Back in the States

Taipei's most important temple, Longshan Temple

Well, I made it back stateside, after another harrowing 28 hours of travel. I've now been back for about 2 weeks and am finally mostly temporally adjusted, though early morning banding here in Colorado has made the transition even more difficult. Overall, my trip to Taiwan was a whirlwind, but a great success and I made it back with all my blood and feather samples and song recordings. I'm now beginning to input all my morphological measurement data and to annotate and measure songs for individual males to see how the Taiwanese population compares to others I've sampled in other countries. From a very preliminary look, it seems like the Taiwanese birds may "rattle", or produce really rapid pulses at the end of their songs, at least as rapidly as our Colorado birds, and maybe faster. A lot of tedious measuring is required to see if this bears out, so we'll have to see--but this is exciting for me, because I had thought that this population might make up for short streamers and pale breast with having a really impressive song. But, again, we'll just have to see if this hypothesis is supported once I've measured a lot of songs for several birds. Well, that's all for now.

Cheers,
Matt