mental tipping point that Jamie and I both have, when dealing with wild birds. We let him go (with his female - I'll write later about how his female came back looking for him).
They both flew away. Immediately the radio - sitting on our pickup tailgate - said "WOOOOOOO..." It had just started working again. WHAT THE...?? Now the bird was gone... and we only usually catch 1 or 2 crossbills per day. Sure enough, we caught no more that day and returned home discouraged.
Long story short, we eventually verified that that particular radio had a short. Its signal came on and off whenever it was jostled, whenever an electrode was touched, whenever we shook it. Well, that's not a very useful radio to put on a live, flapping, jostling, moving bird, is it?
Three of the other radios were completely dead. Dead batteries.
By the time we figured this out, it was late on Wednesday and we'd spent three days testing useless radios on puzzled birds.
That left ONE WORKING RADIO. Un-be-lievable.
But one is better than zero! And that one radio set us off on our Signal Mountain Adventure the next day. More about that later.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Things I've learned in one week
Last Monday morning was my first morning out, up before dawn to go on a bird survey with Tom. Every day since then, I've been out with either Tom or Jaime. Every place we go, we've been looking for cones and crossbills, and I've been picking up some useful information on trees, bird songs, and how to read trail maps.
By now, one week into it, I've finally gotten to the point where I feel a close personal friendship with lodgepole pine, with its bottle-brush, slightly scattered look, and its upright, enthusiastic way of growing. And its generous habit of always having at least a few new cones, while all the spruce and fir are empty.
I've also renewed my acquaintance with the familiar, more relaxed-looking Douglas-fir, which also often has a few new cones. (I already knew Doug fir a bit, but had no idea its cones looked so silly when they were new! - the whole tree peppered with what look like purple plastic dog toys covered with silly green spikes - nothing at all like the sober brown that a proper, civilized "pine cone" should be. Not that it's a pine, but whatever, it's definitely not a very professional look for a conifer.) After buying a small pocket-size tree book, I've also keyed out (= formally identified) a few blue spruce (huge, dark, and drooping, with VERY prickly branches!) and limber pine (wearing a hat of crazy-looking, bendy cones coming out at right angles). There's a few others that I haven't quite figured out, though.
I also have been trying to learn the local bird songs. Tom Hahn has always had an incredible ear for bird song, and it's a crazy experience walking outside with him. He can't get through two sentences without interrupting himself to point out a vanishingly faint bird call that he's just heard - and not only does he instantly know the species, he often can tell the region the bird grew up in, its age, its mood, and whether or not it just woke up. (I'm not exaggerating.) He is the sort of person who is honestly puzzled that anybody could POSSIBLY, EVER confuse a Western Tanager song with an American Robin song, and if you know those two songs, you'll see what I mean about Tom. Anyway, I got a jumpstart on my Wyoming songs that first day, just by walking around with Tom and just listening to his nonstop running commentary on every one of the hundreds of faint woodsy sounds surrounding us.
Tom then had to return to California for a bit, so since he left I've been trying to figure out the remainder of my Mystery Song list on my own. Some of those little birds are pure geniuses at hiding themselves! I'll be chasing them around for an hour and never getting a clear view. But almost every hike is marked by a Mystery Song triumph: the Olive-Sided Flycatcher posing this morning with its simple, loud "quick three beers!" in the sunny meadow this morning at Death Canyon... the entire hour I spent chasing a magnificently singing Lincoln's Sparrow in endless circles, back of Triangle X... the brilliant, nuanced, creative vocabulary of the gorgeous Green-tailed Towhee who came to visit our crossbills at the ponds this morning, turning cooperatively to show me first his chestnut cap, and then his fancy green tail... the shockingly beautiful Lazuli Bunting singing at the marsh... the odd, enchanting "zeep" of the Common Nighthawks that flit around our camp at night... the mysterious evening song that turned out to be the "longer" night song of the Western Wood-Pewee.
While doing all this tromping around, I also found a Lincoln's Sparrow nest, a Violet-Green Swallow nest right in our campsite, a Dark-Eyed Junco nest just one yard from our truck tire at Mosquito Creek (and full of babies! No wonder the parents were so upset! jeez, that was close!). And almost got a Chipping Sparrow nest today.
Other things I've learned in the last week:
"Improved Dirt Road" means "Somebody put some gravel here once, sometime in the last twenty years".
