Babies!!

I was just starting to feel like I would never get to see a baby degu and then I finally got to hold baby rodents! Ok so that was about a month ago (sorry I haven’t blogged).  The mammal team was finding baby degus and abrocoma during their 9 day stint in the beginning of October. Juan took us to one of his grids and we found 2 very young degu pups (~20g) and a dozen or so older pups (40-50g). The little guys were not very mobile yet and they weren’t biting us. But the older ones were jumpy and tried to bite us, and would run away when released. One baby degu even decided that Megan’s shoulder was a great place to nestle. 

Doesn’t he look the happiest any degu could possibly look? 

 Megan also had the important task of warming up the little guys when they were hypothermic. She used her breath to warm them, and also had them bundled in her hoodie pocket.

The other guys found baby abrocoma and were nice enough to show us! They are so cute and silly looking. It’s something about their face and ears. You can see some very flattering shots of Jose Luis, Hector and Juan in the backgrounds.

In other baby news, birds have been nesting around the house, including a giant hummingbird! Juan showed us three eggs there and Jose Luis, one of the mammal guys, looked in there are saw a baby hummingbird! Like most baby birds it is really really ugly. I still can’t believe how strong that nest is. We have tornado like winds all the time and somehow that nest stays put.  Now he is pretty cute though. 

Momma giant hummingbird sitting on her nest

Baby on his own

Juan found a nest of baby Darwin's leaf eared mice! They were so precious and their nest was made from a lot of Megan's hair! It was so beautiful.

And there is a bird nest inside this little shed that also houses Juan’s outside oven. So we were worried about them dying of smoke inhalation.

But they have survived him making a few batches of bread out there and smoking a TON of meat for his bday celebration! Yesterday was Juan’s bday and it was really fun! 

His family came to the park and we all ate and drank jote (wine with coke) and took an impromptu trip into the forest to look at baby rayaditos with Matias, a field assistant that is studying them here. They were so cute!!! 

Rayaditos!

These crystals precipitated out of our wine/coke mixture...were we drugged????

It would make good eye shadow. I'm supposed to wear purple with my brown eyes anyways.

Me and Juan at his bday (he's sitting on my lap)

Juan's nephew Brandon in the forest on Juan's bday.

Terremotos from over a month ago!

Delicious chirimoya (a fruit that tastes like frozen yogurt!!)

My mom is always asking to see practical things like signs. Here are some from the park.

We perform the investigacion (research). We have to go through this gate to get to our house.

If I've learned anything from my nearly 5 month stay in Chile it's this:

This is posted on Juan's fancy new motorcycle!

 Below are views from the mountain. We feel so skinny after hiking this trail.

Can you spot the house?

This is where we pump our water from.

Our owl

Getting up early means we see beautiful sunrises.

Beautiful flower on our hike (reminds me of the flower in Tangled-even thought that one is yellow)

And the coolest thing ever....Megan found a fox skull!!!

Finally, it's the little things in life that can bring you great happiness. I've almost been here for 5 months and am starting to get anxious to come home BUT after about a month without hot showers we had a hot water heater installed and in our newest truck we have an antennae which means I can listen to fun North American and Latin American pop songs to and from my site. And these things makes me so happy!

Spring in Fray Jorge!

I’ve been in Chile for 104 days! Now it’s spring, but it is still really cold with some crazy heat spells. We got a lot of rain recently and the flowers are beautiful and the mountains are really green. Here are some of Megan's pics from my site.

September 18^th is huge national holiday for Chile. It is a really big deal and similar to our 4^th of July. We went to Juan’s house for food, drinks and dancing. They grill lots and lots of meat, including sheep that I watched him butcher a few days before in his living room. We drank terremotos (a mixed drink with wine, fruit juice, ice cream, la chicha and grenadine) and la chicha (a fermented beverage made from grapes). It was funny because they had chicha in many many wine bottles and it was the same type of wine that we actually brought. So people kept asking for wine and trying to figure which was actually wine and then asking for chicha but accidentally poured wine. We danced the cueca, the traditional dance of Chile with Juan’s little nephews. Then we kept dancing with Juan to popular folk music and then we started playing the kind of music we like to dance to. We decorated the house with the Chilean colors.

The other morning I was setting traps in the dark, scared as usual that a puma was about to attack me when I heard the sound of something peeing really close to me. There was no way it was Megan and it was a lot of pee so I was afraid it was a big animal. Then I saw the eye shine and new it was a fox. This would usually not freak me out at all but it was night and I had woken up maybe 20 minutes before. Foxes are always curious and ready to play plus I had my head lamp on which I think intrigued this fox. So it was really interested in me and started coming closer and then running away and followed me around. I didn’t like this just because I was on edge so I scared it away.

