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)