Kuşçular! Kuşçular! Kuş Kuş

A common pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) caught during night banding

This is a common phrase I hear as I'm walking or driving about town these days. It means, more or less, "Birders, the birders are coming! Birds birds." And it's usually old men sitting in chairs outside a certain cafe or on benches or standing in shop doors that greet me with this, shouting "Amerikalı" with a grin that says, "I find your presence here baffling and endlessly amusing." In other words, it's pretty much the same as in Colorado, except that here my name is "American" instead of "The Bird Guy".

In any case, the days since my return from Israel have been action-packed. First, I got strep throat and was down for about three full days and have made a slow, but complete recovery after having a very good first visit to a Turkish doctor. As with nearly every occasion in Turkey, my visit to the doctor began by having "çay" (tea) as Hakan explained my symptoms and what I was actually doing in this village in the first place. I was then prescribed antibiotics and some sundry other medications (I was also sporting an impressive two dozen or so mosquito bites I had picked up in Israel at the time), and sent on my way to get better (which I now feel I have done, fortunately).

Male plumage variation--Questions: Who's sexiest? Are there 2 subspecies?

Apart from my being sick, Hakan and I have been very busy trying to band as many birds as humanly possible, provided the workaday complications of the unexpected return of cows and chickens to barns, destroyed and abandoned nests, sites boarded up, and other problems associated with working in close contact with humans trying to go on living their lives. Despite all this we have now managed to band over 90 adults, 100 nestlings, and I have recorded really good samples for over 15 males for whom we have full data. We've also started taking standardized pictures of banded individuals, following a method Yoni taught me, so that we have a good and measurable indicator of physical appearance to help us sort out differences between subspecies and in case our feather card samples don't make it to the States. The only other exciting bit to relate is that one of the females in our population was already banded when we caught her. She was caught two months ago by a team from Tel-Aviv University in Eilat, Israel, 880km away. It's really fascinating to learn that this female started her journey in places unknown, passed through Israel, and came all this way to build a mud nest in a cow barn behind a small bread market. A little glimpse into the adventuresome life of a barn swallow.

Samed, Ahmed, myself at "City Building"

In other news, Ozgun and Leyla will come back after their exams next Friday and the workload will be a lot more manageable. I have a backlog of data and feel strained to record in the morning after working all day and night banding and doing nest checks. Fortunately, in the absence of field assistants, two village kids, Samed and Ahmed have taken up an interest in helping us and did an entire series of nest checks in Bogazkent with us today.

Well, I guess it's time to enter those nest checks into Excel...hope things are going well for you, my valued readers. Please post a comment if you get the chance. It's nice to hear from you!

Cheers,
Matt