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.