I’m happy to report that Mario & Tatiana got over
their malaise today. They were a bit more relaxed & chatty with me, which
made me feel good. Feeling the odd man out, unable to communicate, is always a
terrible feeling. But we bonded over the struggle to handle 4 large & very
aggressive hooded mountain tanagers at once. I needed Mario’s help to get them
all out of the net; one of the poor guys had gotten the net tangled around the
grooves in its tongue & I was afraid it would writhe so much it would rip
its own tongue off – which I’ve seen happen & is terrible (fortunately,
with his help all tongues were in tact). It must have been a small flock of the
tanagers passing through because while we were trying to disentangle the 4 from
the net, there were 2 others screeching at us from nearby trees.
A queue of waiting birds
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| Hooded mountain tanager wings |
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| Hooded mountain tanager |
While these are beautiful birds & a still photo makes
them appear quite calm, I assure you, they are anything but! They are
incredible strong & incredibly hostile in defending themselves against sudden
man-handling by large, strange, stinky mammals. We had to process them in an
assembly line so they wouldn’t shred any one person’s hands if we held them too
long (it took almost 2 hours to get all 4 done). As mainly fruit eaters, their
beaks are incredibly strong, not to mention their raptor like claws with
half-inch long daggers for nails & vice like grips. It. Was. Painful. So of
course we’re griping & arguing with these poor birds the whole time,
laughing at each other as we share our “dolor”.
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| To keep them from biting, we wrapped their beak w/1st aid tape |
There was a surprise when we got back to the station
tonight: Luke from the Netherlands. It makes me feel a little bit better about
the lack of info I got in coming here, knowing that I’m not the only one. Mario
was told that an American male would be coming to the station last Wed. &
that was all he knew (the male part was right), but it never happened. Then on
Friday, he got a call & was told that the guy would be coming on Sunday.
Surprise, surprise, he showed up on Saturday! Poor guy arrived around 9am to an
empty station (the farmer at least unlocked the house for him) and waited
around all day for us to come back around 6:30pm. I immediately switched to
English & was so relieved to be able to talk to someone again (his Spanish
is way better than mine, so he’ll have no problem here). I was also, as I said,
somewhat relieved to hear that he wasn’t given any info about conditions here
either. So I did my best to give him a bit of an orientation: explain the ways
of the station & what he should expect in the field tomorrow. He’s a recent
biology undergraduate from southern Holland, who has done lots of work with
birds & plans on spending the next 3 months in Colombia with this
organization working on the country-wide cataloguing project. He’ll move to the
next station with Mario & Tatiana next week, but they’ll only be there for
a month, so I’m not sure (& neither is he) where they’ll send him after
that.
Either way, it’ll be nice to have someone I can easily turn to for English translations over the next 4 days :) So thanks for coming, Luke!
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