I made it!

After roughly 28 hours door-to-door travel, I made it to my room in Taipei, Taiwan. I was met at the airport by Shih-Fan Chan, the assistant of our Taiwanese collaborator, Sheng-Feng Shen, and we took an hour bus ride to the campus. After I got checked in, I hit the sack and slept until I was awakened by the front desk calling to ask if I would ever be leaving so they could clean the room. I told them not to worry about it, and then was astonished to see that it was 4pm local time and that I had slept for about 15 hours! Wow, I was clearly tired, but that's a lot even by my standards.

A typical nest (w/ nestlings' heads poking out)

After getting ready, I met with Shih-Fan and Sheng-Feng and we went around and found some nests above some local shop windows and talked to folks about borrowing their barn swallows for a few minutes to measure them and collect some feather and blood samples. They mostly said that would be alright, so tonight I'll be going back to try my luck at night-capturing some adults off the nest. Given that there's a lot of traffic near the nests, and I haven't heard any birds singing yet, I think the difficult part is going to be capturing the 10 or so songs from 10 males that's going to be the challenging part. I have a little over a week to do this, though, so hopefully all will go well. I hope everything is good back home.

Cheerio,
Matt