"Unimproved Dirt Road" means "Some joker drove a jeep through a mudhole here once and left 2 faintly discernable ruts".
"Four Wheel Drive Recommended", in a national park road, means "You don't need four wheel drive at all, but we don't want lots of people driving down this road".
Two tourist cars pulled over to the side of the road means a pretty view of the Tetons; three cars is an elk; four or more is a bison calf or a moose.
And "We're going to get to bed early tonight FOR SURE" means "No we won't."
By now, one week into it, I've finally gotten to the point where I feel a close personal friendship with lodgepole pine, with its bottle-brush, slightly scattered look, and its upright, enthusiastic way of growing. And its generous habit of always having at least a few new cones, while all the spruce and fir are empty.
I've also renewed my acquaintance with the familiar, more relaxed-looking Douglas-fir, which also often has a few new cones. (I already knew Doug fir a bit, but had no idea its cones looked so silly when they were new! - the whole tree peppered with what look like purple plastic dog toys covered with silly green spikes - nothing at all like the sober brown that a proper, civilized "pine cone" should be. Not that it's a pine, but whatever, it's definitely not a very professional look for a conifer.) After buying a small pocket-size tree book, I've also keyed out (= formally identified) a few blue spruce (huge, dark, and drooping, with VERY prickly branches!) and limber pine (wearing a hat of crazy-looking, bendy cones coming out at right angles). There's a few others that I haven't quite figured out, though.
I also have been trying to learn the local bird songs. Tom Hahn has always had an incredible ear for bird song, and it's a crazy experience walking outside with him. He can't get through two sentences without interrupting himself to point out a vanishingly faint bird call that he's just heard - and not only does he instantly know the species, he often can tell the region the bird grew up in, its age, its mood, and whether or not it just woke up. (I'm not exaggerating.) He is the sort of person who is honestly puzzled that anybody could POSSIBLY, EVER confuse a Western Tanager song with an American Robin song, and if you know those two songs, you'll see what I mean about Tom. Anyway, I got a jumpstart on my Wyoming songs that first day, just by walking around with Tom and just listening to his nonstop running commentary on every one of the hundreds of faint woodsy sounds surrounding us.
Tom then had to return to California for a bit, so since he left I've been trying to figure out the remainder of my Mystery Song list on my own. Some of those little birds are pure geniuses at hiding themselves! I'll be chasing them around for an hour and never getting a clear view. But almost every hike is marked by a Mystery Song triumph: the Olive-Sided Flycatcher posing this morning with its simple, loud "quick three beers!" in the sunny meadow this morning at Death Canyon... the entire hour I spent chasing a magnificently singing Lincoln's Sparrow in endless circles, back of Triangle X... the brilliant, nuanced, creative vocabulary of the gorgeous Green-tailed Towhee who came to visit our crossbills at the ponds this morning, turning cooperatively to show me first his chestnut cap, and then his fancy green tail... the shockingly beautiful Lazuli Bunting singing at the marsh... the odd, enchanting "zeep" of the Common Nighthawks that flit around our camp at night... the mysterious evening song that turned out to be the "longer" night song of the Western Wood-Pewee.
While doing all this tromping around, I also found a Lincoln's Sparrow nest, a Violet-Green Swallow nest right in our campsite, a Dark-Eyed Junco nest just one yard from our truck tire at Mosquito Creek (and full of babies! No wonder the parents were so upset! jeez, that was close!). And almost got a Chipping Sparrow nest today.
Other things I've learned in the last week:
"Improved Dirt Road" means "Somebody put some gravel here once, sometime in the last twenty years".
"Unimproved Dirt Road" means "Some joker drove a jeep through a mudhole here once and left 2 faintly discernable ruts".
"Four Wheel Drive Recommended", in a national park road, means "You don't need four wheel drive at all, but we don't want lots of people driving down this road".
Two tourist cars pulled over to the side of the road means a pretty view of the Tetons; three cars is an elk; four or more is a bison calf or a moose.
And "We're going to get to bed early tonight FOR SURE" means "No we won't."
Site visits
All we're trying to do is catch a Red Crossbill.
All we're trying to do is catch just one Red Crossbill, and put a tiny little radiotransmitter on it.
