Week One-- Full Circle

It's hard to believe I arrived in DC just a week ago... so much has happened. Within just a few minutes of arriving, my advisor rolled down the window to point out a fish crow calling in the distance and asked if I could hear the difference between it and the American crows I am used to in California. Indeed, the fish crow has quite a distinctive call-- more of a “Caw-aw caw-aw” than the American crow's “Caw caw.”

This was just the beginning of my quite rapid introduction to bird calls in the area. Actually, I'd been listening to Stokes' CDs of Eastern bird calls before arriving but not quite as religiously as I might have. I'm now able to pick out with increasing success the most common and distinctive calls in our area-- the cardinal, song sparrow, house sparrow, robin, starling, grackle, red-bellied woodpecker, red-eyed vireo, blue jay, tufted titmouse and Carolina wren. I am working on others-- the catbird, house wren, goldfinch, house finch, chimney swift, yellow-rumped warbler, black and white warbler, ovenbird, Baltimore oriole, scarlet tanager, summer tanager, pileated woodpecker, yellow-shafted flicker, downy woodpecker and hairy woodpecker. In just a few weeks I'll really need to know these for point counts used to estimate bird density in our study areas.

The first day was mainly paperwork. It turns out I will be registered as a Smithsonian volunteer since our work is done partly under the Smithsonian migratory bird center, so I had to go and get fingerprinted too.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that our headquarters and lab space are at the National Zoo. This seems particularly fitting since my interest in conservation biology has its roots in part in the National Zoo. In ninth grade, my biology teacher, Mrs. White, stated baldly that she believed cheetahs would go extinct in the next ten years. (Why Mrs. White made that statement in the first place still eludes me but it was right around the time the magazine Wildlife Conservation had as its cover story the paper “Cheetahs: Closer than Kissing Cousins” about the lack of genetic diversity in cheetah populations so perhaps she read that one article and drew her own calamitous conclusion).

Mrs. White's belief that the cheetah was doomed had a tremendous impact on me. Although I had never seen a cheetah, I was moved by the thought that such an amazing and beautiful creature could disappear forever and that humankind would be unwilling or unable to stop its extinction. I begged my parents to take me to the National Zoo, which was the nearest zoo to us that had cheetahs, so that I could see a live cheetah before it was too late. That winter we made the four plus hour drive to DC and I snapped dozens of photos of cheetahs standing in the snow on a grassy embankment at the zoo. I was captivated; I used these photos to make a collage of cheetahs that hung in my room till I graduated high school. As a runner, albeit a distance one, I was awed by their prowess as the fastest land animal. I even wrote a poem about them. (It began, “Powerful, confident stare/ the cheetah eyes its prey” but I don't remember the rest of it-- it's sitting somewhere in a box in California with the rest of my poetry).

My interest in cheetahs and biology took back seat to my interest in chemistry for the next decade of my life, but after graduating college I had a chance encounter with Laurie Marker, who founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia, at a flea market in Oxford, England and subsequently joined the CCF chapter in California. (A year later, California CCF organizer Charlie Knowles formed the Wildlife Conservation Network and I continue to volunteer with them.) Certainly the road to studying wildlife has been a long and circuitous one for me, and it is somehow fitting that I am now back at the zoo where I first stood transfixed by the cheetah and its plight.

Back to DC. Living in the city has been quite an adjustment for me. This time last summer I spent stretches of long, lazy days at an extremely isolated house deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, going almost a week at a time without seeing another soul except my then-girlfriend. The hustle and bustle of a city and the sheer number of people is always a bit overwhelming for me. I'm currently living in a working class neighborhood and my co-workers and I are the only white people in the area. I'll admit this made me a bit uneasy at first, remembering from my childhood in the South that crossing the racial divide is often met with suspicion if not outright hostility from both sides, but everyone has been very friendly and I have quickly become very fond of my new digs. Part of my fondness stems from the fact that there is an Ethiopian restaurant on every corner, or so it seems. Since Ethiopian cuisine is my favorite food, I feel like I've arrived in culinary heaven. You can try to imagine the surprised faces of the local shopkeeper and restaurant owner when I walked into their stores and inquired about buying injera and foule. (I've always liked spicy food and ethnic food. When I lived in England as a kid I practically subsisted off mutton teeka. I think I particularly like Ethiopian restaurants because of their welcoming atmosphere, which reminds me of the incredible hospitality of the Yemenite community that I lived in for a year before entering college, in Petach Tikvah, Israel. Ethiopian and Yemenite food are somewhat similar; perhaps now that I am in a big city I will be able to find a Yemenite restaurant and get some jochnon, koobanah and matrid-- Yum!)

