The all-inclusive update

As predicted these last couple of weeks have been very busy. The first 2 weeks of fieldworks have been exciting, exhausting, surprising, amusing and sometimes a little bit ‘not as expected’. So much has happened that I do not know where to begin. I can’t get into too much detail, so I will give you a rough outline:

After two days of preparing all the Encounternet devices (think about batteries, setting parameters, soldering, superglue things etc) we were ready to tag some little yellow-black songbirds.

The roosting expection was very successful and the following day the whole team was kept busy with testing birds, tagging birds, releasing birds and hanging up base nodes. I was positioned in the tagging team (read: writing down details of the bird and superglueing my face). It all resulted in releasing 34 Great Tits with little transmitter backpacks the same day.

The next days we hang up even more base nodes, tracked birds and tried to download data. Because some *confidential information* here and there, I was busy until deep in the night preparing forms and devices for the other day. When we finally seem to get in a sort of routine, something *confidential information* happened! After a day of *confidential information* the birds, we had to go out that night for an emergency *confidential information*. This was relatively successful. However, the following morning one of the MSc students *confidential information* a tagged bird. But no man overboard, because we still could *confidential information* another bird. But in the end all the tags *confidential information*.

So now you are informed about that, you will be wondering what are plans are now. Luckily, prepared biologists as we are we have plenty of plans. The next weeks will be about analyzing the data we got, doing song activity rounds at 6 am, recording bird song and executing playback experiments (which mostly involves pretending to be a Great Tit). And that is saying nothing about the next month! Our birds seem to get in hurry to start the breeding season so we have to keep up.

But all things taken together I just want to emphasize what a great team we have! The three master students, without whom we would never have could have done all of this. And our in between PhD and Post-doc freelance scientist, who knows what a good plan B is. Our field technician who knows so much about our winged subjects! Information that we thankfully use! And my promoters who are there when they need to be and know how to keep the spirits up!

Besides the stress and a bit of exhaustion these last weeks, I spend some nice sunny days studying birds in a beautiful forest with some very nice and interesting people. It is not possible to say anything *confidential information* about that!
Keep you posted!

The quest, the damsel and the kiwi

If I had to guess, than I think today was a typical PhDer-Sunday. Headbreaking over the schedule for the coming weeks, while listening to a 'learn the songs of songbirds-CD' on the background. Ok, it may have been more a Biology-PhDer Sunday than anything else, but still. It is not easy making a schedule, because it is constantly making trade-offs. It is exactly like evolutionary ecology: making a lot of small eggs (chicken) vs making one big egg (kiwi); produce a very large clutch at once and die (stick-insect) or produce several small clutches and live long (termite); etc. Well, that is sort of what I have been dealing with today (the making trade-offs part, I mean). Balancing, available hours and unavailable hours, with minimum amount of people needed, not letting anyone work to many days straight and getting a halve day off myself every once in a while.

Wow, that sounds pretty boring doesn't it? I did some fun stuff also. I went along with a roosting control on the Hoge Veluwe. Just to be clear, this is not my project but someone elses. We help eachother out sometimes, the social animals that we are. Ever been in a nature-parc (in the Netherlands) at night? Walking in the dark guided by light rain trying to find your way through the bushes, nest-box to nest-box? Well, I have. The plan was to put tags on female Great Tits. Of course in the quest of my little group (me and Maaike) we found about everything in the nestboxes except female Great Tits. We had boxes with male Great Tits, boxes with Blue Tits, boxes with Nuthatches, one box with a dead Great Tit, boxes that where empty and one box without a bottom. Luckily the other groups were more in luck and we managed to get a lot of females tagged after all. And off-course we ringed all the Great and Blue Tits we came across, so we did not do it for nothing! When you get home at 00:45 that is very comforting, the next morning..

The next morning, back to the field! Trying out the playback equipment in a forest that is not our study field. All the cables and batteries and equipement you have to think about (I am talking about boring logistics again). We placed a loudspeaker in a tree, walked 20 meters away and played a loop-song of a male Great Tit. And we waited.. For a very short period! Because there was the great and brave Great Tit to defend its territory, singing and dancing in the top of the trees it tried to scare away our speaker. However, we instructed our speaker to stay put and so after a little while the brave bird lost interest and went one persuing a pretty damsel. Oh, notice again the similarities between life of birds and life of people.

I promised myself to make it a short blog (and failed miserably). The next weeks are going to be very busy with fieldwork and I might not be able to write every week, so I wanted to make a transition fase for you. That is why I did not say anything about me and the likelihood of me appearing in a SchoolTV episode about geese, Barnacle geese of course :). But, I will tell more about that if the planned shooting tomorrow also goes like planned.

Keep you posted!