All we're trying to do, really, is catch JUST ONE Red Crossbill, and put a tiny little radiotransmitter on it, a special new one that can broadcast heart rate. And then follow it, on foot, wherever it flies, through the wilderness of Grand Teton National Park, hiking straight through the woods, off-trail and over deadfall and up bluffs and down cliffs and over rivers, through what they call "serious bear country". Wherever that little bird goes, for 72 hours nonstop. Or until the transmitter batteries die, whichever comes first. Just the two of us, me and Jamie, carrying huge packs with all of our radio gear, our sleeping bags, bear bells and a tiny bit of food.
And then after that we'd like to catch nineteen more crossbills and do the same thing. Then another twenty in the winter. That's all we're trying to do.
The whole idea might completely fail, of course. The two huge obvious problems are, first, we might never catch a Red Crossbill in the first place. Second, even if we catch one and get a transmitter on him, the little guy might up and fly to Alaska the second we release him. (Red Crossbills are famously nomadic - that's one reason we're interested in them, actually.)
But if we can just get hold of a bird, and if we are lucky enough to get a local bird, one who will stay within a reasonably sized home range, and if he doesn't fly out over the lakes - well, then, we might have a chance of getting some cool data.
Anyway, to do this, we have to catch a bird. (Luckily, we have a couple of captive Red Crossbills who are pure geniuses at spotting other Red Crossbills, and at enticing them to come closer. We usually carry one around with us in a little cage.) And we have to be in a relatively open landscape where we can pick up radio signals from far away. So we've spent the whole first week just scoping out the landscape. Red Crossbills love conifers, so we've been visiting as many conifer-forest spots as we can get to, all around Grand Teton National Park and through the whole valley of Jackson Hole, looking for good spots to capture crossbills. We have been aided enormously in this by my old friend Tom Hahn, who knows this valley, and its crossbill habitat, better than the back of his hand. We've been investigating his favorite little side nooks, trailheads, hidden back roads and little-known turnouts, and passes and bluffs and buttes.
Everywhere we go we inspect the trees. It took me a while to realize that when Tom or Jaime hop out of a car and stare up with their binoculars, they're often not looking for birds - they're studying the trees for cones. Studying crossbills means studying their favorite trees, the conifers, and especially, searching the tree tops for those precious NEW CONES that the trees might (or might not) be growing this year. New cones stuffed with the seeds that the crossbills love to feed on.
So everywhere we go we study the trees - the species present, and whether or not they have cones; and the topography of the land; and always, always, we're listening for crossbills. Ears alert for that little "chip!" in the distance. (Jamie and Tom, both long-time crossbill experts, can hear that tell-tale "chip!" a half mile off, jumping bolt alert in the middle of a conversation. Me, it has to be five feet away from me before I notice it, but I'm getting quicker at it.)
It's only been one week so far and I feel like I've been here for months, because every day has had about 4 major excursions in it.
A typical day:
Get up at 5am, stuff down a quick bowl of cereal. Stagger to the truck and drive to a trailhead, and spend three hours hiking up (say) Blacktail Butte, skidding and scrambling our way up an exhausting narrow switch-back trail. A 1-hour grueling hike, an hour bushwhacking our way around on the Butte looking for crossbills and checking out trees, and another hour picking our way carefully down through the steep, crumbly slope. All in the most idyllic scenary possible: dark conifers and slender white-barked aspen, magnificent alpine wildflowers all around...the sun rising over the sage, the pearly moon sinking toward the mountains on the other side of the sky, all the birds around us waking and singing.
By 8 or 9am we've scrambled back to the truck and have finished our first site visit. It's starting to get warm now. Shed the fleece jacket. On with the sunblock and the deet. Switch from hiking boots from sandals. Head to our next stop. (At this point we often hit bison rush hour, and its associated tourist-car road block, as our local herd of bison starts the first of its two daily crossings of the main road out of camp.) The next site visit might be a tour up Signal Mountain (up a paved road, thankfully); or a mild sunny morning chasing chipping sparrows around the romantic Sewage Lagoons; or maybe bushwhacking our way up a steep trailless pine-covered glacial moraine, right at the foot of the Teton glaciers, crawling hands-and-knees and nearly vertically through a jumbled jungle-gym nightmare of thousands of toppled fir trees. Some of these woods have the worst treefalls I've ever seen - let alone tried to climb through, on a steep slope, while carrying a birdcage with a live bird in it. I took some pride in getting our little bird through all of that without him even ruffling his feathers.
