Fray Jorge

We arrived on 6/20/14 after quite a trip. I was in charge of bringing the truck up from the garage near the University so we could load up all of our equipment. But when I got to the truck it would not turn on! I have zero auto knowledge, plus I hardly ever drive a truck and it runs on diesel (I already had an experience learning that diesel’s take a minute to shut off after you remove the keys and get out). Anyways, after some panic a nice man that worked for the garage jumped the car, and the lady at the ticket booth didn’t charge me for the extra time I spent in the garage. So because of all that we were running a little late but had a nice journey North… until we were only about 45 minutes from the house and barely outside the park when the clutch in our car burned out!!! No cell service, no people around, and it was getting dark. The car company blames me, but we still don't think it was my fault :( What was weird is Loren had just said that he could tell he burned his clutch and that car was smelling. An employee of the park, Marcelo, towed the truck to the Administration building and we were finally able to get to our new home. It only took about 4.5 hours! So that might all have sounded bad, but the cabin we are staying in is AMAZING. Definitely exceeded expectations and is very comfy. So all my family back home should not be worried about me staying here for the next five months because I love it! We have everything we need including good company- Juan who lives at the cabin and plays cards and dominos with us each night. He even cooks us food while we are out doing field work! 

Our house!

Three dogs showed up at our cabin, which we were excited about, although the guards said that they were stressing out guanacos. I found the little one almost completely inside a degu burrow, just his tail was sticking out so I that is a problem. 

Trying to sneak into the cabin

Setting traps out in this landscape is labor intensive, and a little stressful because I have to keep track of every single trap so that we make sure to close them all at the end of trapping. But I’ve been catching between 10-30 degus each day! I need to 8-10 groups for my research and Loren and I think that we have 5 and 8 prospective groups, yay!! You can see from pictures that the burrow systems are much harder to determine in FJ than Rinconada. The runways are also not as prominent. Also, cacti are everywhere. I scratch myself up trying to get traps inside these shrubs, and at the end of the day I use pliers to pull out all the spines from my boots.

Traps around a burrow system

I’ve seen many pretty birds, including eagles, Harris’s Hawks, Mustached Turca and many I can not identify yet. There are burrowing owls here that we have been trying to find. I also had a cool wildlife encounter with a fox. I had been hoping to see one, even though Loren says I will get sick of seeing them, and when I was setting traps I looked over and saw one right next to me! They have no fear of humans because they are not hunted, so they act like they are the boss. He did not care when I tried to scare him away and kept peeing on my traps. He was so beautiful though so all I wanted to do was watch him. But if he keeps marking traps that will keep degus from entering the traps. Also, a fox came back when degus were trapped. I scared that one away because can you imagine how scary that would be for a degu to be unable to escape it's predator??? And foxes can run off with the traps!! Katie's blog http://atacamalove.blogspot.com/ has pictures of a fox and pictures of our lovely home!

One of the coolest things in FJ is the fog that rolls over later in the day from the Fog Forest just beyond the mountains. We hope to hike up there during our stay.

Also, Chile lost their last futbol game :( There is another game on Saturday against Brasil and I guess that may be the end for us according to the people that know futbol. Oh well. 

Los perros de Chile

I just have to post some pics of the adorable dogs here. They are wise and know the rules of the city (well, for the most part). It was so funny to watch dogs waiting at crosswalks. They know not to cross when cars are coming, and will walk with the flow of people. 

They have their own territories and will follow you around until they reach a boundary, and then they will stop. One young pit mix clearly did not know the rules yet, and followed us into the university and up some stairs to the Ecology Department building. He whined when we had to leave him outside, which was sad for us dog lovers. He has to learn I guess. 

Friends at the university. They knew not to follow us inside.

You'll notice the little guy above has a on a sweater. We saw many street dogs with sweaters and I still wonder who went around the city dressing these pups.

These guys joined the march down La Alameda to celebrate the win over Spain! Probably because they were stressed and had no idea what was going on in their city... 

I never felt badly for the dogs when they had had a nice place to nap, often with other dog friends. 

This Cocker Spaniel was sitting on his own balcony with a cat, who I just had to include because he had a killer mustache.

