Birds!

In honour my friend in Montreal who is an avid birder, I went through and found some more pictures of birds that I haven't put on my blog yet. It's been fun down here as there is now a couple of folks from Harvard working on evolutionary development stuff on birds here. They were originally going to work with Galapagos finches, but apparently obtaining permits has become incredibly difficult, so they are now working here in Barbados. So, one of them is working on the bullfinch, and the other is working on the bananaquit. The first two pictures are the bullfinch, and the thirds is the bananaquit.

Next up is the Gray Kingbird (thank to Cameron Rutt for the positive ID!). The bananaquit, loggerhead and one of the finches pictures were taken during the course in May at Gay's Cove on the east side of the island. The other finch pictures is an overzealous finch who enjoys finding the crumbs in the dining area.

Lastly are egrets (cattle I think). About a five minute walk from the institute is a large tree that the egrets go to to roost for the evening. As the sun sets more and more and more egrets come flying in. It's a spectacular sight, and gives my zoom lens a good workout.

St. Jean Baptiste Day

So today is St. Jean Baptiste Day. To everyone's amusement, nobody seems to really know what the day is about except it's a really good excuse to eat food that's bad for you and drink a lot. So, like the good people we are, we celebrated St. Jean Baptiste day Bajan style. We made poutine, except we had no cheese curds, so we used cubed cheddar instead. To those who don't know what poutine is, it's french fries, poutine sauce (like a gravey), and cheese curds. It's very bad for you and very yummy!

Then we made a fire (sort of) in the BBQ and Ian shows us how to roast marsh- mallows properly. Audrey's boyfriend and his cousin were in Barbados for the weekend, so it was a great time for everyone!

The infamous gorilla tripod made an appearance as well, much to everybody's amusement.

Monkey Sea, Monkey Do

On Barbados, there is one type of monkey, the green monkey. They are originally from West Africa, and were brought over about 350 years ago. They are a regular sight here at Bellairs. We have a fabulous mango tree on the property,and we actually end up competing with the monkeys to make sure we get some. The tree has just started to produce massive amounts of fruit, so it's mangos for breakfast everyday!

I had brought my underwater casing for my little Canon, but right before I left, the CCD chip blew out. It's a known problem with certain models, mine being one of them. Chris was ever so kind to take it to the service centre where they sent it off to be replaced and even shipped it back to is (in Montreal). In the meantime, Sylvain happens to have the exact same kind of camera, so my casing has been put to good use while done here. So, first, there is a golden eel. I had to remember how to do custom white balance - so using the sand, I managed to get it working decent enough. A little processing with photoshop, and voila, a very cool looking eel. The other shot is of a spotted trunkfish. The best are the juveniles. They are about the size of a pea and completely black with yellow polka dots. Some great pictures were taken, but I'm not sure who has them, so if I get a chance, I'll post them. Here, we affectionately call them petite pois (little pea).

Sadly, Holga has passed on. The night before, she was traumatized by a cat that was trying to get to her and managed to knock her cage off the table. She survived that, but we think the stress put her over the edge and she died the next day. RIP Holga.

Common Ground Dove

Maria and Cameron (I hope I spelt the names right!) are in doing research on malaria in birds. It's not a form that humans can obtain - for those of you that were worried! They were using traps on the site to catch some birds. They caught this beautiful ground dove, and were showing me how they collect their data. They place them in a sack to weight them, and take a tiny blood sample. They then use callipers to measure things like beak width and depth. It was very cool. Maria is from Sweden and is doing graduate work in St. Louis, and Cameron is from Pennsylvania and working with her as a research assistant. They'll be back at the end of the month, so it will be interesting to see how the rest of their time in the Caribbean has been!

Life through Holga, Death Through a Stranger

Meet Holga. She was found after she fell out of her nest right before I arrived here in Barbados. She's a green throated Carib hummingbird (thanks to Cameron Rutt for the ID), and she is the unofficial mascot for our team. Tropical birds are notoriously difficult to raise in captivity, and she's gone through a couple moments where she didn't look so great. I don't think she'll ever get to the point where she will be able to be released. She can't fly, and is a bit helpless when she falls of her perch. She does have an amazing tongue with which to get nectar and stuff.

We also had a strange visitor. This white and yellow pigeon-like bird started to come by the station. We had two people in doing research on malaria in birds in the Carri bean. Maria mentioned that the bird didn't look so great - it had parasites and seemed to be injured somehow. It was also hoarding all the bait in the traps. Two days later, we awoke to the bird lying on the walkway, ironically surrounded by flowers of the exact same colour. Down here, mother nature has her own way of disposing the deceased, so we let it take its' natural course. I was going to take a picture of it when it was alive, but I figured I'd do it another day.