Around noon, a lunch break at camp; check on our captive birds, on the solar panel, on the rechargable batteries, check our supplies and gas and propane and whatnot; call the National Park Service about something or other, haul 10 gallons of water back to camp, buy a new tripod or duct tape or whatever other new thing we suddenly need; fiddle with some element of the trailer that is inexplicably falling apart. Every day I think I'll have time to take a nap, and every day there seem to be hours of these errands!
Third site visit, late afternoon, starting around 3 or 4pm. Maybe it's a visit to sunny, peaceful, inappropriately named Death Canyon to check out the cone crop and listen for crossbills; or to the much more appropriately named Mosquito Creek; or maybe a three-hour rough drive through the rutted National Forest roads in back of the Triangle X ranch; or maybe a hike up through the heartbreakingly beautiful lupine-flower alpine meadows near Phillips Pass.
Last of all, early evening, 6-8pm or so, the fourth site visit. My favorite of all of these evening site visits was a 5-mile hike through the astonishing wildflowers of the Taggart Lake Trail and deep into the Valley Trail. This was on a park trail that went right under the brooding face of Grand Teton itself - the greatest and craggiest of the Teton range, with its glaciers hanging seemingly over our heads. I carried the bird almost the whole way on that hike. By this time Jaime and I felt we knew this particular little bird quite well - he's quite a cutie actually. He clearly needed a name at this point, so he's now "Jackson" (in honor of Michael Jackson; and also because we are working in Jackson Hole.) Jackson has been on so many hikes with us now that he is totally blase about it, preening, eating and even singing while we're carrying him up a cliff or over a stream. He seems to like it; maybe he likes being chauffered around like this?
Jackson and I, with Jamie right behind us, spooked a whole herd of elk on the Valley Trail - and then spooked the same elk all over again on our way back, an hour later.
Every night we stagger into camp at about 8:30 or 9pm. We still need to make dinner, Jamie and me, on our tiny propane stove in our beloved "vintage" (= falling apart) 1971 Silver Streak trailer. One of us cooks, the other cleans, and cleaning dishes when you have no running water is rather a slow process. We scrupulously tidy everything and lock the food out of sight - this is bear country, after all. Suddenly it's 10:15pm and we're supposed to get up at (say) 4:30am tomorrow. Dang, how did that happen again? We make our way over to the equally old tent ("Don't try to open the back zipper. Or the bottom left zipper. Oh and, don't open the right zipper more than halfway. Actually, it would be better if you never left the tent at all")
Tumble into bed, set the alarm for six hours from now.
Come awake several times in the night: what's that? A coyote? A bison? A nighthawk?
Suddenly the alarm goes off. It's 4:30 and the first birds are already singing. Up and out! Where are we going today? Jenny Lake? Granite Canyon? Or maybe, if we're lucky, the oh-so-romantic Sewage Lagoons?
Over it all - always present, every day - the massive, unbelievable Tetons. The most beautiful mountain view I have ever seen. The Tetons rear shockingly abruptly from the edge of the peaceful sagebrush valley (Jackson Hole) where we are camped. They are like a child's sketch of mountains, the idealized mountains of dreams - huge triangular jagged peaks, snow-covered, with two huge glaciers, even. Looming always across the western sky, so close and so high and so vivid that it is hard to escape the impression that they are looking down at you, watching over you. They are stern and fierce and amazing, but somehow also comforting. It would be hard to feel lonely in this place, when there are so many birds all around, talking all the time in their thousands of voices; and the rivers are running, and the bison walking by, and the Tetons right there watching over everything.
All we're trying to do is catch just one Red Crossbill, and put a tiny little radiotransmitter on it.
All we're trying to do, really, is catch JUST ONE Red Crossbill, and put a tiny little radiotransmitter on it, a special new one that can broadcast heart rate. And then follow it, on foot, wherever it flies, through the wilderness of Grand Teton National Park, hiking straight through the woods, off-trail and over deadfall and up bluffs and down cliffs and over rivers, through what they call "serious bear country". Wherever that little bird goes, for 72 hours nonstop. Or until the transmitter batteries die, whichever comes first. Just the two of us, me and Jamie, carrying huge packs with all of our radio gear, our sleeping bags, bear bells and a tiny bit of food.
