Busy-ness as usual

Things are pretty hard right now, since I'm the only one fully dedicated to the barn swallow project at the moment. Özgün and Leyla Kaplan, who are undergrad field assistants, are still working on Hakan's migratory bird banding project, as well as taking

The walk to town to record

classes a few days a week at Akdeniz University in Antalya (1 hour away). Hakan has his own project and is teaching an ornithology lab, and Leyla Özkan has her own PhD work on lapwings and a job as a tutor. So that leaves me, and a waxing and waning crew of 1-4 to band birds, find new sites, record male songs, stay on top of activity at all nests in our study population, and deal with other logistical issues that inevitably arise. There is the added problem that our study sites (if you're interested, you can check them out here) are spread out over around 4 square kilometers and we only have 1 car. I'm trying to get us a bicycle, but so far it has just meant walking a lot all over town.

This is a European Wryneck (Jynx torquilla) caught at the migratory bird banding station--please ignore my narration ;)

But despite all the difficulties, I think things are going quite well. I have had mixed success with recordings due to the unpredictable behavior of birds and to a larger extent, humans (and their tractors), but the last few nights we have been catching at least two pairs of birds, which is nice, because you can usually assume that if a pair are sleeping together on a nest, they are "together". But, this may not always be the case, or, may not be the case always, because the other night we caught two birds at a new site. The birds were sitting on the nest together, the female unbanded, but the male was a bird caught at Mustafa's house (~200m down the hill). A few days ago I noted that there were three birds on the nest at Mustafa's (the male in question, and two females) and I am wondering whether the third wheel was this extra female. An intriguing love triangle indeed...

In other news, I went to Antalya yesterday to give a talk to the Biology Department at Akdeniz University. Hakan's advisor, Dr. Ali Erdoğan, and the department chair had requested it, so after a brief recording session in the AM, we headed to the big city. Antalya is like a more tropical version of Boulder, with palms instead of spruce, and with the shadowy spine of the Taurus range in place of the Rockies, as an ever-impressive backdrop. It's also a much larger (pop ~700,000) and towering city, with huge groups of apartment complexes covered in satellite dishes rising to the sky. In any case, the talk went fine, though I think the 30 or so people present had different takes on my presentation (in proportion to their fluency in English). Some comments I got were 1) "Acoustic divergence in crickets has been shown to be negligible in allopatry, but is much greater when species are found in the same place, have you seen a similar pattern in swallows?" and 2) "um...what?"

Yes, that's a car tied to a truck with a rope

Afterwards, Dr. Erdoğan treated the whole field team to lunch and then Hakan, Leyla Özkan, and I went to purchase some field supplies at a shopping center. After that, we parted ways, since Hakan and Leyla had more business in Antalya (Hakan's coming back tonight), and I was given the task of driving back to Bogazkent. Overall, the trip was uneventful, but I was surprised to learn that when someone honks at you, it could mean anything from: "Hey, I don't know if you noticed, but the light is about to turn green and you should go" to "Hey, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm not in a turning lane and I'm coming over across your lane of traffic anyway." So once I figured that out, everything went fine. Also, lane lines are not so much a strict boundary as in the US, but more suggestions of the rough area you should direct your car most of the time. Anyway, I need to get some lunch and do some data entry. Hope all is well back home!

Cheers,
Matt

Daily Dose of Turkish: Yes/No--Evet (eh-vet)/ Hayır (hire)

End of the First Week

Tuesday and Wednesday morning I went to one of our sites to start recording barn swallows we banded Monday evening. Hakan and the others were all in Antalya either to take or proctor mid-term exams, so I was by myself at the apartment passing the time recording or organizing our data collection system. Tuesday's recordings didn't go so well because I showed up at the site at about half an hour before the town woke up and a half dozen tractors and motorbikes chugged past while I was recording. Often, the driver would shout some greeting at me or another person on the street right as my bird of interest started singing. Nevertheless, I stuck it out for quite a while, getting about three and a half songs of any quality. Just when I had given up, Mustafa (the site owner) and his neighbor, neither of whom speak English, came down to where I was packing up my things and indicated they were about to eat and insisted several times that I come up and join them. I was very happy for the invitation and impressed with the Mustafa's generosity at inviting some Man Who Stares at Birds into his house for lunch. And though the neighbor and I tried valiantly to carry on a conversation, it appears that my 10 word vocabulary just isn't cutting it--so I'm working on that.

Sonogram of the first song recorded from a male for my study

Hakan and Metin came back late Wednesday night and were snoozing away yesterday morning when I left to try to record. As soon as I shut the door to leave, I realized I had left my good headphones inside, along with the house key. Oh well, I thought, and walked on to the site, where I found that all the birds were perched close together on a wire (a recordist's nightmare--because you often can't know who is singing or overlapping at a given time). Furthermore, my focal male was not to be seen. I started the recording and the wind started picking up (another big problem for recording), just as my first set of batteries failed. Replacing the batteries, I stood there waiting as the bird didn't show up and kids started to trickle into the school abutting the yard where I stood, occasionally peering in at me curiously. An old woman came out of the neighboring house and gave me a distrusting look, ignoring my greeting and going about sweeping the entrance to her home. Not an uncommon reaction--whether in Turkey or Colorado--I thought to myself. I shrugged internally and looked back up at the place where I thought my bird would perch. Just then--was that singing?! I turned around and looked back to the wire where

A European Goldfinch I saw on the walk home

the twenty or so barn swallows had been earlier and saw--were those tail feathers painted blue? Yes, it was my focal male. I jogged quietly (or as quietly as one can jog on gravel) over to get a stronger signal. The bird was singing his third song in a bout as the wind started to pick up. The male, seeming to sense my presence or perhaps just to mess with my head, left his perch, flew over and landed where I had been waiting for him all morning and started singing. I jogged back over into the yard, trying to record as I went, but as soon as I got there, he stopped and flew into the barn. Just then, a gust of wind maxed out my microphone and I checked the display. Batteries half full. As things were going so swimmingly, I thought this was a good opportunity to "hit the old dusty trail" home.

