Sex Panther?

I spent some time last winter in the mangrove swamps of Chiapas. I was mostly there to help with bird monitoring, but I also did crocodile and mammal surveys. When setting out camera traps for jaguars, we sprayed each one with... something... to bait the trap. When I asked what the trap was baited with, I was told in a thick Mexican accent ¨Calvin Klien´s Obsession.¨ After having this repeated to me several times, I verified that, yes, Calvin Klien cologne was part of our field supplies. Apparently, and probably not by accident, Obsession closely mimics jaguar pheremone.

Let this be a warning to those of you who want to wear cologne in the jungle.

Kangaroo Rats

I will do one quick entry.

In the words of my FEHA data sheets "Capture Method: Ground Hand-grab"

While in Canada I did a few kangaroo rat surveys. The Ord's Kangaroo Rat lives in southern Alberta in approximately three dune systems. This means the Ord's is VERY rare. On these three dunes, however, they can be seen hopping around pretty readily.

Since they are so rare, a major goal of the surveys is population monitoring. The general procedure when you go out "k-ratting" is to catch them, check for a PIT tag and put in a PIT tag if the rat is lacking one, (then check for parasites, take some measurements, take some pictures and have fun.) The PIT tag is a little chip under the skin that can be scanned in order to identify the rat. It functions more or less like a bird band, but with slightly flashier technology. From the rate of recaptures and a bit of a Bio101 background knowledge (which I will try to remember to write about later) it is possible to get a pretty good estimation of the total population of rats.

When I asked how you catch a kangaroo rat, I had a vision of a live trap or something in my head. The response was no, you just grab them. I didn't believe the k-ratters, but it's true. They just bounce around the dunes looking stunned to see you when you approach. From this observation I started to formulate theories as to why this is not the most successful species in Canada, but it appears that they only stand around stupidly for humans. When an owl approaches, the evasive maneuvers come out, and the kangaroo rats out perform nearly every time.

My new favorite mammal.

The limited internet effect.

Hi family. Hi mom, mostly.

When my life is truly great and wonderful and exciting, I rarely have much time. I rarely have internet easily available, either. For this reason, my blog is missing most of the best parts of my adventures. So. Just to tell you, I am having a great, wonderful, exciting time. I'm more than content.

I'll try to get a few things up soon.

Clever Girl

My favorite juvenile hawk this season is a hawk I dubbed Ninja Bird. Ferruginous hawks are on average more ninja than other buteos (if you ignore their previously noted proclivity towards drooling.) They have a fearsome sidekick-talon combo that they can back up with some pretty intense face-biting.

Ninja Bird was the greatest of the bad-ass baby ferruginous hawks. Ninja bird attacked us before we even tried to pick her up, footing both of us in the legs. (The Destoryer has eight puncture wounds to prove this.) Ninja bird fought back through the whole transmitter attachment, and upon release, she chased after us with extreme ferocity.

Ninja Bird was not just fearsome, she was also as clever as a Jurassic Park velociraptor. On our day-after check, we heard Ninja Bird’s radio signal coming from near a large mound of dirt at the dugout not far from the nest. It was a hot day, but through the haze we spotted a young female hawk perched on the mound. The Destoryer ran to catch her, and he kept running. The bird flew away far better than Ninja should have been able to– and the signal didn’t move. That wasn’t our bird. It was a decoy.

As we get up to the dugout, the signal started making less and less sense. It would be nearly silent but for brief moments it would suddenly become super strong. I walked back and forth for over half an hour somehow going PAST the signal over and over without seeing a bird or a fallen transmitter.

It finally dawned on me. The bird was IN the drain culvert to the dugout. To quote Aliens “They're coming outta the walls. They're coming outta the goddamn walls.” She was hiding her signal, she was creating distractions, and she almost out smarted us.

Needless to say, getting Ninja out of the drain culvert was difficult.

Hawk Drool

It is well known to any GGROer that a drooling hawk is a bad sign. In most birds, it is a sign of severe stress, but in Ferruginous Hawks it appears to be their natural response to almost everything. Within seconds of hooding a FEHA, the hood will become soaked with hawk spit. The problem is so pronounced that my trapping jeans actually have a ferruginous hawk drool stain. Buteo regilus is just not very regal at times.