And then after that we'd like to catch nineteen more crossbills and do the same thing. Then another twenty in the winter. That's all we're trying to do.
The whole idea might completely fail, of course. The two huge obvious problems are, first, we might never catch a Red Crossbill in the first place. Second, even if we catch one and get a transmitter on him, the little guy might up and fly to Alaska the second we release him. (Red Crossbills are famously nomadic - that's one reason we're interested in them, actually.)
But if we can just get hold of a bird, and if we are lucky enough to get a local bird, one who will stay within a reasonably sized home range, and if he doesn't fly out over the lakes - well, then, we might have a chance of getting some cool data.
Anyway, to do this, we have to catch a bird. (Luckily, we have a couple of captive Red Crossbills who are pure geniuses at spotting other Red Crossbills, and at enticing them to come closer. We usually carry one around with us in a little cage.) And we have to be in a relatively open landscape where we can pick up radio signals from far away. So we've spent the whole first week just scoping out the landscape. Red Crossbills love conifers, so we've been visiting as many conifer-forest spots as we can get to, all around Grand Teton National Park and through the whole valley of Jackson Hole, looking for good spots to capture crossbills. We have been aided enormously in this by my old friend Tom Hahn, who knows this valley, and its crossbill habitat, better than the back of his hand. We've been investigating his favorite little side nooks, trailheads, hidden back roads and little-known turnouts, and passes and bluffs and buttes.
Everywhere we go we inspect the trees. It took me a while to realize that when Tom or Jaime hop out of a car and stare up with their binoculars, they're often not looking for birds - they're studying the trees for cones. Studying crossbills means studying their favorite trees, the conifers, and especially, searching the tree tops for those precious NEW CONES that the trees might (or might not) be growing this year. New cones stuffed with the seeds that the crossbills love to feed on.
So everywhere we go we study the trees - the species present, and whether or not they have cones; and the topography of the land; and always, always, we're listening for crossbills. Ears alert for that little "chip!" in the distance. (Jamie and Tom, both long-time crossbill experts, can hear that tell-tale "chip!" a half mile off, jumping bolt alert in the middle of a conversation. Me, it has to be five feet away from me before I notice it, but I'm getting quicker at it.)
It's only been one week so far and I feel like I've been here for months, because every day has had about 4 major excursions in it.
A typical day:
Get up at 5am, stuff down a quick bowl of cereal. Stagger to the truck and drive to a trailhead, and spend three hours hiking up (say) Blacktail Butte, skidding and scrambling our way up an exhausting narrow switch-back trail. A 1-hour grueling hike, an hour bushwhacking our way around on the Butte looking for crossbills and checking out trees, and another hour picking our way carefully down through the steep, crumbly slope. All in the most idyllic scenary possible: dark conifers and slender white-barked aspen, magnificent alpine wildflowers all around...the sun rising over the sage, the pearly moon sinking toward the mountains on the other side of the sky, all the birds around us waking and singing.
By 8 or 9am we've scrambled back to the truck and have finished our first site visit. It's starting to get warm now. Shed the fleece jacket. On with the sunblock and the deet. Switch from hiking boots from sandals. Head to our next stop. (At this point we often hit bison rush hour, and its associated tourist-car road block, as our local herd of bison starts the first of its two daily crossings of the main road out of camp.) The next site visit might be a tour up Signal Mountain (up a paved road, thankfully); or a mild sunny morning chasing chipping sparrows around the romantic Sewage Lagoons; or maybe bushwhacking our way up a steep trailless pine-covered glacial moraine, right at the foot of the Teton glaciers, crawling hands-and-knees and nearly vertically through a jumbled jungle-gym nightmare of thousands of toppled fir trees. Some of these woods have the worst treefalls I've ever seen - let alone tried to climb through, on a steep slope, while carrying a birdcage with a live bird in it. I took some pride in getting our little bird through all of that without him even ruffling his feathers.
Around noon, a lunch break at camp; check on our captive birds, on the solar panel, on the rechargable batteries, check our supplies and gas and propane and whatnot; call the National Park Service about something or other, haul 10 gallons of water back to camp, buy a new tripod or duct tape or whatever other new thing we suddenly need; fiddle with some element of the trailer that is inexplicably falling apart. Every day I think I'll have time to take a nap, and every day there seem to be hours of these errands!
