How to eat a caterpillar

From one of our field sites, you can walk up some stairs and are treated to a lovely view of the harbour on Santa Cruz Island.

The view from atop a hill on Santa Cruz Island

It is currently the wet season, though we've been lucky in that we've only had one day where it rained quite a bit. Otherwise, we've had sporadic thundershowers, but nothing that has kept us out of the field. The wet season means an abundance of fruits and tasty tidbits for the finches, and this vegetarian finch was enjoying a meal of berries.

Platyspiza crassirostris or vegetarian finch munching on berries

As we were finishing up at Academy Bay today, it did start to sprinkle. We stopped at the station kiosk to get some ice cream and refreshments, and noticed a mockingbird doing these weird movements. It had a caterpillar in its mouth and was bashing it against the ground to eat it. That's one way to tenderize your meat!

Nest Building

Many of the birds on the island make their nests in cacti, acacia trees, and other prickly plants. The finches make a spherical type nest, and you can often find them gathering materials for their nests

Finished nest with nestlings

Bird Food

Once we think we've captured, banded, and measured the finches that are paired and have nestlings, we return to the nest to double check that we caught the correct finches. This can take quite a bit both the male and female are out finding caterpillars for their young, so there is often time to observe other birds and their behaviour. This post is all about birds and their food, but first, the Galapagos dove. Another endemic species, but with beautiful blue around the eyes and bright coloured legs. At one of our processing stations, one of the doves meandered through the camp looking for food, and proved to be a fairly cooperative model

And now some for some birds both eating and getting fed!

Las Grietas and Garrapatero

We got an unusual afternoon off, so Coll and I headed over to Las Grietas. I was excited to bring the underwater camera set-up because some cool fish and eels had been spotted there about a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, I forgot my mask and snorkel, so I just took a dip and watched one of the kids jump off the top of the cliff. Needless to say, I didn't jump, and likely never will!

One of our sites is called El Garrapatero, for a large, black bird that lives there. It is also known by the name Ani. I hadn't seen them up close, only from afar. One of sampling days resulted in one flying into our mist net, and up close, you can see there is a very cool plate on it's upper beak. The plumage was quite beautiful as well. A very cool bird for a very cool place.

Bikes and Trucks

To get to our field sites, we hire a taxi that picks up at 5am from town and drops us off at El Garrapatero. The taxi then picks us up at 11am in the field. By that time, we're tired, hot, and sweaty, and so we often wait for the taxi in the shade if we are a little bit early. Today, Coll found a motorcycle, and made every effort to purchase it, but we couldn't find the seller.

On our way back to town, our friends passed us in their taxi. They also work with finches, but are focused on the parasite Phylornis. They offered us a ride up to the research station, so we hopped into the back of the taxi.

How to Make Rum and Watermelon

Today is a step-by-step demonstration of how to make watermelon with rum inside of it.

First, assemble the necessary materials. Watermelon, rum, knife, and demonstrator. Today we have a Belgian demonstrator, so I will do my best to do this post in international english.

Grab the largest, cheapest ($4 USD) knife you have in the dorm room

 Stab the watermelon to make a hole in the rind.

Realize the knife is to large to do what you want. Replace with a leatherman knife, and cut a small hole in the rind. Enjoy small piece of watermelon

 Realize you need to cut a larger hole in the watermelon, so cut another piece out of the watermelon

Imitate the artwork you are creating.

 Open bottle of rum (or vodka or spirit of your choice)

 Make sure the bottle is actually open.

 Pour the entire bottle of rum into the watermelon. You are allowed to sample the spirit you have chosen to infuse the watermelon with.

 Keep going! the whole bottle will fit!

Voila! Let sit for 24 hours. If you have a refridgerator large enough, put it in there. Even better, but it in the freezer. Or, if you don't have room, stash in the closet and infuse all your clothes with the wonderful, boozy aroma of rum.

Nestlings

 Part of the project is to look at assortative mating, where finches mate with other finches that have beaks that are similar in shape to theirs. There are two ways to do this. One is to band as many birds as possible, and then do focal observations on nests you find and figured out which finches are paired. The other way is to find a nest, and then try to sample the birds you find at the nest. Due to lack of time, we're going with the second method for now. The coolest thing about this is finding nestlings in the bird nests!

Finch nestlings

Mockingbird nestlings and parent(s)