Recording aside, yesterday was quite a success. Hakan, Metin, and I went back to Mustafa's site at night and caught two more males and several females. We have now caught and banded 9 barn swallows for our study!  Hakan and Metin went back to Antalya today, so I'm on my own again to record and map out our sites till they get back on Saturday. I'm going to try to get to the site a little after dawn tomorrow to try my luck at recording the males we caught last night. More on that to come.

-Matt

Daily Dose of Turkish: Thank you= "teşekkür ederim" tesh-eck-coor  ed-er-im

Site surveying

Over the last two days, Hakan and I have gone around the towns of Bogazkent and Karadyi looking for barn swallow nests. We usually go about this by wandering around town and poking our heads into garages and abandoned buildings. When someone inevitably turns up to ask the natural question, "Uh...what are you doing?" I say hello (Merhaba) and defer to Hakan, who will go into a long explanation in Turkish wherein I recognize a few words--"Amerikali," "Matt," "Colorado," and "Kirlangic," which means barn swallow. I just stand there, like a dog, understanding 1 word out of 20, looking between the people speaking and nodding my head expectantly. Then, the person will sometimes shake my hand and show us into a garage or carport, and say some more things I don't understand and laugh, to which I smile and follow along.

We have had pretty good luck so far, mapping out forty or so sites with the GPS and taking note of whether we've seen birds in the area or if there was new mud on an old nest. Male barn swallows return from migration earlier than females in order to locate and defend existing nests or build new ones. So far, it seems there are few females around, although we found one full clutch of 5 eggs and another nest with 3 at one garage in Bogazkent, as well as one nest with 4 eggs in an apartment stairwell in Karadyi. Fortunately, most of the nests don't even have the feather linings that usually precede egg laying, so hopefully we still have some time to get set up and start banding birds before the main onset of breeding. Right now or plan is to do one survey in the morning and another in the evening. Yesterday, during our evening circuit around a Bogazkent neighborhood, a group of kids decided to follow us as we slinked around barn doors and scrambled on top of tractors to peer into dark nests with a flashlight and extendible automotive mirror. I imagine it was a pretty interesting experience for them. One of the boys seemed particularly impressed, or at least confused about how to respond, since he gave me a short bow when we climbed back in the car to head to another area. Tonight we will survey some more of Bogazkent, and maybe try to band a few birds. I am eager to get birds banded and start recording.

-Matt

Jump to Field Work: My first day in Turkey

I arrived in Bogazkent, Turkey last night at about 11pm, having traveled about 25 hours from Boulder, CO. I slept late, until my collaborator (Hakan Karaardic) woke me up to go to a barbecue. He jokingly told me it was in my honor, but actually, it was for a program that tries to introduce children from an Antalya orphanage to nature. This afternoon about 60 kids, aged 7-12 inundated a small park along a riverbank in Bogazkent. I spent my time talking to one woman who had studied a year in England about the program and eating bread, grilled meat, a mixture of tomatoes and cucumbers that seems to accompany every Turkish meal, and drinking "Le-cola", all of which had been donated for the event. Occasionally a kid would come up, ask me in Turkish if he could wear my sunglasses, and then run off when one of the adults would chastise him for bothering me. As I looked around at all the adults chatting while the kids were running around like an animated barrel of monkeys, I decided I was bored with the adults (who I couldn't really relate to in any language). So I went down to the river and started skipping rocks with a couple of the kids. Soon I found myself swarmed by at least a dozen. They were each simultaneously vying for my attention--saying "Hello, hello, hello", and when I looked, one would say "my name is--'Shukra'." Or sometimes one would just say "Mitt", and throw a big rock in the water when I turned. One kid thought it was hilarious to play the "My Name Is" game and tell me a different name each time--sometimes saying "My name is..." and then a meaningless phrase like "Big Show" that I assumed he had heard on TV. When I would repeat what he had said, he would laugh and run away, leaving another in his place to show me a rock or ask me to throw a weighted fishing line for him. Since I had their attention, I thought I'd try to teach them a few English words--showing the difference between a  "Big" rock and a "perfect" "small, flat" skipping stone and counting the skips for them in English. I often find it easier to communicate with kids because they have no reservations about trying what little English they know. They won't learn to be embarrassed about this until middle school. Ah...middle school...

In any case, after the kids went back to Antalya, a friend of Hakan's invited us over to have tea at her house. "Us" refers to Hakan, myself, four other people involved in various bird projects that are staying at our apartment, and two others that tagged along from the picnic. It was nice to relax, have a Turkish coffee and tea. I was also surprised to see that our hostess served Turkish delight. You might say I was delighted. Actually, I was surprised, but pleasantly so. After that, I did some unpacking and worked on some data sheets while Hakan and the others did some evening banding at the bird ringing station. Tomorrow Hakan and I will start out bright and early mapping out sites and checking on the nesting status of our birds. I don't know yet whether there are eggs, but we will probably begin banding on Monday morning if not tomorrow night. More on that later.

Cheers,
Matt