A young hawk oozing saliva

More About Cecil

The beloved owl. I know. I'm obsessed.

Cecil the great horned owl, my ferruginous hawk-trapping lure, went back to the Edmonton Wildlife Rehabilitation Center a few days ago. I miss him greatly. He is only a working owl for part of the year, and he had to go home sometime. He spends most of his year rather commodious aviary at the rehab center glaring at the other owls suspiciously and totally terrorizing the volunteers. In fact, Cecil has quite the reputation of being a king-hell bastard. He has already even sent a girl to the hospital to get stitches after he raked her across the shoulder with his talons as she tried to clean his enclosure.

I find this shocking, because I spent the past several months showing Cecil off to anyone who was interested in meeting him. He was comfortable being held by almost anyone. I had a totally positive relationship with Cecil. He was often grouchy, but never aggressive. He would get a little touchy when somebody came between him and his road-kill meals. The worst he would do was refuse to cooperate by hanging upside-down on your glove when you tried to handle him. By the end of the season he even gave up this habit.

He was a great companion, and I’m glad he came with my trapping partner and I on our many-hundred mile journey across the Canadian prairies. He was definitely the hardest working member of our crew, and the whole time he was a model citizen. He stood up to angry ferruginous hawks for us, he stayed in motels with us, he napped in parks with us, and he even came into restaurants with us. Cecil even once hopped into a dho-gaza net by accident, and with only a bit of resentment allowed us to take him out.

Thanks, Cecil.

Tracking FEHAs

Lately, I have been tracking the dispersal of fledgling Ferruginous Hawks. In theory, what we attempted to do was to take young birds out of the nest, fit them with a backpack bearing a radio transmitter, and put them back into the nest. This is a good idea in theory. The reality of the situation is that there is only a very tiny window of time in which a hawk is in the nest and about to fly but not yet actually flying. Even if they are still in the nest, they are probably just waiting for an excuse to try out their new wings, and your approach is a perfect reason. We can’t put the backpacks on birds that are too young, so we did the nest best thing. We ran down flighted birds.

The technique we ended up employing was to spot recently fledged hawks as they loafed around near their nests and then bolt after them. Their flying skill at this stage usually only permits them between about 500 meters and a kilometer before they begin losing altitude. If one is alert, it is possible to gather them up as they make their landing. Sometimes the babies flew away majestically laughing at our feeble attempts to run after them, but often we were successful.

A recently transmittered hawk.

Our success is due in large part to my field partner. He is a man with a truly accipiter-like disposition. By this, I mean he possesses both the speed and single-minded desire to chase after anything that flaps fitting of a forest hawk. I had one or two good runs on my part, but I can do nothing in comparison to this man, known by some as the Destroyer. I was able to make an important contribution, however. My role was to determine where the bird actually WENT, and to determine if the bird was, in fact, a ferruginous hawk. The destroyer is known to chase down red-tails and even ravens on accident, and could probably be trapped using a pinecone with feathers attached. I am serious when I say my partner was a human accipiter.

Once the birds are tagged, it comes down to tracking them. The VHF style transmitter in their backpacks is the classic style radio telemetry tag. All it does is send out a pulse at a given frequency. This is my kind of technology. Simple. After spending so much time messing around with satellite transmitters, remote data downloading stations, and total technological meltdowns, the radio telemetry was a relief. There is really only one available control on a radio receiver, and that is the gain. This just adjusts the sensitivity of the receiver. Using this a person can determine everything they really need to know: the relative distance on the bird, and direction of the signal.

Of course, because the University here can never leave anything simple, airplanes and horses and a whole morass of fancy antennae and equipment have come into the picture. The technology is still simple, but now there is an AIRPLANE and a lot more geometry. Since, you won’t see the bird from the airplane, you instead take a bearing on the bird from multiple points. Where the hypothetical lines pointing towards the bird would cross should be the location of your bird. So as glamorous as doing science from a Cessna might seem, keep mind that both math and vomiting are also happening concurrently.

What I have learned from all of this is that life is difficult when you are a young hawk. It takes more than a sharp bill and talons to get by in the world.