Moral of the day: don't wait until tomorrow what you can do today!

Blue Moon

Once in a blue moon, we actually get a blue moon. I remember when someone explained what a blue moon was, and I finally saw one, that I was incredibly disappointed that the moon wasn't actually blue. Well, it's got a slight blue cast, but I digress. I suppose I could have manipulated the picture, but I decided to save manipulation for the other picture.

So during the course, I did an impromptu mini showing to some of my friends about the wonders of photoshop. I know very little, but I was able to slap a texture shot (mundane dead coral shot) over a silhouette picture I'd taken at the beginning. I ran it through a draganizer action, and voila, digital art! I kind of like the effect of this one, though I know it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Mon Équipe et le Fish Market

SO now that the course is over, the real work begins! This is the team I will be working with this summer. Bridget and Audrey are volunteers as well. All of us are majoring in Bio at McGill, and we did the tropical ecology course. Vanessa and Sylvain are at U of Laval and Trois Rivières respectively, and Katrine is the person we are working with, and her boyfriend Sébastian is also working with us as well. We're looking at longfin damselfish and territoriality, and how changes in density will affect them. It is a very cool project, which entails us either swimming or taking a boat to get to our study sites.

We went to the fish market in Hoistens. It's a crazy open market area with vendors and tons of stalls sering fantastic Bajan food: grilled dolpinfish (mahi mahi), coleslaw, macaroni and cheese pie (YUM), and other goodies. It's normally right on the beach, but they are doing renovations so it's across the street right now. There is also an area where they blare a random mix of reggae and old pop tunes. There was one guy who was really into his dancing. What we couldn't understand is why he danced with these crazy industrial rubber gloves on. He did eventually take them off. He also lip synched African Queen to a little girl in a carriage who was less then amused by his antics. Lots of fun and good food!

THE END (of the course, not my time here!)

So today is the last day of the course. After a late night (we worked until 3.30am!!) and not much sleep, we hammered out our paper and did our presentation. Audrey knows Powerpoint, so she found some cool photos and put together a cool shot with all our stuff and our kickass rarefaction curves. The presentation was great. Everyone did an amazing job on their projects and put together interesting presentations. considering the presentation was close to 2 hours - it never felt like it was droning on and on.

That morning, some construction people dug up a hawks bill turtle nest, and the turtles had hatched and were probably going to dig themselves out that night, so they brought them to Bellairs. We called the turtle people and they came to get them to release them to the ocean that night.

After the presentations, we had a party - fresh grilled fish (Mahi Mahi, tuna, something else I can't remember) thanks to Dr. Kramer. We made a potato salad, and there was lots of beer and rum. Emma, at the start of the course, collected all our beer bottle caps, and we made them into little bottle cap art. DNA for Dr. Bureau (molecular module), fish for Dr. Kramer (fish module), and a spider for the spider specialist Dr. Buddle (bug module).

And lastly, I pulled out my new Gorilla tripod which provided much phallic entertainment for the evening. I did put it to good use to take our last group shot though.

I'll be posting more about my adventures down here. Stay tuned!

Crunch time!

Today Audrey donned her swamp clothes and went out with Dr. Buddle for a whirlwind collection of the pitfall traps and malaise trap, as well as trying to find a few more specimens. Everyone was working incredibly hard on their presentations and papers (due on Saturday at 2pm!). I was in the lab all day, so all I have to show for it are some macro shots of our pinned bugs. Thanks to Etienne who lent me his camera with a sweet 150mm macro lens for these shots (even though his body was a Nikon :P)

Lab Work

So today, we didn't do a field day, but we spent the day in the lab identifying all our bugs we had collected. The lepidoptera and odonata group worked on identifying species, and some of the species they had to differentiate between looked remarkably similar! The fish people were dissecting their parasite and identifying their fish as well. Lots of work, lots of stress, but still very cool. Kristen spent the day identifying spiders, and she is now the expert spider woman! Audrey also worked on separating the ants by morophospecies, so she is now the ant queen. Morophospecies are when you separate the ants by morphological characteristics. Identifying ants unless you are an expert is too difficult. I have it a shot and ended up with some species that ius only found in Australia, so we used morphospecies instead.

