Micro and macro

We met our scientist at 9am after a breakfast of eggs and salsa with fruit and yogurt and headed off into the woods to the south of the Station to see what we could see. Specifically, we are looking for Mexican Jays.

As soon as I started paying more attention to bird calls and the sounds of other critters, the whole forest changed. In the city there is lots of noise all over, but it's pretty much the same selection and its origins are usually clear (vehicle, person, jackhammer, seagull, drunks...) but in the forest there are several layers of sounds and, for me at least for now, most are mysterious. What bird is that? Was that slithery sound in the leaves a lizard or a snake? Were those big steps over the ridge a person, large bird, deer or mountain lion? Was that a huge dragonfly or a little hummingbird? Is that a mythical beast or construction in the distance??

By listening and learning from the company of biologists, which I am most grateful for, you can start to pick through the cacophony. Today, for instance, I learned that the much-hunted (with binoculars) trogon makes a noise like a dehydrated dog trying to bark. I also was thus reminded that even though the bird is beautiful, doesn't mean their song will be...

At one point, we were trekking over rocks next to the creek when an all-too familiar sound startled us: gobble-gobble-gobble. And there it was - a massive, warty headed, wobbly chinned turkey. He was doing this amazing pouffy, stompy, I'm-so-hot-please-mate-with-me dance. I heard footsteps over the ridge, and lo and behold, a boring brown and likely fertile female was going up the creek.

Here's a little section of his number; unfortunately, he didn't do his loud warbly cry while I was filming. He's camera shy I suppose.



Not like the pictures on the frozen thanksgiving bird, eh? This place is endlessly weird. I love it.

It's also nice when walking thorough the forest here that you have to pay so much attention. You have to watch your footing for loose rocks or rattlers, make sure to avoid the prickly things, figure out the best way around or over barbed wire fences, keep an ear out for loud footsteps, and keep eyes and ears out for whatever you are collecting data on. This heightened awareness is a welcome change from the urban auto-pilot I am used to.

I did not realize how big our study plot was, though, and will be sure next time to wear a long-sleeved shirt, a hat, and bring more water. The sun out here is relentless. Even in the woods - the canopy is a lot less dense here. Every day is a learning day.

Speaking of learning, I went to a talk about the ecological significance of the Chiracahua mountains yesterday and learned some amazing things. Like, the reason the American Natural History Museum acquired a research station in this mountain range is because of its incredible biological/geological diversity. The whole west coast of the Americas was underwater 500 million or so years ago, so apparently you can actually still find aquatic fossils at the tops of mountains. The pushing up of the coast by the plates created mountain ranges, but also volcanoes. They spent a lot of time erupting and creating lots and lots of ash which compacted over years and years and years, resulting in the mountains you see here. That's why they look so worn and old - they are much more fragile than mountains made of good ol' earth-crust rock, so the wind and rain erode them much faster.


The west coast was also spared from the last ice age, so there are a lot of ancient species here. The other amazing factor I'm sure you're all dying to hear about is the fact that these particular mountains are what are known as "sky islands". The climate at elevation is drastically different than that of the valleys. So the animals, insects and plants of the mountain cannot travel anywhere else - they would die in transit through the desert. So they are basically stuck on whatever mountain they are born on, which makes for density as well as unique evolutionary patterns. And to top it all off, this range seems to be a cul de sac for animals from the north, east, south, or west who migrate and stop here because it's too hot, cold, wet, and/or dry on the other side. The immigration of animals from Mexico is likely declining, though - the presenters say - now that a lot of the fence is up along the border. (More on the border later. Its presence is very real here.)

Anyway, there's my little geology/biology lesson for the day.

As for me, I went through a bit of an, shall we say, adjustment the last few days (read: mild homesickness, missing urban life a bit, and a little tired of the same people day in and day out, except Chris who is awesome), but this has passed with (surprisingly) more sleep and the work with the scientist in the forest feels great. It's a lot of fun. And does the body good. And pained.

I am already over sunned (today marks one week here) so I have to start being much more careful than back home. I also have nasty blisters on my feet from my sandals - grit gets under the straps and basically sandpapers my feet - but other than that I am fit as a fiddle. Chris and I attempted to fix the big crack that developed in the car's windshield during the drive to sketchy success, I guess.

I'm looking forward to more learning and more hiking and exploring. One of these posts I'll have to talk about our cave explorings. Very neat.


Thanks to all who have sent me messages or left comments! It's great to hear from you!

Daily life at SWRS

• 6:00 - wake up to sound of construction of new buildings behind our room.
  

• 6:30 - drag myself out of bed and run.


• 7:00 - if scheduled, fill hummingbird feeders, then head to Main House to set up for breakfast.

• 7:30 (sharp) - eat breakfast. Avert eyes if sausage gravy is on the menu.

