The Great and Ongoing Egg Search

Well, this post is much more belated than I thought it would be! The season’s only getting crazier, and it sounds like it’s going to get substantially worse before it gets better…still, I’ve got a bunch of photos that I want to get up here, so I’ll try to churn through some more posts quickly!

There's lupine and California poppies everywhere, which may be my new favorite color combination.

First of all, I'm into a proper, full-size room now! Sarah and Zoe have moved on and moved out, leaving me and Russel to both handle all of the job responsibilities...and lay claim to the nicer rooms on the main floor of Rob House. They have such modern luxuries as coat hooks, lamps, and desks. Okay, mine does have a walk-in closet and a full-length mirror, those are actually nice things for a dorm-style room. I've also found a place to hang my hammock outside, which is especially lovely as the weather continues to warm up.

That's Rob House down below; we were up on the hillside doing a "tick drag", which actually isn't as bad as it sounds. I mean, it's five hours long, but mostly it just means wandering back and forth over the beautiful hillside...tick handling itself isn't bad...

Aside from the living situation, I guess my day-to-day activities have also changed a fair bit since that last post. We started out doing mostly census watches—periods where we’d watch a single group of birds to try to spot all of the group members, see if any new birds had joined since we were there last, etc. Those are still important, but they’ve definitely taken a back burner as we head into the breeding season. Now, we’re looking for nests, and all else is secondary.

Yes, they just hang out like this. They'll all sit up there in a row to preen and look out over the territory.

“Looking for nests” is both simpler and more complicated than you’re probably imagining. It’s not something we can just do with binoculars, since ACWOs are cavity nesters: they drill a hole down into the tree and put their nests in it. Of course, we can see those cavities from the outside, but a given woodpecker group will have many cavities…among which they have placed exactly one nest. This means we have to actually look into the cavities (which can be anywhere from six to sixty feet off the ground) to see if they have eggs in them. For this, we have some handy-dandy extendable poles that were originally designed to let people measure the height of power lines, and we’ve stuck cameras on them. This leaves us with the activity that is currently dominating our lives: scoping.

In the words of Sarah, “Scoping is great. I love scoping.”

This is most often said after the pole has collapsed, the camera has malfunctioned, the wind has picked up, or you finally get the camera into a hole forty feet up only to discover that you forgot to turn it on.

Here we see Russell demonstrating the sophisticated art of "swinging the pole around until you finally find the cavity".

It's an…interesting endeavor. On the one hand, it’s an amazingly efficient way to see into cavities of various heights, often out in the middle of nowhere where you have to be able to carry the equipment for a long hike first. On the other hand, the poles are super bendy so you usually end up “fishing” with the camera at the top, trying to aim it precisely into the hole while the pole wobbles back and forth and the wind throws a wrench in everything…

Still, we’re doing it enough that we’ve certainly gotten much better at it. We go around scoping all of the active-use cavities for all of the groups (around 180 cavities total) about once a week. This has mostly been fruitless so far, but now we’re starting to find actual nests! Last Friday I found one with three eggs, and another with five; then I checked it again yesterday and found that the five-egg clutch stayed the same, and the three-egg clutch has grown to four. That tells us exactly when the four-egg one will hatch...and unfortunately means we have no idea about the five-egg one, so we'll just have to keep an eye on it. Since the birds pretty reliably lay one egg per day (all of the group’s females sharing the same nest), we can calculate from the final clutch size when we think the eggs will hatch. This will eventually be important because there’s a very narrow window when the chicks are big enough to put leg bands on them, but not old enough to fly away.

This is just some random tree down by Gate, but it's currently carpeted with flowers and looks like a fairy glade.

Aside from that (and some drama with getting new batteries for our equipment, but that's another story), we've mostly been trying to figure out where different bird groups are roosting so we can catch and band them before nesting really gets going. This involves going out at dusk, sitting really quietly for a while, and then watching and listening for where the birds are going--usually a particular cavity or two, which they'll all vanish into about ten minutes after sunset. This has also led me to discover one of my favorite "fun facts" at Hastings so far, which is that two groups that are particularly close to one another apparently have a tradition of spending ten minutes before bed each night...yelling at each other from neighboring trees. Hey, it's important to maintain good relationships with your neighbors, and remind them that they better stay really far away from your trees.

