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Published: April 11th 2008
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Sorry it has been a while! Been pretty busy lately. Last week we finished up classes and had our exams so as of friday, no more class! Which is really crazy. As of monay, our directed research projects started!! I got into Jess's DR, which is the one I wanted! i was really really excited. there are 10 of us in Jess's DR, working with bats. 9 people are in socio-econ and 6 are in the plant one. My closest friends are in socio-econ so i hardly ever see them, but i like all of the people in my group so it is all good. I am loving every minute of it. We are basically catching bats and then either processing them, or putting transmitters on them. We currently have two bats with transmitters on them that we are tracking to see where they roost and where and when they forage. We have food the roost sites for both of them. One of them has been pretty easy to track, whereas the other is giving us difficulty. We had called her Gloria, but now we are thinking She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named because she is being such a pain. First of all, I was in
the group that went to find her roost. We basically had to tramp through the entire rainforest fragment to get to where her signal was strongest, and this including have to cut a path, going through wait-a-whiles (these plants with thorns and spikes and hooks that will latch onto you and not let go) and avoid stinging trees (a lot of people got stung. i luckily, have not yet. it is extremely painful). It was quite the adventure. But it was kinda exciting. =) we eventually tracked her down to a certain tree, although we are unsure where in the tree she is. Since then, any night that we have tried to track her, we will have her, she leaves the roost, and then disappears and we are traveling all around trying to find her with no luck. When we get back to the roost, she is there again! this persists all night long. Last night was especially annoying. We spent hours trying to track her. it does make things interesting. With the other bat, (priscilla), we stayed at her roost all through the night basically and she never left. So that was easy for us but kinda boring. At
least I got to have a good conversation with someone for like 3 hours. hehe. So overall I am having a blast. We are basically out from 3:30pm until 10am the next day. Usually we get about 5hours or more of sleep in there somewhere because we switch off during the night. The only unfun thing so far is that I have gotten scrub itch. You don't want to know what it is. Basically just know that I am very very itchy. In unfortunate places. lol. They like pressure points from your clothing. so yea. it gets a little terrible. It kept me up one night. but last night i got a lot of sleep. from like 1am until 9am. so yeah. i'm doing ok. everyone else practically has scrub itch too so we are all in the same boat. And the weather has been absolutely gorgeous which has been great. No rain. And we have had some awesome clear nights where we can see tons and tons of stars. We continue doing field work until next friday. Then everyone is going to Cairns that weekend, which i am really excited for. Then we have 2 intense weeks of write-up for our papers. And we have to prepare presentations as well. I'm probably going to be going nuts. More so than usual. =) But I am really loving everything so I can't really complain. I need to go be productive now in the little time I have left at the center before we head out again. hope everyone is doing well!! i'll try to update again as soon as i can.
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