• 8:00 - clean up after breakfast.


• 9:00 - check email, blog, try to inform myself about swine flu without falling for the sensationalism.

• 10:00 - walk around plots in forest documenting location of Mexican jays with the GPS.

• 11:30 - if scheduled, set up for lunch.


• noon (sharp) - eat lunch. Try not to gorge myself on bacon.

• 12:30 - more dishes.


• 13:00 - go for a hike or bike ride or road trip into "town" followed by dip in the pool and reading.

• 16:00 - walk plots looking for jays again.


• 17:00 - listen to talk about ecological importance of Chiracahua Mountains. Or attempt to fix a crack in windshield of car.


• 17:30 - if not scheduled for breakfast and lunch, I'm on dinner and evening clean duty.

• 18:00 (sharp) - eat dinner. Fail at avoiding dessert yet again.

• 18:30 - begin evening clean - dishes, cleaning, sweeping, mopping of whole dining room and kitchen. Blare loud music when cook leaves.


• 20:00 - find Chris, drink beer. Help her with night photography experiments.


• 21:30 - try and put back a little tiny bit of moisture into my skin. Examine new cuts/blisters/bruises. Wish my hair would curl. Wash and hang clothes if needed and machines are free.


• 22:00 - go to bed, read, sleep.


• start over

Context:

Two inspirational women

My camera broke yesterday, so I'll take advantage of this unfortunate situation for a text-heavy post I've been meaning to write.

In my first two days here I met two women that gave me a lot to think about.

The second was a gregarious woman from Pennsylvania here with her birder husband. She was going bonkers over the Red River cereal Chris brought up (they apparently can't get it in the US and the cook loves the stuff - as do I). The woman actually found it on amazon.com and will be ordering six boxes for $49 when she gets home. Chris and I are considering an import-export business...

Anyway, though this demonstrates her good taste for things Canadian, it is not at all why she was inspirational.

The day before yesterday, she was wearing a shirt covered in drawings of birds. Not a remarkable thing - all the nutty birders do it - but hers were the birds of the Galapagos. I asked her if she had been and she told me that she went with her husband after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctors had to inject blue dye in her breast and she told her husband - "Now you have your own blue-footed booby!" When she was well enough, they decided to plan a trip - something she was able to look forward to during all the scary unpleasantness. She was determined to go wherever the boobies were, which turned out to the the Galapagos. The trip was meaningful enough for her and her husband that they took out a home equity loan to do it. This method of financing is tinged with stigma, I realize, but as she bubbled away to her birding tour I had lump in my throat. She found a way to struggle through cancer and live to laugh about it. Puts my fears of the next big transition in my life in perspective.

The first woman I met the day before was really interesting. She sat beside us lowly volunteers at lunch and immediately struck up a conversation, asking what our stories and backgrounds were. She exuded optimism and told us of her dream to be a virtuoso organist. When this was clearly not going to happen, she travelled - living in Lebanon, being evacuated to Paris and teaching music there for a year, hitchhiking around the US - working just to keep travelling. She then stumbled into a career as a piano tuner in Las Vegas. She had to fight sexist perceptions that she would never being able to learn how to use a wrench and worked hard with little support to be the best in her field despite this. Meanwhile, she takes off for several months a year and keeps travelling. She married at 49 ("Plenty early enough" she said, laughing) and though she doesn't have children, takes in travellers and guests at her home with open arms. In fact, we are invited and are considering the Vegasian detour on our return trip.

Recounting this, I realize it's hard to get across the effect she had on me. The inspirational thing was that, like the Red River lady, she was living just the way she wanted and was not afraid to take chances. I was also touched by her openness to us and her clear desire to be good to others and to herself.

Now that I have an increasingly clearer idea of what my own aspirations are, it was nice to have the timely reminder to go and do the things I need to do now with an open heart. And be a nice and generous person as often as possible.

Desert observations

It's really hard to imagine that this landscape will soon be the norm for me. It has all the basic elements of home - sky, dirt, relief, trees, water, rocks, plants, animals, etc., but everything is wackier.

The sky is big and mostly cloudless. When I wake up at 6am, the sun is well above the very big mountains to the east. This may have something to do with the fact that Arizona does not do Daylight Savings Time for some reason. I have been meaning to ask when the sun rises, but seeing as it is unlikely I will get up that early, I'll focus on the sunsets. And the stars. The bazillion stars.