Third site visit, late afternoon, starting around 3 or 4pm. Maybe it's a visit to sunny, peaceful, inappropriately named Death Canyon to check out the cone crop and listen for crossbills; or to the much more appropriately named Mosquito Creek; or maybe a three-hour rough drive through the rutted National Forest roads in back of the Triangle X ranch; or maybe a hike up through the heartbreakingly beautiful lupine-flower alpine meadows near Phillips Pass.
Last of all, early evening, 6-8pm or so, the fourth site visit. My favorite of all of these evening site visits was a 5-mile hike through the astonishing wildflowers of the Taggart Lake Trail and deep into the Valley Trail. This was on a park trail that went right under the brooding face of Grand Teton itself - the greatest and craggiest of the Teton range, with its glaciers hanging seemingly over our heads. I carried the bird almost the whole way on that hike. By this time Jaime and I felt we knew this particular little bird quite well - he's quite a cutie actually. He clearly needed a name at this point, so he's now "Jackson" (in honor of Michael Jackson; and also because we are working in Jackson Hole.) Jackson has been on so many hikes with us now that he is totally blase about it, preening, eating and even singing while we're carrying him up a cliff or over a stream. He seems to like it; maybe he likes being chauffered around like this?
Jackson and I, with Jamie right behind us, spooked a whole herd of elk on the Valley Trail - and then spooked the same elk all over again on our way back, an hour later.
Every night we stagger into camp at about 8:30 or 9pm. We still need to make dinner, Jamie and me, on our tiny propane stove in our beloved "vintage" (= falling apart) 1971 Silver Streak trailer. One of us cooks, the other cleans, and cleaning dishes when you have no running water is rather a slow process. We scrupulously tidy everything and lock the food out of sight - this is bear country, after all. Suddenly it's 10:15pm and we're supposed to get up at (say) 4:30am tomorrow. Dang, how did that happen again? We make our way over to the equally old tent ("Don't try to open the back zipper. Or the bottom left zipper. Oh and, don't open the right zipper more than halfway. Actually, it would be better if you never left the tent at all")
Tumble into bed, set the alarm for six hours from now.
Come awake several times in the night: what's that? A coyote? A bison? A nighthawk?
Suddenly the alarm goes off. It's 4:30 and the first birds are already singing. Up and out! Where are we going today? Jenny Lake? Granite Canyon? Or maybe, if we're lucky, the oh-so-romantic Sewage Lagoons?
Over it all - always present, every day - the massive, unbelievable Tetons. The most beautiful mountain view I have ever seen. The Tetons rear shockingly abruptly from the edge of the peaceful sagebrush valley (Jackson Hole) where we are camped. They are like a child's sketch of mountains, the idealized mountains of dreams - huge triangular jagged peaks, snow-covered, with two huge glaciers, even. Looming always across the western sky, so close and so high and so vivid that it is hard to escape the impression that they are looking down at you, watching over you. They are stern and fierce and amazing, but somehow also comforting. It would be hard to feel lonely in this place, when there are so many birds all around, talking all the time in their thousands of voices; and the rivers are running, and the bison walking by, and the Tetons right there watching over everything.
A thunderstorm to start it off
I've been writing my Rio Stories blog for a few years now. (And its sister blog, Sambagypsy, which chronicles some of my musical experiences outside of Rio.) But this summer I've got a different kind of thing going on: biology fieldwork. It's the first time in over a decade that I've done real fieldwork. Out in the woods, on the plains, in the tundra, by the mountains, in the middle of the Bay of Fundy; whatever habitat it is, fieldwork is as different from my Rio Stories world as can be. It's a strange transition, coming from the crazy, noisy, mass-of-humanity Brazilian cities where I was a few weeks ago, from the bright-colored city of Salvador, with Olodum drumming in the streets and all the people dancing.... to the solitude of this vast and magnificent Wyoming mountain land, chasing tiny birds through the endless dark pine trees.
But there's something similar in both, in the act of abandoning your "normal" life and hurling yourself heart-and-soul into another world, trying to understand it, diving into it, swimming in it, thinking of nothing else. So, I'm starting this little Bio Stories blog, to write about fieldwork. Mostly so that I can remember it later. I so wish I'd kept a journal during my years at Toolik Lake in northern Alaska.... This time I don't want to let it slip away. (Eventually I'll add some notes on my other biology projects too, which currently are: bird, elephant, lion, whale and sea turtle.)
