New Discoveries

29 June 2016

We caught an emerald toucanet today! It was such a beautiful bird & such a defensive/aggressive one. They don’t use & don’t have gloves when working with the birds here, as most of them are so small that trying to get them out of the mist nets with thick gloves on would be really cumbersome & hard on the birds. So Mario had to handle the toucanet with bare hands. Toucans (& their relations), if you don’t know, have serrated beaks to shred their food (mostly fruits & the occasional small reptile or bird). So their main defense mechanism is to use that same beak against giant mammals man-handling them all of a sudden. Mario’s hand got pretty shredded. I packed a first aid kit in my backpack & pulled out some alcohol swabs & liquid bandage. Everyone was amazed at both of these things, which surprised me. It’s not like Colombia is a 3^rd world country; they have medical advances & supplies. But none of the crew had ever seen either of these products. Mario was most excited about the liquid bandage – he even took pictures of the bottle to look for it online. He got even more excited later when it didn’t wash off with soap & water. (He is the director of this station, very intelligent & more than capable, but about 10+ years younger than me & sometimes it shows :)

The liquid bandage prompted an interrogation of what other technologies & gadgets we had in the U.S. that are used for camps & research. They now want to write into their next grant hand warming sachets, a backpacking stove, battery powered socks, & liquid bandage.

Taking measurements

Banding the bird

We also had sad news today (though not really), as one of the hummingbirds we had caught died while we were processing it. It’s an occupational hazard with this kind of work, as birds naturally run at very high temperatures (over 100^oF on average) and when you’re working in a cold cloud forest, your own body temperature starts to drop. So handling the birds with cold hands can be very dangerous by rapidly lowering their own body temperature, since they’re not able to move or fly, which is how they normally would generate their own heat. Which is why there’s an emphasis on processing the birds as quickly & as efficiently as possible. Since we only check the nets once every hour, there’s also no telling how long a birds has been trapped in a net within that hour, with its body temp already starting to drop. So sadly, a hummingbird must have gotten too cold & slowly died. It’s a very quiet process: they just start to close their eyes & go to sleep in your hands. (So it’s a good sign when the bird is fighting your grip, biting & scratching at you – it tells you they’re still very much alive. Which is how I got my lip split open by leaning in to close to a bird to read its band number. New scar added to the list.) So anyway, a hummingbird passed away in Mario’s hands but will not go to waste: it was in perfect condition & will get preserved until the project is over, then sent to the university to get stuffed & turned into a museum specimen. In scientific studies, death can be put to good use.

We’re no longer working on an incline (gracias a dios!) so they brought out a game of Rummikub. They get very competitive with each other, so it’s a good thing no one’s keeping score ;) The presence of the Spanish-English dictionary has also created a new fun game: What does this mean in English? The dictionary has become essential for me to quickly find what the hell I’m trying to say in Spanish, but it’s also become a way to pass the time in between checking the nets for birds. They randomly flip to a page & learn a new word in English, then try to quiz each other on it later, or they find definitions & idioms in English that make no sense in Spanish. Trying to explain “almighty”, “urchin”, “what on earth”, “down to earth”, & “hedgehog” (they don’t understand how this animal is different from a porcupine & I don’t have the language skills to remedy that) was an interesting challenge.

My view from inside the camp tent

View from inside tent

The day ended with picking fresh mora (blackberry/raspberry-like fruits & SUPER sour) & listening to quetzals calling (though we couldn’t see them) along the trail home.

Edible berries (don't know the name)

Mora