Vampires and Barn Swallows

The Catholic Cathedral in Cluj, at dusk

Last night I returned from a weeklong trip to Cluj, Romania, the historical capital of Transylvania. The purpose of my visit was to sample from a known population of H. r. rusticas (the European barn swallow subspecies), to take measurements and sample blood, feathers, and song. Beforehand, I didn't know what to expect. Having never traveled in the Balkans, I didn't know if the language barrier would present a big problem, if people would welcome Americans; would we be able to capture and record enough birds?; how much time would our contact be able to help me?; and so on. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, it was supposed to rain during my entire stay, which was a little unnerving. In fact, it rained every single day I was there. Fortunately, we were left enough gaps between downpours to complete our work.

Me, Peter Pap, and his student, Orshi

After a harrowing double transfer flight with too many hours of layover to think about right now, I arrived in Cluj-Napoca at around 10:30 Thursday night. The first problem was that I had never met our contact, Peter Pap, and so neither of us knew exactly who we were supposed to meet. As I came out of the terminal I looked for someone squinting and glancing around. I saw one guy who appeared to be a bit confused, but we just kind of looked at each other in this Larry David kind of way (for any Curb Your Enthusiasm fans) and then I walked outside. The same guy reappeared and we looked at each other again, but then he turned and went back in. It was after that I figured, this has to be my contact, because no one else is looking around, so when he came back out yet again, I said, "Hey, are you Peter?" After a second the man said... "Yeah."

It's strange coming to a place you've never been, meeting up with someone you've never met and then immediately loading your stuff in their car and letting them drive you somewhere. This was the case when I first came to Turkey and had never met Hakan. At that time, he was also late, since he apparently had gone to the wrong terminal, and so I had to buy a phone card, navigate the VERY un-user-friendly Turkish telephone system, and call his cell to arrange a pickup. This time Peter was fortunately waiting for me, so he drove me to my hostel and we arranged to meet at 8 the next morning to head to the study site.

Downtown Cluj, Romania

Next morning, at the planned time, we headed to Cojocna, a small village about 45 minutes east of Cluj. Peter told me the village was founded over a thousand years ago for salt mining, and it is now the home of Hungarian, Romanian, and Gypsy farmers. On this first day we caught 12 birds. As I had hoped to catch about 15 males and 15 females to get a good sample size, this was, well, awesome! We then took a break for coffee and it rained for two hours before we finally gave up waiting and headed back to the city.

By the third day in Romania, we had caught all 30 birds I had established as a goal for the trip. In the following days, I endeavored to record as many males as I could.

Gergo (fore) and Orshi (back) hiking to Cojocna

Since Peter was busy on Saturday, two of his students (Orshi and Gergo) and I took the 5:30am train to the village. It apparently stops 3km away from the village, though. When Peter told me this, I thought he meant 3km walking along a flat, narrow country road. What he actually meant was, "3km through muddy tracks over rolling hills of open pasture." The landscape was really beautiful, but it took us an hour to get there. So, when Peter wasn't available again to drive me to Cojocna at 4:30 in the morning on Tuesday, I decided to stay in a really tiny house at this cool little (literally) hostel/camping site on the edge of town Monday night. That night it rained for several hours straight and in the morning when I got up, the "camping" area was flooded and the sky was dark. After several infuriating hours of slogging through mud, having dogs bark at me, males not sing, and struggling to identify birds in the gloom, I managed to scrape out enough recordings to complete my dataset. Excited to head back to Cluj, I negotiated my bill with the "hotel" proprietors, who spoke Hungarian, and no English, and lugged my huge pack of equipment to the bus stop to find that the road out of town was flooded and the bus would not run today. A local boy at the bus stop, who apparently spoke only English greetings and curses, smiled wryly at me and held his thumb up to indicate how I should get back to town.