The dirt is dry. Like, really dry. I know, I know, it is the desert... but seriously - I am pretty much constantly covered in dust. Yesterday there were HUGE gusts of wind and I was driving around the New Mexico desert. There were dust clouds everywhere. I was driving north on hwy 80 with my windows open and all of a sudden the wind kicked up and practically burst my ear drum! I went to this store, literally in the middle of nowhere, that sells organics and natural products (very surreal in a place where most businesses are taverns or churches), and I couldn't get the door open to get out the wind was so strong. Here is a very creepy video to give you an idea of the wind and dust (and absence of people and children... *shiver*:



The trees are all different - small leaves and short compared to ours. The sycamores are cool, I'll try to get some shots of them. The bushes are pretty much all thorny and there are cacti EVERYWHERE! They are as common as our dandelions almost. So weird. A lot of the plants look like they're right out of a Dr. Seuss book. Very weird.


As for water, well, coming from the land o' lakes and rivers, this place is pretty bare. Better than New Mexico where there are endless river beds and the water has clearly decided to sleep somewhere else. Here there a whopping two creeks. Luckily the water at the station is very drinkable. In fact, I don't think I've ever drank so much on a daily basis. Way more than 8 a day, that's for sure.

Now the rocks, they are something else (JJ - you have to visit this place sometime). The patterns and colours and commonness of geode-like shiny bits have ruined me for Canadian shield rocks forever. Check these out:




Look at the many weird things growing out of this rock:


As for the fauna, well there is a resident mule deer here named Mickey who just wanders around the property that I hope to befriend. Her mom, Molly, was famous here for her approachability, which may have been the cause of her untimely demise by a mountain lion two weeks ago. She is much missed - people come here just to visit her.

Yesterday on our hike we heard what was likely the rattle of a rattlesnake. And there are scorpions around. I'm not too too concerned - watch your step and don't bother them and they won't bother you.

Now that you are all worried for me, let me tell you about the non-deadly animals. There are obviously birds galore. This place is a birder's mecca. I don't know much about them yet, but hope to go on some tours. Maybe see the mythical trogon everyone keeps talking about. Birder culture is weird though. And a little obsessive. So I think I'll stay on the periphery and avoid becoming a lifelister [people who spend all their time trying to see new species just to add to their list]. The hummingbirds are pretty amazing. And big! There are feeders here and I have never seen so many all at once. We're talking ten fighting over each feeder. They are beautiful.

And would you believe it? The lizards here are as common as squirrels back home. They are so cute.

And that's just a small taste of the differentness of this place. I have much, much more to talk about, but if I sit here all day and do that, I won't be experiencing more things to talk about.

Speaking of, in case you are worried that I am spending too much time on the internet rather than enjoying my surroundings, the other very different thing here is the pace of time. It's been a long, long time since I felt it passing so leisurely. I can write an incredibly longwinded blog post (like this one), eat three meals, work my four hours, go on long hikes, read many chapters of a book, sit around, lie down, have a shower, drive to Rodeo and back, and still feel like I have hours to kill.

Speaking of, my porch, my book, and some coffee are calling. It's 10am here and there are still two hours until lunch.

Talk to y'all later!

4,411 kilometres later...

... and we're here! Five days on the road and we can finally settle into our home for the next six weeks - the Southwestern Research Station in Portal, AZ.

It took 5 days of mostly easy driving. The first stretch was Ottawa to Toronto which I have done countless times, but it has never felt so short. When your trip totals almost 40 hours in total, your perception of distance changes.

The next day we crossed the border and were stopped immediately once the "volunteering" was uttered. When we told the nice woman at border control what we were doing (helping at a biological research station in the mountains of Arizona) she immediately looked up and asked "Now why would you want to do that?"; not joking. First of all, I'm glad Chris took the mic here - as a biologist her answer made sense. I just nodded and made it seem like I was going for the same reasons. Had I said, "Well, I hated my job and needed to get away from things back home and I have no clue what I am doing afterwards", I may have ended up in the room labelled "search" with the fluorescent lights and sterilized gloves (I really wish they had shut the door - that room still gives me nightmares). Secondly, is there a "good enough" answer? Who are they to judge our motivations? Why not ask us about the fruit in our cooler instead? Anyway, they eventually they let us go, after taking our picture and our fingerprints...

anecdote: There was an oriental couple at the booth next to us who, when asked "Where are you folks headed?" answered "Two bags of rice and some soy sauce." Even the border lady was giggling.

So after being permitted to enter, we were in the US! But only a very, very small fraction to our destination. That day we drive through Michigan (making a very short detour in Flint to see if Mr. Moore was around) and Indiana and stayed at a pretty nice highway hotel that we booked through hotwire.

Indianapolis is a weird place. We went looking for dinner and parked by their cobblestone roundabout with the MASSIVE war memorial in the middle. Walking around on the very large, excessively clean streets with very few people and no women around, I told Chris it felt like being in a place built to demonstrate what a city should look like; as if we stumbled upon Universal Studios Indiana or something. We eventually asked the only people we found who didn't look like they were headed to the sports bar where we should go and they directed us to a nice strip where we enjoyed good food and beer after an eight-hour driving day.