And actually, that leads me into my final story of the post. If you remember me mentioning it before, these birds have something called "power struggles", where a bunch of young birds fight for the chance to become high-ranking breeders. Something new that I learned this last week is that, like any war, a power struggle can also destabilize nearby groups and lead them to power-struggle as well! We had three different groups power-struggle in less than a week earlier--when you describe it, it ends up sounding like something out of a history group (or, again, Game of Thrones). The three younger females from 1600 went to take over at 1800, but their departure left 1600 unstable so then that exploded into its own power struggle, and then Middle Long Field 2 got tipped off as well and the three 1600-now-1800 females were fighting in that as well to maybe try to take over both territories...Now it's all settled out, but it was a lot of fun to track the changing power dynamics as they were happening!

I think I'll leave this post there. Time to make two week's worth of trail snacks so I survive the chaotic start to the nesting season!

Finally, the view from the top of Aardvark. That hilltop you can see on the left is Haystack.

Arrivals and adventures

I am officially here! And I've got at least a few days under my belt to have a sense of what's going on. Well, some sort of sense. Theoretically.

I got in on the 14th, had a brief evening to get unpacked, and then started work on on the 15th. Well, "start" is overstating things a bit--the first day mostly consisted of hiking around the reserve being introduced to the layout, doing a practice run of birdwatching, and then getting lessons in driving the "mules" (UTVs that you have to use to get to the more isolated areas). The rest of this week-and-a-half has been similar, with a combination of "doing actual work" and more tours and lessons. The other new tech (Russel) and I are still a little shaky on the names and locations of the several dozen woodpecker groups, but we've gotten to the point where our data is considered reliable enough to record, so that's progress.

This is about 60% of my job. I stare through the scope and try to make out what color leg bands each ACWO (acorn woodpecker) is wearing.

Those several dozen woodpecker groups are scattered throughout this park, mostly on four hills. I greatly enjoy their names, and the names of the hills, and the names of most things around the park--they remind me of living on the farm, because everything clearly has a personal history for somebody, and possibly a history spanning more than forty years. One hill is called "Haystack" (clearly for it's shape), and another is called "Poison Oak" (clearly for...other reasons); a woodpecker group near the office is named "Jaime" after the steward, and another is named "Aardvark" after a deliberate mispronunciation of a previous student's name; and one of the residences is called "Schoolhouse" because it is literally a refurbished one-room schoolhouse. No one locks anything. There are ancient Star Trek posters in the equipment shed and drawings from someone's eight-year-old stuck on the office fridge. In my house's random drawers, I have found items including 1) a single bent knitting needle, 2) an extensive collection of cassette tapes, 3) a peg solitaire board that miraculously still has all the pegs, and 4) a seal nose in a jar. I really don't know what the story is with that last one.

So, speaking of, I am staying in Rob House! Technically Robinson House, but nobody calls it that. It's an old farmhouse that's been reworked into research housing, with five bedrooms scattered across 2.5 floors. I'm currently in a very goofy little room right up top: it is really a repurposed attic, and it has two blankets in lieu of a door. Rob House isn't usually full enough for people to need this room, and I'm just in it until one of the other techs moves out in a couple weeks. I kind of like it--though I'll certainly be glad for more space once it's available! I'm currently here with Zoe, Sarah, and Russel. Zoe and Sarah have been the woodpecker techs here for the last six months, so they're introducing me and Russel to the job and the place.

I don't have a photo of Rob House right now, so instead you get a picture of Sarah and Sahas looking pensively into the distance over Poison Oak.

The rest of the park's researchers live in various other, similarly-eclectic dwellings. These include Sahas, the postdoc who's currently running the woodpecker project here (my boss); the researcher who is actually running the whole woodpecker project (Sahas's boss); a mouse researcher and her two techs (the "mousers"); a scrub-jay researcher and his wife; and some other folks who keep this place afloat. We had a potluck last week, so I finally got to put names to faces for the whole bunch--they're a good group.

Going forward here, Russel and I will be finishing our attempts to memorize the park layout and learning the rest of our field techniques (such as catching and banding woodpeckers, watching their nests, and doing "tick dragging", which is exactly as charming as it sounds). It really is a lovely place; I'm still adapting to the amount of straight-up-and-down-the-hills hiking that's involved, but those hills do make for spectacular scenery.

The hills are aliiiiiiiive with the sound of ACWOs...

There are a bunch of random animals wandering through the area at any given time, ranging from deer and turkeys to some more Western species like California quail and a special endangered newt, as well as the more occasional bobcat or fox. There are flocks of bluebirds around, which often get quite close when you're sitting still long enough woodpecker-watching--on one of my watches, one bluebird decided to perch on my blind for a bit! The frogs here have a very traditional "ribbit".

