Well, we made it. We’ve been in China for a week now, and it simultaneously feels like we just got here and we’ve been here forever. So far, the field season has been a whirlwind of food, buses, taxis, hotels, and, of course, barn swallows. We began our work in Haikou, the main city on the island of Hainan, off China’s far southern coast. Our primary collaborator in China, Dr. Wei Liang, is a professor at Hainan Normal University, and has helped us organize the logistics for this trip. He and his students study interactions between cuckoos and swallows, and they offered to take us to their study sites on Hainan to capture birds. Hainan’s tropical climate means that barn swallows breed early there, so it worked out perfectly for Hainan to be the first stop on our trip.