The next day we enjoyed our complimentary breakfast, wisely avoiding the sausage gravy which looked like the Quaker factory's Cream of Wheat rejects, and hit the road headed for Kansas City.

Now's a good time as any to talk about the landscape of the midwest, I suppose, as normally this is a big part of a road trip. In our case, however, we quickly realized why no one we know has ever done this route and why we know so little of these states. They are quite boring. Lovely and prairie-like with rolling hills and fields and all that, but never ending. And I like prairies. After a while I was jonesing for the lakes and rivers and forests and hills I am more accustomed to. But, alas, I will not see such scenery again for eight more weeks. One thing that was awesome, though, was that by mid-Indiana, the grass was green and the trees were almost fully leaved. It was summer!

We stopped for lunch in St Louis at a great restaurant that specialized in crepe sandwiches and had the option of adding bacon to almost anything (drool). We poked around a nice bookstore, got a parking ticket, and then got very lost on the gazillions of highway that cut through town.

Little did we know that this would end up being Getting Lost Day. We pulled into Kansas City in the evening, where we were to stay with a very kind and generous friend of a friend. We had to take a detour from our directions as the highway we wanted was closed due to a bad accident (second of three on the trip: two trucks collided in Michigan, this car flipped, and later, in New Mexico, a pick-up was on its side. Not great to see on a long roadtrip... or ever). So we tried to find the place sans a good city map and ended up driving through a zoological park for a while, and then a low income neighbourhood, and then a very VERY high income neighbourhood. It was surreal. Roundabouts with fountains in the centre, turrets galore, sports cars everywhere... Our little trusty rust bucket from Ontario was quite out of place. We eventually found the house, two neighbourhoods and income brackets over and were happy to be able to actually make food and drink bad American beer. Our host came home early and we chatted pleasantly about travel and the cities where we live and the education system.

OK, now comes the big haul. The next day we woke up late (7 am!) and got on the road headed for Santa Rose, New Mexico. Stopping only to pee and eat (we "enjoyed" a free breakfast burrito at the only fast food joint of the trip - Sonic) and go through a border control station (I guess white Canadian girls do not fit the smuggler profile) we arrived at Santa Rosa, NM over 12 hours later. What a day! And if anyone has been to New Mexico, it is hot and dry and straight-roaded and big. The change from green prairie to brown and prickly prairie was sudden and awesome. I have always wanted to see this desert and there it was - it appeared out of nowhere somewhere in the middle of that top square nubbin of Texas. And it was there the next day too.

Still Life at Motel 6

We left Santa Rosa, which should be renamed Sketchy Motels Galore (don't worry mom, we stayed at the more respectable Motel 6), and started on our last day on the road. And boy were we ready for it. Our bodies were not enjoying the lack of moving.

New Mexico landscape. Check out the first town name.

I was getting worried as we neared our very last turn-off to get to Arizona and the Research Station. There was no end in sight for the scorching desert. The prospect of spending six weeks without shade or vegetation or clouds was less than pleasant. For the very last stretch, I had to switch off driving duties due to the quick onset of heat exhaustion and very mild hallucinations. My body was definitely not yet acclimatized and is wondering what the heck happened to spring. But then we turned a corner, went down the first two-lane road I'd seen all day and everything changed. We were entering Coronado Forest. We drove down actual shaded roads with plants and animals an the mountains had a lot more vegetation. What a relief!

Almost there... look! green!

--

So my 10-year-old Honda Civic made it from Ottawa to Arizona! There is crack starting in the windshield and a squeaking noise coming from the power steering belt when turning at slow speeds that needs adjustment. I actually phoned my mechanic from somewhere in Oklahoma to ask him about it. He'll be emailing me instructions on fixing it. Funnily enough, we woke up yesterday morning at the research centre and the back right tire was flat. Good thing it happened here and not on the side of a New Mexican highway! The maintenance guy here, Ben, plugged it and we're all good to go. Nice to be in a place with a shop and nice helpful people.

Speaking of this place, it's nothing short of amazing. It feels like I'm in a wizened elderly version of the mountains of BC I'm more familiar with. They surround us, but look ancient. There is one mountain covered in near-fluorescent green lichen.



Oh, and everything here is prickly and hurts to touch. It's kinda hilarious actually.

It looks like I may be getting to help out with hummingbird observation. And for those of you who know me, you'll be shocked to hear that so far I am getting up at 6am (!) and running . It's altitude training (we're at 5,400 feet). We'll also be doing some hiking (up to 9,500 feet), exploring the landscape and avoiding rattlesnakes. All romance aside though, if you are reading this and wondering what I might be up to, the likely answer is dishes.

More soon! Pics to come. I'm lazy. Chris isn't though, so check out her blog.