team manakin 2007

OK...here goes another one....

Two days ago we moved into our new house...very exciting! It´s a one bedroom house (which Eric and I share- Jeff and Adam sleep in the dining room turned bedroom) with bathroom and kitchen. It´s simple but good enough for us! The best part about it is that there´s a huge garden behind the house filled with flowers and fruit trees. It´s really beautiful. The landlord is a real Tico (costa rican) and puts me on edge...but him and his wife are really friendly. We even have two dogs as pets! The only bad thing about living off-site is that our new house is about a ten minute walk from the comador. Not bad in itself but there´s a killer hill in between which when going down on a bike is close to suicidal!

Last night we had a manakin dinner on the patio. It´s a large dinner table surrounded by loads of flowers...beautiful! We invited two other manakin researchers so there were 6 of us in total. We ordered pizza and had wine and beer. We talked about a variety of things yet somehow those lovely manakins just kept creeping back into the conversation! After dinner we went to the beach (about a 15 minute walk) and started a big bonfire. This event had been planned weeks ago and so everyone had great expectations....and ofcourse just as the fire was starting, the skies opened up and gave us everything they had to offer. We were soaked immediately. Yet miraculously the bonfire managed to keep going (albeit weakly) and we managed to revive it to its former glory after the rain stopped pouring! We made smores (I´m turning into a real american!)...and drank beer. It was a great night! And to top it off Adam gave us today off! We even got to sleep in - until about 6 when we were woken up by the Howler monkeys and roosters!

I forgot to mention that about two weeks ago Adam got really sick so we couldn´t get much work done (as we were all still pretty much clueless as to what we were supposed to do!)...so Adam, the nice man he is, gave us two full days off. The three of us decided to go to Tortugeuro which is a national park by the beach, reknowned for it´s turtle conservation projects. It took us three buses, one boat and 5 hours to get there (not bad if you get up at 6 in the mornings!)...at least we get to see the country this way! The first thing we did once settled in was go swimming in the sea. It´s a beautiful sea but rough with huge waves. I almost drowned a couple of times! Later that evening I read in the guidebook that the sea is not recommended for swimming due to the strong rip tides and infestion of sharks. That evening we bought some wine and enjoyed the sea breeze. The next day we hired a canoe and paddled ourselves through the small canals of the national park. It´s a beautiful forest and we saw lots of little turtles, some monkeys and loads of other animals! By the end of it though, my arms were about to fall off (and I was just pretending to row most of the time!). The afternoon we spent in a small cafe overlooking the scattered palmtrees on the beach while drinking the best daiquiris i´ve ever tasted! What a life. Unfortunately we had to return to La Selva that evening...but it was nice to go back home!

The project is starting to make some headway and most of the prelimenary planning and organising has been done so that we can now start collecting the real data. This means that our days are less hectic and more routine. It also means that we can have a social ife outside of TEAM MANAKIN since i don´t need to be in bed by 8:30! Our mornings consist of checking the cameras that we´ve set up (which film the males dance), which takes a little over an hour. And then we set up the mistnets to catch females for the telemetry. This is the difficult part as these females are hard to ctahc. So far we´ve caught 3...about one every two days! One person follows these birds....and this job is rotated as it´s a 13 hour work day. It´s my turn tomorrow! The others do behaviour observation from about 11-3. Ofcourse every so often things go wrong so we have to do something not planned.

Last monday, Eic and I had to go to San Jose to pick up some more batteries and an AC adapter. We were there around ten so we decided to get to know the city. Eric wanted to go to a huge park on the outskirts so we decided to go there (why he wanted to see a park when he lives in one of the most beautiful parks of the country is beyond me!). It was a nice woodland park with a big lake. Then we decided to have lunch at a Mexican restaurant.....we had the best tacos i´ve eve had...mmm...just thinking about it is making my mouth water and stomach rumble! Finally around 1 we decided to go get the stuff we were sent to the big city for, thinking it was an easy job. We ended up having to visit about 6 different stores sprawled throughout the city and didn´t get back to La Selva until around 19:30. We were scared Adam wasn´t gonna be pleased but he was just so happy we got all the gear that nothing else mattered!

