What´s the news, tell me whatsa happenin

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The little town of Veronica has had some excitement recently, and the entire town is jabbering about it. Anthony Hopkins has made an appearance in a nearby ranch to shoot a film that I don´t know the name of, and oh man, it´s a huge deal to these people. Black vans with film actors and directors and peons are rushing around the dirt roads filming this movie on one of the beaches. Surprises me, because Rio de La Plata is really nasty looking. Brown and littered, wouldn´t want to drop a toe in. Not exactly your pristine setting for Hollywood. But you can tell it´s huge because they have security guys in orange vests who don´t smile and look pretty bad-ass. I think the whole thing is comical. They´ve hired local people to work menial jobs for what comes out to be around $40/day according to the front page article in the local paper. Of couse, Mr. Hopkins won´t stay in a place like Veronica. He is stationed at his five star hotel in Buenos Aires, and is helicoptered in every day at the tiny airforce base nearby. What a snob. C´mon Tony, get some culture, stay in a hostel for once.

And speaking of fame... on the back page of that same paper, there is a picture of a bunch of dorky biologists from the month before, one of them in a tree. Luciano apparently got some publicity about his Cardinal project, and the article gives a nice little blurb on the study. It´s pretty cute, I´d have to admit. Since the article, we´ve generated a bit of interest from the people, and yesterday a random woman came wandering into camp just to nose about. She lived close by and brought her sister, so Diego showed them around the camp and explained what the article already told her, and that was that. We think it´s hilarious because the project isn´t exactly what one would describe as action-packed. When we´re not working, we´re mostly reading or napping or cooking or washing our clothes. It´s pretty mellow.

We´ve been doing a lot of mist netting recently, which is really good because that´s one of the reasons why I came back. It´s a good experience, and it´s neat to see a lot of these species up close and their personality traits. (Mist netting is when you string up a large net that is made up of very strong and fine material between two poles in order to catch birds in flight. They cant´see it because the fiber is so thin, so they fly right in, and that way you can have bird in hand to band and draw blood for future study.) Some species are very calm and struggle little when you´re untangling them from the net. This makes life easy, as sometimes they get in a real mess. Sometimes it´s hard to tell from which direction they flew into the net, which is the first thing you have to know before you attempt to detangle and pull them out. So the process becomes much more difficult if the subject is thrashing and squaking and biting. Especially the parrots. Oh man, they´re the worst. They bite like hell, and their finger-crunching bills seem to be able to reach any point on their body. It doesn´t help that they travel in flocks. Thankfully, we don´t get them too often. The desired species, of course, is the red-crested cardinals, and we prefer both parents from one nest. This way they are easy to track and we can band the whole family since we know where the nest is. We band chicks when they´re about 10 days old. They fledge at 12 days. We take blood samples from the adults for genetic analysis, but not the chicks. It´s pretty cool.

Ah, and there is a new family member at the farm. A little black lamb named Flora who is all legs and thinks she´s a dog. Probably the cutest thing in the world. The dogs all look after her, and when they run and bark, she´ll do her best to lollup along and follow. As a result of Flora, we´ve been losing sleep. They feed the lamb cow´s milk, and in order to get the cow for the milk, they tie up her calf in an arena near camp. The mother is locked outside the arena so the calf won´t drink all her milk, so all night she moos. And moos. And moos. Horrible moos. High pitched moos. Low pitched moos. Moos that sound like Chubacca. It goes all night long, and she kept this up for three nights. Finally I guess they got enough milk, and let them go, but you have no idea how much we hated that cow. To celebrate, we had a meat feast.

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