Trogon-y trogons

Today was a great, productive day out in the pastures. We buzzed through a bunch of our playback experiments in record time, and even had time to explore the ranch for more potential groups/territories.

In the process, we saw our first owl of the trip, a Spectacled Owl, a super cool-looking bird:

This was in the same area that we saw a Tamandua (collared anteater) just a few weeks before:

Then we got to explore some more of the ranch, and hiked up one big hill, for a gorgeous view of the surrounding land:

And on the walk home through the forest, we came upon this guy perching right on one of the bridges. One of three species of trogons found here, this is the Black-throated Trogon. For some reason I think trogons are really cool; they're just little colorful birds with long tails and big funny-looking eyes. A year ago, I wouldn't have had any idea what a trogon even was... a few months ago my friend Angela was describing them to me for the first time, simply telling me that "they just look so trogon-y!" At the time, I found this a perfectly unhelpful description, but now I must say, there's a lot of truth in that statement... This guy sat still for a surprisingly long time and allowed me to get some great pictures!

Pretty trogon-y, huh?

Here is my video from a few weeks ago of a pair of Slaty-tailed Trogons duetting. Not a particularly great video, but I love that you can indeed tell how "trogon-y" they look, just from a silhouette, and that you can see their tails flick up every time they sing.

The Project: Band-backed Wrens

It's now been a month since we arrived here in Costa Rica, and almost as long since I've posted anything here... It seems like time moves too slowly and yet flies by all at the same time. I meant to write more regularly, but it turns out you get really busy when you're working your ass off all day. Then it seems like everything we do is the same from day-to-day so I feel like I have nothing to share, and yet I see awesome and spectacular things almost every day here. And now, I'm completely backed up I don't even know where to begin, so I'll just jump in and we'll see where this takes me...

I really just want to share pictures/stories of all the cool animals I see here (I'll get to that, don't worry - if you just want to look at pictures, see the end of this post for the link to my flickr page), but I guess I could start out with a little more background on what I'm doing here.

This past year I volunteered in a lab and through our weekly lab meetings with a few professors and grad students I met Mike, who is working on his PhD at Minnesota. A few weeks before the end of the school year, right around the time I was becoming very stressed about not having any jobs/plans for the summer/future, Mike ran into me and asked if I had any plans for the summer and if I would be interested in going to Costa Rica as one of his field assistants. The catch was that he couldn't pay me, but he could pay for the flight and all of my housing/food. The upside was that I would get the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica for free, essentially, and get a lot of field experience working with birds. Seeing as I had no other plans set up, it was a pretty easy decision.


The project - Mike has worked here at La Selva for a few summers on his project, looking at the sociality of this particular species of wren, the Band-backed Wren. These wrens are interesting in that they often exhibit cooperative breeding, where one or more offspring ("subordinates") will stay around and help the dominant pair when they are mature, instead of going off to breed themselves. So we are looking at how relatedness of subordinates relates to how much they invest in territory defense or care of young. This involves catching birds to mark them and taking blood samples to determine relatedness. We also do playback experiments, in which we play their song (mimicking an intruding wren) and observe how the birds react. (Click here to here how funky these guys sound)

Adult Band-backed Wren

We also spend a lot of time just looking for them. Even if we hear them call or sing, it can be almost impossible to find them moving along the trunk or branches of a tree with a lot of vegetation, like this:

Where we work - These birds are also interesting because they don't really live in the forest. They like to nest in isolated trees that are not touching other trees, so they usually set up territories on edges or in clearings. So we have two groups of wrens that we can observe on/very near the station itself, but most of the groups we work with are on a cattle ranch that is adjacent to La Selva.

To get there, we go on a quick hike through the forest, slide down a muddy slope, cross some barbed wire, and ford a stream. We are then at "Señor Macho's."