Here’s some pictures of processing degus. Also, a pregnant lady (she’s only ~162g). My favorite degu Nubz is pregnant and getting bigger every day! The biggest pregnant degus are close to 200g right now. 

Here's a pic comparing the pregnant female with a male (much smaller). 

Katie’s mom left us a People magazine so we had fun looking through that with Juan. He recognizes many American actors and actresses. It was the Emmy edition and he loves The Normal Heart so he liked seeing Mark Ruffalo, Jim Parsons and Julia Roberts. He actually didn't believe it was Julia Roberts because she looks so bad in The Normal Heart and was obviously stunning in the photos. 

Updates!

I haven’t blogged in a while and still I’m not sure that there are that many interesting things to talk about or tie together so I’ll just cover some highlights.

The research team was here for their usual 10 days at the beginning of the month which is always a weird but fun time. It’s a little rough to have so many people in one small house, and I stay in a different house while they are here, but I still cook and hang out in Juan’s house. But I like to have some alone time.  One night the guys were all out calling their families and it was just me and Juan hanging out in the kitchen. Hector was the assigned cook and Juan and I agreed the dinner wasn’t that filling. Juan pulled down this algae stuff called luche that he had been drying outside for a few weeks. He asked me if I wanted to try it and I ask “How?” because it wasn’t prepared or anything. So he said he was going to make something. He kept saying he really hoped I like it and he really really likes it but he doesn’t know if I’ll like it. First of all, everything Juan makes is amazing. Secondly, he was battering it to fry it! I told it of course I’ll like it, it's fried! It was the BEST thing I’ve ever had!!!! Just fried algae that he collected from the ocean. He tried to tell me it was super healthy but I said no way now that it's fried. 

Another fun excursion with the guys happened on our way to take the other Juan to the highway to catch a bus. We were outside the park where we commonly see horses, donkeys, cows, cows, sheep, etc. and we see a cabrito (a little baby goat) running around the road trying to jump up the cliff on the side of the road to escape the truck. But he was too small to get up! Juan jumped out of the car and I thought he was going to help it get up the cliff but the goat ran away. So Juan starts sprinting after it! We followed him in the car and he finally caught the goat and starts bringing it over to the truck. Of course I got out to pet the goat but then Juan puts it in my arms and pushes me back into the truck and we continue driving!! We had the goat in the backseat all the way to the highway and all the way back. Jose Luis and Juan kept saying we were going to eat him for lunch the next day. They loved that whenever they said that the goat would yell. I wasn’t sure to believe them or not because lately they had been talking a lot about how to butcher animals like sheep and goats. But they were talking to the goat in cute voices so I figured that they must be kidding. Turns out Juan planned all along on taking it to a guy with goats to find the goat’s mom.

Okay, now to the serious stuff. We haven’t warm water for showers in a few weeks. The water heater broke and Juan couldn’t fix it. Then we got a replacement and we thought Juan would replace it but they need a technician to come out which probably won’t happen until the beginning of October when the guys come back. UGHH. It has been rough. Appreciate your hot water people! And for those of you in Phoenix saying to yourself that it's so hot you would enjoy a cold shower remember that it is cold and windy here!

Juan invited Matías and me to the forest one day when he was working. It was so beautiful and different than any part we had seen so far. We also saw puma poop which was interesting but also scares me because I really don’t like thinking about them being out here! 

Found this cool guy in the forest

Katie and I visited Juan’s family a few times since he was home for over a week. We visited the town of Barraza to visit the church there and the artesana which has beautiful hand made art.

I’ve also had some amazing wildlife sitings lately but unfortunately they weren’t captured on film because they were quick moments. Juan and I saw an abrocoma (Bennett's Chinchilla Rat) in the road one night when we were going to pick up Matías at 4:30am. They are hard to find because they are nocturnal but sometimes the researchers catch them in traps and I hope to get a picture in the future. They are round with short legs so he couldn’t even move that fast across the road. Megan and I were driving back to the house one day and a coruro popped its head out of its burrow right in the middle of the road! Not a good place to tunnel out. They don't come above ground so you will only see one popping out of a burrow like that. Finally, before Matías left we were driving back from trapping and two guanacos leapt together across the road and they were so fast we didn’t even see them when we reached that spot. 

