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.