Yesterday, we traveled by high speed train to another city within the Gansu Province – our last stop along the Hexi Corridor where tags were placed on birds last summer. Without saying too much, Juiquan was a tricky place last year. Sheela ended up placing ten tags on birds in a small group of buildings deep within the city. To ensure maximal success we registered ourselves with the local police and the Forestry Service in the city – to make sure they knew what our doings would be for the next 48 hours. We’re heading to a highly-populated part of the city where we want to be sure that we are a known entity. Everyone was fine with our work so we headed out to the site. Liu Yu and Liz had caught birds there in 2015, Sheela and her crew were there last summer. People immediately recognized us as they chatted with Liu Yu. One of the few words in Chinese that I can recognize during these discussions is the word for barn swallow which sounds like ‘yentzah’. When they say this, I nod and smile and point to my binoculars. Really, we are just a bunch of nerdy scientists but we of course have to convince others that creeping around the entry of their homes quietly with headlamps and our banding gear is fine.