6/17/14

Fixed point telemetry, to determine home range

Foggy Rinconada in the early morning

I've been performing field work in Rinconada for the last few days to practice techniques for my research at Fray Jorge National Park. The thing about field work is that you never know what you'll encounter. Driving in the truck in Rinconada is truly like riding the Indiana Jones ride in Disneyland, and I'm not exaggerating at all. During the ride we were able to see lots of native wildlife, like coruros (a pretty ugly but somehow cute subterranean rodent-look it up!), Chimango caracaras (spanish: tiuque), Black-chested Buzzard-Eagles, Harris's Hawk, striped woodpecker, long-tailed meadow lark (spanish: loica), and I was surprised by an Elegant Racer! I recommend Katie Carroll's blog http://atacamalove.blogspot.com/ for some excellent high quality wildlife pictures! 

A view of the Andes in Rinconada

We started exploring the mountain and when we looked back down into the valley there was my brilliant advisor Dr. Loren Hayes herding hundreds of sheep! Turns out a big part of burrow trapping degus in Rinconada is making sure the sheep don't walk through our area, crushing or traps or scaring degus. We all had a chance to herd the sheep- they are so cute!

My favorite were the the Blackface sheep, but I didn't get a good picture of any of those.

And I finally trapped and handled some degus! Some were feistier than others, but that's good practice since I hear the degus in Fray Jorge will be much wilder than Rinconada degus. This is likely because they have not been trapped or handled as much as the Rinconada degus. 

You can see in the pictures that degus form "runways" between the burrow openings in each system. Degu social groups use multiple systems, where they will sleep together at night, but during the day may travel to burrow systems that are not there own. We open traps early in the morning so we can be sure that the degus we trap just emerged from the burrow system they were sleeping in. Fun fact: we can not use peanut butter to bait traps because degus, unlike other animals, are very susceptible to diabetes so we use oats instead. They are studied to understand why they are less successful at controlling blood sugar levels.

For my project, I will trap degus (including the pups when they begin emerging!) and assign radio collars to individuals. If you know how small my hands are then you will understand  how tiny these collars are! Degus are a lot smaller than they appear in pictures. I will radio track animals to burrow systems to figure out the social groups, and then I will know how many pups are produced in groups of various sizes.

Futbol!!!

It was so amazing to be in Chile when they beat Australia on 6/13/14. My advisor Loren said that the city would riot if they won and I have to admit I thought he was exaggerating. But crowds really did march down La Alameda, a main street here in Santiago. People of all ages, including babies and young children congregated at Plaza Italia where people were climbing up on statues, setting off fireworks, and waving flags like mad. Families were spraying shaving cream and silly string at each other, and guys were climbing on top of bus stop structures. Some of the street dogs seemed excited about the commotion and others looked panicked (I don't blame them). I am looking forward to their game tomorrow versus Espana!

6/9/14

This trip started off a little rocky- Delta employees at Sky Harbor did not want to let me on the plane unless I had an extended visa for Chile-which I did not. Luckily they decided to trust me and believe that I would pay for an extended tourist visa once I was in Santiago (like I had planned). The rest of the trip was pretty peaceful, and by the time we flew over the Andes I was very excited and the trip finally seemed real. Santiago is a fun city, with very nice people and many many sweet street dogs! I'll include some pictures of my new friends in their cute sweaters :) My vocabulary for Spanish food is clearly lacking so restaurants have been an interesting experience, but I love that people drink beer and wine from lunch time on until dinner (which seems to be anywhere from 9pm-12am). The people of Santiago are so patient and understanding with me, always taking a lot of time to figure out what I'm trying to say.

Rinconada de Maipu

I have been visiting with collaborators from Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile and Universidad de Chile to discuss my degu research. We also visited the research station in Rinconada de Maipu, where Dr. Hayes and Dr. Ebensperger have been studying degus for 10+ years. 






Katie, Erin, and I were super excited to finally see degus running around in the wild!!!

I told some family members I was trying to video blog....I started off strong but I doubt it will continue.

Flying to Santiago 6/9/14

First day in our hostel 6/10/14

Katie's birthday! 6/11/14