Graeme Hall: Muck Day

We thought yesterday was a mucky, swampy day. This one was just as bad. First, Dr. Kramer, or OMS (old man of the swamp) shows us how to get through the sedge habitat by wading waist deep in the sludge. Dr. Buddle in the mangroves showed us what the new fashion is - mud covered pants. He did keep his camera nice and dry, though! Today was a field day for our group to do insect collection in our focal habitats: mangrove and sedge. We mostly did it through opportunistic collection. We had a great time collecting our focal taxa, though we fell seriously short on one of them. We didn't get very many coleoptera (beetles), since it seems they are most effectively caught through flight intercept traps, which brings us to the malaise trap we set up. Malaise traps are designed for diptera and other flying insects that when they encounter something, they fly up. The only opening at the top is into a jar of ethanol, so we were able to collect flies, bees, wasps, and other things like that. Flight intercept traps are designed for things that fly and go down, such as coleoptera, and we all realized if we were to try and sample them, we would need a flight intercept trap. Next time! So, while slugging through the sludge in the sedge, while waist deep, I did manage to find a spider that had not been previously recorded on Barbados before. I found a dock spider, with an egg sack, which was pretty cool. Very large and hairy!

Graeme Hall: Swamp Day

Today is first field collection day. The beginning of the day was dedicated to game plan and out collection techniques. I may have my days mixed up, but there was one day where everyone had to go out in the field. Now, in the what to bring list - they said bring some clothes for Graeme Hall that you won't mind getting muddy. When they said muddy, they meant muddy. As you can see, the boys demonstrated proper swamp fashion. Tyler also demonstrates the art of zen lepidoptera and odonata collection. Or as he calls it: Oh-no-data.

Dr. Kramer worked with the fish group while Dr. Buddle worked with the two arthropod groups. We set out pit-fall traps, which are cups of ethanol set into the ground that bugs will walk into, fall in, and be preserved in the ethanol. The picture shows Dr. Kramer and the fish group trying to identify their bounty while puzzling over this weird growth on some of their fins. The growth actually turned out to be a parasite, and when you looked at it under the microscope, it sort of pulsated and moved - straight out of an alien movie!

Graeme Hall: Non-swamp day

So today was our introduction to Graeme Hall and decide on a project day. We were meeting various government people, so were instructed to dress semi decently. First was Graeme Hall - a nature sanctuary owned by a Canadian. In this reserve there is the last remaining mangrove habitat, and we were told of a petition to make Graeme Hall a national park. The problem is a developer wants to put a water park right next door to Graeme Hall, and so some people got together to form an NGO designated to make Graeme Hall a national park. Due to the political implications and complications, our project ended up being very information based as opposed to actually making a recommendation. However, I do think we gathered some interesting information through this project.

We also went to the Ministry of Agriculture, where the entomology sector showed how they were using bioloigcal methods to try and control crop pests. It was very interesting, and alternatives to pesticides are almost always a good thing.

Then it was brainstorm time to try and find a project. Dr. Buddle acted as our moderator, and we actually ended up with five sub projects. One group would do research on biodiversity and its importance and the effects of conservation programs in other countries. Three groups looked at fauna in Graeme Hall, collecting and identifying species, and the last group worked with molecular biological techniques to be able to process and add to the DNA barcoding initiative. The three fauna groups were fish, lepidoptera and odonata (butterflies, dragonflies, and damselflies), and terrestrial arthropods.

To finish is an example of our now superb pinning skills which will be put to good us in this project! The bug in the top right was a carpenter bee. It was found dead - can you imagine that thing actually flying around?!

Leatherback Turtles

So, as you can tell, I am about week behind in getting my posts up. However, in retrospect, this day that I am currently writing about has to be the highlight of the trip. First, we met up with this very cool guy, Barry, and some of his assistants and he explained to us how the Sea Turtle Conservation project was started and what. They had found what they though was a nest by the little tracks to the water. On Morgan Lewis beach, the nesting turtles are the Leatherback turtles.

So, as part of their efforts, every nest they find is excavated, and every non hatched egg is opened to see what stage of development it was in. The picture shows an egg, and you can see the embryo and yolk sack. When they are fully developed, they use their egg tooth to get out of the egg. They then manage to get out of the sand (the females lay their eggs in nests that are a couple feet deep), and using the light reflected from the ocean, they make their way to the ocean. While they were digging out the nest, they found a coupe that hadn't made it, but we did find one live one. The group named him Zeus, and at dusk, we put him in the sand and cheered him on as he made his (roundabout) way to the ocean. Because of the tourist development on the west coast of Barbados, the turtle project get calls from people saying there are a bunch of baby turtles in the lobby. The bright lights of the hotels disorient the baby turtles, so they think they are heading to the ocean when they are in fact heading the opposite direction.

So, after a BBQ on the beach - nothing like sand as a condiment to the burgers - we accompanied tome volunteers on the turtle walk. Female turtles come up at night to lay their eggs. On the way back, as we were literally ready to head back to the cars, someone found some tracks. We were luck enough to see two of thes HUGE turtles. The carapice (shell) length on one of the females was 1.67 metres long! It was very cool. If you ever have the chance to see these guys, I highly recommend it! June is apparently peak hatching season for the beach on the side of the island where the research institute is located. Can't wait to watch the babies!