Abrocoma

Coruro

Hola muchanchos

So remember when I was complaining about waking up earlier and earlier? I forgot about the time change that happens on September 6th! Now I can wake up at the same "time" (in regards to the sunrise) but the clock will say 6:30 or 7:00 not 5:30 or 6:00!!! Which is great for my mental state. That is my happy thought during a crazy field season. Turns out Katie's project wasn't going to work during this freak season because the degus are too small and there are not enough females in her enclosures. We couldn't have predicted this so it is a shock for the team. She will be leaving Fray Jorge to pursue a different project back in Tennessee :( 

As for my project, it is progressing as well as it possibly could. We set around 400 traps in the mornings and start bringing all the degus we capture back to a processing station where we record sex, weight, reproductive status and also take ear tissue samples for genetic analysis. We've been capturing between 40-50 degus a day (a capture percentage of 10% is considered very successful), and you can imagine that the traps start piling up. Some degus are content to sit in the trap and eat oats but others climb around like Spiderman or put all their effort into escaping. They have to be returned to their burrows pretty quickly since they are sensitive to the heat. That means a lot of trekking back and forth through my site. I'm hoping to start seeing pups emerging from burrows next month, but you never know with degu ecology, plus like I said this year has been an anomaly. 

Back at the house I've been the only non Spanish speaker. The research team is here for their monthly 10 day stint, and they can speak English to me when I'm really not following their Spanish. I am becoming better at following really really fast stories spoken with Chilean slang, but it is still a real challenge to speak well. Juan thinks I am bored, or tired, or depressed because I am quiet but I tried to explain that since Katie left for Peru I can't really talk a lot or laugh a lot because I don't understand their jokes or their stories!!! I think I described Jose Luis, one of the researchers, in a previous post, and he makes me laugh all the time even when I don't understand what he is saying because he is just a true goofball. And I still haven't figured out what the word for goofball is here. I could not stop laughing yesterday, and even now thinking about it, when Jose Luis went out on the porch to put his shoes on, sat on a stack of unsteady chairs and tumbled down and onto the ground where he rolled for a few more feet. The phrase here for that is "sacar la chucha" or "bust your ass". He says I yelled from inside "Oh my god Jose Luis are you okay?" before I started laughing hysterically. He just yelled back "Me saque la chucha!" and started laughing. 

I am really interested in learning "dichos" (sayings), puns, and other interesting parts of the language and I learned a cute one this week. "Muchacho" means boy and you could say "Hola, muchacho" or something like that to your friend. Also, "chancho" means pig. So some of the guys joke around and change it to "muchancho" which I think is cute especially because they all have a little bit of a gut. 

Degu Power

Trapping has been going very well- except that the sun is rising earlier and earlier so we will have to get up earlier and earlier. We're still waking up around 6 because I can't bear to set an alarm in the 5am hour. That will happen this week though. My new assistant is here! I'll have to do a little profile on him next if he lets me. His name is Matias and so far he has been doing a great job! More importantly he has a lot of movies and tv shows on a hard drive so we have new stuff to watch at night! We watched American Psycho the other night and he and Katie had nightmares about it. We watched Pitch Perfect with Juan- he said he couldn't fall asleep that night because he kept laughing about the movie. We even got Megan to watch it and she never watches movies with us! We're still quoting lines from the movie. One day we thought he was lost hiking up to the forest so Katie and I drove up to find him. The guardaparque told us he had already started hiking back down but it wasn't a waste because I got to see the ocean of clouds! 

We also saw the ocean from the forest on one of Matias' first days in the park.

As you have probably heard from Facebook. Little Jorge the hummingbird died. He was doing very well but I doubt his wing would ever get better. On very cold days he would go into torpor and then it would get really hot again in the house, so maybe his body was just very stressed. 

In more positive animal news....Nubz survived another fox attack! She's invincible. Matias found her in a trap and clearly a fox had been digging all around her. She was unscathed except for a small cut on her ear. What a badass. We are going to stay out by the traps in the mornings to scare foxes away. 

I've still been finding new degus while I'm focusing my trapping efforts. I have around 75 burrow systems tagged- a social group of degus will use around 2-5 burrow systems to sleep and rear young. So it is important I find all the burrow systems a group may use so that I can trap their pups in September/October. I have enough traps for around 40 burrow systems. We have found some very pregnant females lately and I can't wait to see the pups! They do not emerge until about 30 days after being born, and no females are lactating yet so I still have weeks until I will be able to hold one of the little guys. 