One of my tasks is to hang out at dusk watching for roosting birds, but birds don't show up very often--so that mostly translates into "meditating and listening to frogs".

This is far from everything, but I think it's enough for now. I'll put together some more specific descriptions of what I'm doing for the next time, and keep you posted with any further developments!

Introducing the Official 2018 Field Season Blog

Greetings, all! Welcome to Round Two of "Emily goes running off into the woods to study animals". This is a pretty straightforward introduction, doubling as a test drive to remind me how to use this website effectively.

As most people will know, I've spent the last few months working on some research from school (and otherwise doing part-time work) while looking for my first "real" job post-graduation. The school research--a cleaned up and hopefully-publication-worthy redo of my senior research on elephant ecology--has gone well, and I expect to be 99% finished with it by the time I start this next endeavor. My other major activities, such as working part-time at Barnes & Noble and volunteering at my local nature center, will have to stop for now, much as I'll miss the people there.

Now, though, I'm preparing to depart for California in mid-March, as I've accepted a position as a field assistant for acorn woodpecker research at Hastings Natural History Reservation.

A "clown-faced" acorn woodpecker, courtesy of https://tinyurl.com/y84y5eqt

This silly-looking birds have some very weird social dynamics. Family groups consist of four-ish males (often brothers) and four-ish females (often sisters), all of which breed freely with each other. They're also accompanied by a bunch of young birds ("nest helpers") who haven't found their own family yet and so are stuck at home babysitting the new kids.

This results in what I have taken to calling "woodpecker Game of Thrones".

Since the local woodpeckers are very territorial and have snapped up the good nesting and feeding areas nearby, the only time a nest helper can start their own family is when all of the males or all of the females from another group die. Now, this does happen occasionally--and when it does, it sets off what is called a "power struggle" (I swear I'm not making this up, real scientific term there). All of the local lads or gals who want to get away from their parents get into a huge ruckus fighting over the new open positions, after which the victors emerge as the leaders of the new "dynasty" (again, technical term). Film adaptations are just waiting to be made.

On the scientific side, you might be able to guess how many weird things we therefore have available to study, mostly about group dynamics. Do the nest helpers get anything out of helping, or are they just pressed into service because they have nowhere else to go? Do they actually do their best to help, or just kind of make a show of it? How closely do the dominant birds watch them, anyway?

This particular park's worth of woodpeckers has been very well-studied: all of the birds in the area are banded, many are radio-tagged, and some are genotyped. In some form or another, this group has been constantly monitored for the last few decades. This is a ton of data, all about the Hastings woodpecker population.

Speaking of which, about Hastings. Hastings Natural History Reservation (http://hastingsreserve.org/) is a good-size nature reserve about two hours south of the Bay Area.

Generally in the middle of nowhere, but a very pretty nowhere.

It's pretty isolated, but not so much that you can't make weekend trips off to nearby national forests, the Monterey area, or (if you're feeling ambitious) up to the Bay Area. The park itself is off-limits to anyone except staff and researchers--no visiting me there, unfortunately! I'm not working for the reserve, but for a lab at Old Dominion University (waaaaaay over in Virginia). They're focused on these breeding group dynamics so, like my Yale adviser's liking for working in South Africa, these people come out to California every summer. Aside from the four of them, it sounds like there'll be 5-10 other researchers working on different projects. A small community, but certainly an interesting one!

Day-to-day work sounds like it will mostly be "very diligent birdwatching", as my dad put it: watching woodpecker holes and nests for how often they're visited, by which birds, with what kind of food, etc. There will also be some woodpecker-catching involved, and a lot of miscellaneous data processing. Finally, I get the chance to do an independent project as part of this--which, as I'm looking to head back to grad school within a couple of years, is an excellent resume-builder.

All in all, I'll be out in the middle of the woods from March to September. Enough people expressed interest in updates, photos, etc., that I decided to revive the blog; hopefully I'll be able to update it a bit more regularly than I did in South Africa! My internet will be limited due to the isolation and mountains, but not so much that I can't post some pictures every once in a while.

That's all I've got for now; stay tuned for initial reactions in mid-late March, and some more regular updates after that. A good winter to all!

Oh yeah, did I mention they store hundreds of acorns in dedicated "granary" trees? These are very bizarre birds.
https://tinyurl.com/ybg5pgrj