Moving along

A pair of Taiwanese barn swallows caught from the nest

So the past three days have been action-packed. Along with the help of Shih-Fan, and an undergraduate assistant named Yiu-Jin, we've made much better progress than I could have hoped for. Despite the fact that weather.com insists there's a chance of thunderstorms every day I'm here, I've yet to get rained on once (though the humidity is right around 90%). And that has helped us to catch 6 birds the first night, 9 the second, and 13 last night, bringing us nearly to the amount I was hoping to catch. Because we're situated in the middle of the city, we've been waiting till most shops close down and shut their lights off at around 10pm to go ahead. We then carry a ladder, extendable poles, a mist net, two butterfly nets and other questionable accoutrement all along the main drag, earning quite a few stares by late-night passersby.  I aim to post some videos later, to give you an idea of exactly what we're doing to catch these birds, but it requires a bit of skill, a good deal of humility, and a full dose of luck. So far, it's paid off--leaving the hard part.

The endemic Taiwanese whistling thrush

The hard part would be getting around 10 clear song recordings from around 10 or so of the males we've banded. This turns out to be quite difficult when you throw in traffic noise and querulous people trying to ask you questions in Chinese and for some reason pointing and making cooing noises right near your microphone. When you add in the maddeningly unpredictible behavior of the birds themselves, you've got yourself a right old chore. So I think, amazingly enough, we're about done with our intense banding effort--I've been basically going out from 9:30 to 3 each night and then turning around to record from 4:30 to 7:30, and mostly sleeping till it was time to work again. But now it'll just be the going out at 4 for a bit till I get the sample size I'm looking for.

But for tomorrow, I'm going to take a little side trip to check out the mountain research area where Sheng-Feng studies beetles. More on that to come, and keep a look out for new photos--I've just added 40. There are updated links to the new Field Season 2011 album, and hopefully there'll be some cool videos soon. Thanks for reading!

Gan Bei,
Matt