After the first day of paperwork and getting our government cars from Fort Lee, Virginia in a torrential downpour, we spent the rest of the week searching out robins' nests in four of our sites. The first day was bitterly cold, for which I was ill-prepared not having even brought a jacket, but my spirits were buoyed by the fact that we quickly located close to two dozen nests. My advisor educated us on the finer details of robin behavior and identification. The males have a darker head than the females in general, although this is not foolproof. We watched every robin that we came across, trying to visually follow them back to their nests. I was quite pleased when I located a nest in a dense juniper bush solely from the female's behavior. We also learned to listen for robins' alarm calls, often signifying that you or another threatening predator was coming too close to a nest. Finally, we recorded the specific color combination of bands on every robin that had been banded in previous years. This turned out to be quite tricky for me. My advisor, experienced in these things, seemed to be able to pick out the four colors of bands (two on each leg) in a nanosecond, but I have to stare at the birds' legs for awhile to really see the colors.

It's lucky for me starting out that robins' nests are not especially difficult to fund. Robins are as ubiquitous as house sparrows, starlings and mockingbirds in urban areas, and their nests are large and often quite conspicuous. I found an empty nest that had been blown down and took it home to place next to our front steps. I also collected some robins' eggs from nests that had been depredated and empty shells that I found on the ground. (Robin parents, like most other birds, remove the eggshells from the nest after the young hatch).

After we identified each nest, we tried to get a look inside with a modified pole that has a bike mirror on one end. We recorded if the nest had eggs and how many, or if there were nestlings, how many and their approximate age. It's quite stressful on the robin parents if they see us doing this, but they usually won't abandon a nest with eggs and even more rarely abandon a nest with young. I would have more qualms about this if robins were in the least bit threatened as a species, but since their numbers are stupendously large, I have little problem invading their nest in the name of science.

I won't write much about the people I'm living with out of respect for their privacy. Suffice to say I genuinely like the two other field techs who have arrived so far. I think the type of person who is inspired to pick up their life and move to another state in order to do meaningful research despite not knowing exactly what they will be doing-- only that the conditions will be hot and humid and the housing “dorm-like” is generally the type of person I have quite a bit in common with. The housing is by no means luxurious, but this is of little concern for me. I don't mind living out of my suitcase until we can obtain furniture off freecycle.com because it suits my style and ethics perfectly. I'm especially pleased that both of the other field techs run and we have had many lovely, long runs in the nearby Rock Creek Park.

For those of you who have made it thus far, I suppose I should mention why I have finally started a blog after considering it for many months. I've been inspired mainly by Nuthatch over at Bootstrap Analysis, who I read fairly faithfully, although I don't aspire to the high standards she has set. I mainly want to keep in touch with the many wonderful friends and co-workers I have left behind, and hopefully this blog will push me to get out and use my camera more as I intend to post pictures of the birds I band.

Finally, for those of you back in California, I'll post a shameless plug for Zeni's Ethiopian restaurant in Campbell, my comfort food and spot of solace, in whose tea I shed an occasional tear and whose warm staff made me forget many a sorrow over the past seven years. (If you aren't a lightweight like me or have a dining partner, I highly recommend Tej, Ethiopian honey wine).

Also, a shout out to Lisa Myers of Let's Go Birding, also based in Campbell. Someone looking to further their interest in birds could not ask for a finer mentor and I am thrilled to finally put into use some of the knowledge I gained by going on her weekend birding trips and attending evening classes through the Santa Clara Valley Audubon society. You rock!

"Treasures" found in the field gracing our front doorstep.

Robins love to nest in junipers, and their nests can be hard to spot. (This one is in a shrub two doors down from me). Nests in blue spruce are next to impossible!

This robin's nest at the library around the corner from us is barely disguised.