Sorry I have been such a slacker at posting but life has been kind of crazy.
Just got back from my first voyage into the Great Australian Outback!!! It was great!!! To start my trip I flew up to Sydney where I got to spend a day wondering about the city. Walked to botanical gardens and the found my way to the Opera house. It was really cool standing there looking at this building that I have seen countless times on TV or in picture and here I am right in front of it!
After my day in Sydney I met up with 3 guys that were also going out the the research station and we headed out (I didn't know until we got into the car that it would take 2 days of driving to get there!). Anyway quietest car ride ever!!!!! None of the guys that I was with really talked, Uli and I (who I got to know later and absolutely love him) were strangers and the other two just didn't seem to like each other. Anyway once we got through the Blue Mountains I went into what I call a boredom coma and just took a continuous stream of cat naps. Would wake up to look around watch some landscape roll past then drop my head back on the head rest and be out again for another little nap. Because not only did no one talk but being in the middle of know where your cell phone didn't work, no radio stations came in and there was no CD player or Ipod dock in this car.
That is how I made my way from one side of New South Whales to the other (the wide way a crossed). Once we got to the station I met Simon the professor from Macquarie University that I had arranged this trip through. I didn't even realize when I met him who I was meeting at first. I was expecting an older man and Simon is only 38 was really impressed you usually don't become a tenured prof with a really successful lab in our field before you are 50.
So I went out to work on Zebra Finches, any one who ever spent any amount of time with Granddaddy Howard over the years has seen a Zebra Finch or 300. They are one of the most widely kept birds in the world (I think they are right behind chickens) also one of the most widely studied birds in captivity. Simon's lab is pretty much the only one that studies them in the wild. He has a number of partnerships with other labs around the world so that their students come and do research along side his on the wild finches. One of those students Ulrich Knief (Uli) was my main companion while at the research station.
I was assisting him with catching, banding, and bleeding the finches. By helping him I mean I was catching, banding, and bleeding the birds while he took his morphological measurements that he needed for his project.
The way that we were catching these birds was freaking hysterical! It was something an 8 year boy would come up with (The technique was probably created and perfected by an 8 year old). It consisted of a regular wire bird cage with a sliding door, a stick, string and some seed. We seeded the cage tide a string to the stick propped the door open with said stick unrolled the string about 10- 15 meeters and waited. Before we could really trap, the feeders need to be heavily seeded with the door wired open for a few days so that the finches could find them and get used to going in them. We were extremely successful, on average I would catch about 100 birds a day the problem quickly became that we were re-catching a lot of the same birds (ones that we had already banded).
I have to go to work now so I will have to continue this post later.
But here are some pictures from my trip!
Our Work Station
Male Zebra Finch
Sun Rise
Me and my first Spike haired pigeon (more scientifically called a crested pigeon) I as you can tell by photographic evidence am thrilled Pigeon not so much!
This is a picture that Uli took in December but I love it. This little guy had just gotten out of the pouch.
Me in a Gum tree
Spiders were everywhere, amazing webs and the tensile strength of these webs was insane!
I have fallen in love with Gum trees they are so beautiful and smell amazing
Tried to get a picture of an Emu the whole time I was out there. Then as we were driving in to Broken Hill to drop me off this whole family came up next to the road to say good bye!
My partner Uli kissing a Honeyeater that I caught!
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