Of course, there's a couple of problems with the idea of trying to write a blog about fieldwork. The first problem is that I'm in the middle of Grand Teton National Park living in a campsite with no email or electricity. The second problem is that my working day is 5am to 10pm, generally with no days off and certainly no time for writing. Nor for any other frivolous activities, such as, say, eating breakfast, taking showers, doing laundry, or sleeping.
But today we woke up at 4am to the loudest, most torrential downpour I've ever heard - a huge crack of thunder and WHAM, it sounded like our tent was standing directly under a waterfall! I have never heard such a thunderous onslaught of rain in my life! Complete with wild lightning and strings of stunningly loud thunderclaps. Jamie hopped up out of her sleeping bag to check on our frayed, 30-year-old tent and its flimsy tarps (we'd lashed two jerry-rigged tarps together, since neither was big enough to cover the tent on its own). But everything held - actually the tarps had even withstood a minor moose attack a few days earlier - and so after Jamie verified that everything was still standing, we just lay cozily in our sleeping bags and listened to the fury just outside.
(I thought, what on earth do all the birds do in a rainstorm like this? Can every one of them really find a hidey-hole somewhere? Some of them must surely get drenched now and then.)
Two hours later, when we got up at 6am, the sky looked clear, but massive banks of dark clouds were sweeping directly toward us over the Tetons trailing ominous gray sheets of rain underneath. The weather forecast was an interesting "70% chance of strong thunderstorms, with heavy rain, some lightning, large hail and strong winds". So we've reluctantly decided to postpone our bird-catching efforts for one day. And we've already completed most of our site visits... which means I get a HALF DAY OFF. So I'm in the town of Jackson, Wyoming, now, at a little wi-fi cafe, starting this little blog.
All we're trying to do is catch a Red Crossbill. But more on that later.
But there's something similar in both, in the act of abandoning your "normal" life and hurling yourself heart-and-soul into another world, trying to understand it, diving into it, swimming in it, thinking of nothing else. So, I'm starting this little Bio Stories blog, to write about fieldwork. Mostly so that I can remember it later. I so wish I'd kept a journal during my years at Toolik Lake in northern Alaska.... This time I don't want to let it slip away. (Eventually I'll add some notes on my other biology projects too, which currently are: bird, elephant, lion, whale and sea turtle.)
Of course, there's a couple of problems with the idea of trying to write a blog about fieldwork. The first problem is that I'm in the middle of Grand Teton National Park living in a campsite with no email or electricity. The second problem is that my working day is 5am to 10pm, generally with no days off and certainly no time for writing. Nor for any other frivolous activities, such as, say, eating breakfast, taking showers, doing laundry, or sleeping.
But today we woke up at 4am to the loudest, most torrential downpour I've ever heard - a huge crack of thunder and WHAM, it sounded like our tent was standing directly under a waterfall! I have never heard such a thunderous onslaught of rain in my life! Complete with wild lightning and strings of stunningly loud thunderclaps. Jamie hopped up out of her sleeping bag to check on our frayed, 30-year-old tent and its flimsy tarps (we'd lashed two jerry-rigged tarps together, since neither was big enough to cover the tent on its own). But everything held - actually the tarps had even withstood a minor moose attack a few days earlier - and so after Jamie verified that everything was still standing, we just lay cozily in our sleeping bags and listened to the fury just outside.
(I thought, what on earth do all the birds do in a rainstorm like this? Can every one of them really find a hidey-hole somewhere? Some of them must surely get drenched now and then.)
Two hours later, when we got up at 6am, the sky looked clear, but massive banks of dark clouds were sweeping directly toward us over the Tetons trailing ominous gray sheets of rain underneath. The weather forecast was an interesting "70% chance of strong thunderstorms, with heavy rain, some lightning, large hail and strong winds". So we've reluctantly decided to postpone our bird-catching efforts for one day. And we've already completed most of our site visits... which means I get a HALF DAY OFF. So I'm in the town of Jackson, Wyoming, now, at a little wi-fi cafe, starting this little blog.
All we're trying to do is catch a Red Crossbill. But more on that later.
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