Just call me Mountain Maddie

Megan, Erin and I left Fray Jorge for Santiago on August 6th to take Erin to the airport. That's right, Erin has returned to the US and a life of regular showers, shaved legs and internet! We are going to miss her so much, but we had a very fun last night in the park with her. Unfortunately Santiago was not as fun as we thought it would be. The city was so overwhelming, and having to drive a truck in that city did not make the experience any more pleasant. But I decided pretty quickly that I preferred Fray Jorge and pretty much wanting to get back to the park and Juan ASAP. My parents are afraid I will want to live in the mountains with only dogs now. Not to be a downer but the energy, massive crowds and intense noise was just to much for me to handle and made me appreciate the peace and quiet in FJ. Plus if I want solitude in the park I can just wander into the desert alone. Also, if you've driven with me you know I have a lead foot so driving in the city was miserable- and no one follows traffic laws. In FJ my only competition on the road is a fox or a rabbit- and the occasional tourist or guardaparque- so I have can drive however I want. One positive thing about Santiago is all the happy dogs!!! I am smiling just thinking of them.

Erin's last night party!

There was a surprise visitor when we returned to Juan's house in FJ- a little hummingbird named Little Jorge (or Little George). His wing was hurt so Katie took him in and they've been trying to nurse him back to health. He has to eat every couple hours and I told them that I do not want to take responsibility for an animal's life so I just look at him. He probably won't make it is a little sad. 

Katie feeding her George. The boys have been calling him her son. 

My assistant comes early Tuesday morning (I have to pick him up at 5am!) And then the real work begins. 

Nubz and river trekking

On 8/1/14 Megan found a really tough lady degu with a nub for an arm! I was still in Valley #1 when Megan and Erin were in Valley #2 and apparently there was a lot of excitement upon her discovery. The crazy thing is that we ear tagged her in June and have trapped, handled, and weighed her many times since then and somehow did not notice the nubbin!! We can’t decide if it is a birth defect or maybe she survived a fox attack? Anyways, Nubz was an exciting find.  

I’ve been trapping a lot and started radio-collaring ladies to find out where they are sleeping so I can trap all the right burrow systems once my project officially begins in a few weeks. Katie came with me the first night and I was terrified the whole time that a puma would jump out at us. I feel more comfortable doing it in the morning when I know the sun will come up. The trouble with radio collaring now is that the females have to be heavy enough that the collar doesn’t add too much weight but at the same time we don’t want to collar ladies that are too far along in pregnancy.  

Little lady enjoying some oats after radio-collaring

We visited Juan’s family again. He had to go home to get something for his motorcycle and we asked if we could come along for an adventure. Juan brought out a bunch of books for us to pick from so now I will be really challenging myself by reading Spanish! He also brought out many photo albums to see pictures from his past! It was great!

I finished the book Cloud Atlas-it was so good! Megan and Erin have also seen the movie and say it’s really good. It’s so weird though that I can’t really picture it as a film. I’m out of physical books now. I have many on my computer but the battery charger doesn't always work in the house so I can’t read on it all the time. Hopefully the Spanish books will be interesting!

River Trekking- Juan took us on another adventure! When I was opening traps in the morning I saw a falling star (estrella fugaz) and thought that meant it would be a lucky day. Trapping did not go well but I was excited that Juan was going to take us swimming in the river. We had a great time (except when my Chacos were almost lost in the mud). But we went swimming with Juan and laughed a lot.

String of frog eggs

The gang minus Erin- Megan didn't have shoes on so Juan carried her around!

THEN… we realized when we were almost back to the house that we had a flat tire. Juan, Erin, Katie and I spent the rest of the day and night driving around the highway trying to find a mechanic to patch up the tire. Not exactly a lucky day. But we had fun with Juan and we decided to drink a lot of wine to forget our bad luck. ALSO, Juan made picarones that night. Picarones are a peruvian donut dessert made with a squash called zapallo. He had made us another dessert with squash a few nights before that was more like fry bread. 

Picarones

Picarones with the syrup like sauce

Megan and I will be taking Erin to Santiago in a few days because she is going back to Tennessee. I don’t know what I’ll do without her here. She has the best attitude and great positive energy. I am excited to visit Santiago again, but I have to do a lot while I’m there- meet with colleagues, change out the truck, pack up the new truck with traps and supplies, and wait in line forever to extend my tourist card. 

The next exciting thing for the blog will be the arrival of my new field assistant in about a week!