A rare glimpse at the mountain from one of the pastures - it's often shrouded in clouds 

Once there, the going is fairly easy. We mostly trudge through pastures with the occasional scramble under barbed wire fences and a few stream crossings to get to certain sites:

This is where the rubber boots come in really handy

We will usually spend a full day out there, bring a pack lunch, and basically be on our feet looking for birds for up to 7-9 hours. It's exhausting. And we always have to watch out for these guys... not dangerous, but definitely curious:

Moo

There are at least two herds of cattle, probably more, and they are rotated fairly frequently, so we never know where they'll be when we get there each day. The day we met this particular group, we were in the process of setting up one of our nets across that barbed wire fence. I gradually became aware that the constant moo-ing we were hearing in the distance was getting louder and I turned around to see this herd charging in through the open gate at the other end of the pasture I was standing in. We frantically got all of our equipment over the fence and I crawled under just before they arrived, ready to head over and check us out.

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Until next time, mis amigos! I will just keep writing about what I think might be interesting, but if anyone is actually out there reading this and has anything they are dying to know more about my trip, let me know!

I've been taking a ton of pictures, so if you want to see more of the cool critters I've seen so far, check out my flickr photo set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/76038115@N00/sets/72157634211768609/

I update it fairly frequently, so check back often! (FYI: I add a lot more pictures to it than I do to my facebook photo album)

Mist-netting and a jungle hike

They don't call it the rainy season for nothing... It is currently raining (thunder-storming), as it has almost every afternoon/evening since we arrived at La Selva.

The most shocking things here are probably the constant heat, the amount of rain, and all of the amazing sights and sounds. The first night I got here, I had to walk across a long (wet) suspension bridge over a river, from the dining hall to my cabin, in the dark, alone. I'm not going to lie... it was a little scary. There were tons of bug noises, plus who knows what, plus the occasional howler monkey or two to mix it up.

Howler monkey on the suspension bridge

In the daytime, the sounds of bugs and howlers are joined by the beautiful sounds - and sights - of birds! Everywhere! Birds! I think on our first day in the field I saw about 20-30 lifers. I'm now up to 50 or so.

The first few days, our fearless leader Mike showed Charlie and me the ropes of our field work. We scouted out a few of the wren groups on/near the station, and identified a few of the individuals (by colored bands on their legs). One important part of our research is catching the birds, and putting those colored bands on them, which we do by mist-netting. We set up a great big, very fine net, like so:

Big ole net... hard to see, but you can see the tall pole off to the left.

And then the little birdies hopefully can't see the net and fly into it, falling into a nice little pocket:

Hummingbirds are actually quite good at avoiding the net... this guy was unlucky.

Then we go in and carefully extract the bird from the net. Some birds struggle and bite and peck, and some are a bit more docile:

Mike working on a tody-flycatcher

Then you do stuff like measure tail and wing length, mass, and if necessary put on bands and take a blood sample. (We have not caught any of our study birds, so we haven't done any banding or blood samples yet.)

Wing measurement

And then you take pictures with the bird. Because we are serious scientists.

After a few days of work, we had our day off today, so Charlie and I went on a hike through some cool old-growth forest and "swamp" trails. We did not get lost. But we did hear a jaguar in heat, catching a tapir, and fighting off an ocelot. Fortunately we survived. Okay, not really...but we did hear some odd deep rumbling sound and something crashing through the woods. Other than that we had a lovely hike AND made it back for lunch.

Huge trees!

One of many shady bridges...

Beautiful "waterfall" sort of thing

Quick update (fyi I'm in Costa Rica)

Hey ya'll, it's been a while. Here's a quick update:

I graduated from the University of Minnesota! Wooooo!

The Ninjas went to Nationals! It was great. We broke seed, plus we beat teams that were seeded ahead of us, and we pushed other top teams to the limit! Couldn't be prouder of my ladies.

And now, what am I doing with that new B.S. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior? NO idea. But for the time being, I'm spending the summer assisting a grad student from the UofM on his research project studying a bird species called the Band-backed Wren. It should consist of some fun romping around the rainforest catching birds.

After waking up at 3am and a LONG day of traveling (a drive to Chicago, two flights to make it to San Jose, and another drive out to the station), we finally arrived at our final destination about 2 hours ago. I am now exhausted and, after checking in with my parents, will probably go right to sleep. ¡Buenas noches, amigos!