The Colorado beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata), a worldwide potato pest from North America

In the end, a lady at the small grocery store who spoke surprisingly fluid English found a local guy to drive me back to Cluj via a long, meandering road through the countryside. Incredibly, after driving over an hour through some very windy, crumbling roads through breathtaking country, he dropped me off in the city center and would not accept any payment. In fact, pretty much everyone I met in Romania turned out to be extremely friendly, helpful, and many spoke very good English, which was very welcome I can tell you. All in all, it was an extremely successful trip (more than I could have hoped for). On the downside, as is always the case, I suppose, on a work trip, I had very little time for sight-seeing. That will be for another trip, hopefully before Romania switches from the Lei (1 Lei = 0.29 USD) to the Euro (1 Euro = 1.3 USD).

Little house on the prairie

So now, and for the next three weeks, it's back to work in Turkey. I've still got a lot of banding to do to finish out our work here so I can come back to the States in mid-July with a solid dataset to show for all our hard work. And now, I'll leave you with a toast:

Cheers:
in Hungarian--egészségedre (eh-guh-shuh-geh-druh)
in Romanian--noroc (no-roke)

Travels in the Southwest

In the last two weeks we have passed the 100 banded adult mark and then eked into a doldrum week without catching anything, despite our best efforts. With swallows you really have one or two chances to catch them on first arrival to a site. After that, even the most human-acclimated birds will alarm call at you and refuse to go back to their nest. And thereafter you will be a marked man--barn swallows seem to be able to recognize and discriminate between individuals and even between cars. It's a very irritating trait. (For me, the hated biologist.)

The Duden Waterfalls

But the arrival of my girlfriend, Amy, on the 2nd seemed to change our luck. In recent days we've banded a number of key males, added two whole families (adults and nestlings) to our study, and I got some excellent recordings. Amy and I also managed to see a bit of the region within easy driving distance of the study area. I say easy distance, but not easy driving. I tend to agree with Amy's suggestion that Turkish drivers don't seem to have received the "defensive driving" training common in the US, but rather a form of "ninjitsu-kamikaze driving." But, I managed to get around and miraculously avoid getting permanently lost or colliding with vehicles or people that seemed to genuinely want me to hit them.

Happiest boat in the harbor

Among the more interesting stops: the Duden waterfalls north of Antalya, the ruins of Aspendos (including an amphitheater dating back to the 4th Century), the ancient cliff city of Myra, near the modern day city of Demre and location of the Church of St. Nicholas. (Like myself, you may be surprised to learn that St. Nicholas died in 346AD, was Turkish, and rather than deliver presents to children all over the world, was known for putting coins in people's shoes and is also the patron saint of mariners.) The church, like many of the Old World historical sites I have visited, was very small. But still, it's pretty incredible to know that you're in a structure that dates back over 1.5 thousand years. It would have been more incredible if there were not 200 or so Russian tourists crammed with Amy and myself in the tiny church. We had a similar experience at the "Chimera," near Olympos, to the West of Antalya. This is a place where eternal fires burn on the hillside from natural gas vents leaking from a chamber below. The site was the inspiration for the Greek legend of the chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the body of a lion, a tail ending in a snake head, and with a goat head inexplicably coming out of its back. Although no doubt cool, the fires were not as big or numerous as the crowds of rude Russian tourists gathered around them.

Sea view near Olympos

In any case, it has been really amazing to have Amy visit for a time (and change our luck with banding), and to see a little of southwestern Turkey. I've been totally oblivious to most of the country, isolated as I am in a tiny rural town. But today Amy is making her long way back to Colorado and I am waiting for my flight to Istanbul, Bucharest, and then to Cluj, Romania, where I'll be trying to band and record some known H. r. rusticas for my study and for a larger study involving barn swallow populations all over the world. As the historical capital of Transylvania, my trip to Cluj should be interesting and I can only hope the forecast days of thunderstorms won't prevent me from recording and seeing a vampire museum or two. Well, that's all for now.
Pax,

Matt