A few days ago, Eric and I discovered that the Peurto Viejo (our town) is only a ten minute bike ride away...so from now on we can just ride our bikes into town and get cakes from the bakery or some fried chicken....or ice cream...mmm! Although we have to ride on the main road where huge trucks and buses just storm by. A little scary!

At the moment there´s a french film crew filming several types of birds...including our manakins. They´re making a film called "animals in love" which should come out in December some time in Europe. It´s more or less the same film crew that made "microcosmos" and "winged migration". How exciting! So soon everyoe will be able to see our manakin males in action!

Well, i´m off home t get changed because we´re goig to float down the river later this afternoon. Hope I dont get attacked by a crocodile!

My home for the next three months, La Selva Biological Park (they have a website...just google it if you´re interested!), is a working biological research station. It is operated by the 'Organisation for Tropical Studies', founded in 1963to provide leadership in the education, research and wise use of tropical natural resources. Many well-known tropical ecologists have studied at La Selva!

The area protected by La Selva is 1513 hectares of pre-montane wet-tropical rain forest, much of it undisturbed. It's bordered to the south by th 476 sq km of Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo, creating a protected are large enough to support a great diversity of life. More than 430 bird species have been recorded here, as well as 120 mammal species, 1900 species of vascular plants and thousands of insects species. (Sorry Lonely Planet for plagarising those two paragraphs but I couldn't have said it better!).

I really love it here. The four of us (Adam, Jeff, Eric and I) share a (small)room at the river station (by the river...obviously...wé've been swimming once but it's a little scary coz teh current is so strong and there are crocodiles-though i haven't seen any yet!). It´s about a 5 minute walk to either the labs, the library, and the dining hall. Not too bad unless it´s dark and you're wearing flip-flops with no flashlight! Bad Idea! I actually stepped on a snake the other day....I just didn´t see it....even though it was light! Luckily it was a little one and a rear-fanged snake (and to those of you, like me, who are unfamiliar with snakes...that means it´s fangs turn inwards in its mouth...no fangs on its´ tail...which apparently is a stupid thing to think!).

Manakins make this special type of "snapping" sound with their wings to attract females. The males lek in groups of 3-15. Each one clears a "court" which is about one meter squared (it variates greatly depending on the quality of the male) surrounded by several strong saplings on which they jump from one to another while making their "snapping" sound (there´s a lot more info, including some videos of this snapping behaviour on adam´s website: www.adamcstein.com).

They usually axhibit this snapping behaviour early in the mornings (6-9) and in the afternoons (11:30-3). So the first few days we had to go around the whole park and listen out for the manakin snapping. La Selva has over 50km of well-developed jungle trails, often paved, so we got bikes to ride around! Makes it a lot easier! Once we located the snapping we had to go off the path into the jungle to find the lek exactly and then find out how many courts there are (once you know what they look like they´re really easy to recognise!). Then we had to measure the distance and direction of each of the courts.

Out of the many leks we found, we´re using three main good ones at the moment. The past four days we´ve been misnetting which involves putting up these nets (which to me look like fishnets) in the forest. They're reallyt hin and hard to spot so the birds just fly into them and get stuck. Sounds horrific but it isn't. We just have to check them about every half an hour and then untangle any caught birds. I was very scared at doing this in the beginning but i´m getiing used to it and better so i kinda like it now. I think i´ve freed about 15 birds in the past 4 days. Not bad. Plus you get to hold them and play with them after you free them. Fun! We've caught some pretty birds so far...the nicest definitely was a royal flycatcher...beautiful! If a manakin gets caught then we bring them back to "camp", tag and measure them etc...and after about half an hour let them go again. We´ve caught 16 manakins so far and Adam wants to catch all the birds from those three leks which probably comes to about 40 birds....so we still have a lot of work to do. After this we will be filming them, observing them and teleometrying (I don't know if that´s a verb but now it is!) them.

I think that´s about it for now...it´s getting close to dinner time. My rice and beans are waiting for me...

xxxxx