We just got back to Moscow after spending six days at the “Crane Homeland Field Station” three hours north of the capital. It actually turns out to be six hours north of the capital if you leave at 3pm on Friday, as we found out. Our experience so far has overall been incredibly positive! We are returning with banding data and samples for 31 barn swallows and song recordings from 12 different males, which just exceeds our target sample sizes of 30 and 10. If we get these kinds of numbers at the rest of our sites, this will be more than sufficient to characterize the variation we see in tail feather (streamer) length, color, and song across populations, which vary as a result of differences in female preferences for these traits. We will also be using some cutting-edge genomic techniques to figure out which parts of the barn swallow genome are correlated with this variation.
But we were actually quite lucky to get these numbers, and we have no idea how easy it will be to repeat this at our other sites. For our first two days of trying to capture barn swallows, we caught a grand total of none. This was not for lack of trying—we had Alex driving us all over the area surrounding the field station. We found lots of swallows, too! We went to a huge abandoned warehouse that was swarming with them—but they were nesting about 30-40 feet in the air and flying in and out of a huge hole in the roof. Not feasible. Then we found some solitary pairs at many houses in a small village called Yesayoolova. People were generally friendly or at least amused and indifferent, and were more than happy to let us try and catch their birds. A lady named Olga invited us in for tea, roasted meat, and curds mashed in with milk, cheese, and sugar, and let us pet her very demanding shelty while we waited for it to get dark. (It doesn’t really do that til around 10:30pm). Then we went outside to find that our target birds were not on the nest and had decided to spend the night elsewhere, without letting us know, of course. Fortunately, we did find one male nesting inside a gazebo where we had previously talked up the site owner and gotten permission to return in the evening. Unfortunately, in the intervening time, the site owner, a thin, good natured-man of about 60, and his wife had gotten rather tanked. They were quite excited to see how we were going to catch their lastochki (barn swallows). In this case, it involved a tall A-frame ladder we brought down from the neighbor’s, a four meter mist net, strung between two poles on one side of the gazebo (we had to guess which side the male might try to fly out), and one graduate student (yours truly), creeping up the ladder in the dark with a couple butterfly nets and trying to convince the bird to fly into one of them. What we didn’t count on was two drunken site owners making a lot of boisterous noise and very helpfully flipping the lights on and off, moving things around in a bird-startling fashion, and distracting Alex as I missed the bird, it flew into the net once, bounced out, and escaped.
The next day, we caught our first bird, living in an abandoned boxcar, and this happened to be the male with the longest streamers I’ve ever measured anywhere in the world (141mm if you want to know)! Later, we found a man grilling in his front yard and asked if we could band the lastochki we’d seen flying in and out of his shed. He said (in Russian), “Uh, you want to do what?! Oooo....K. Knock yourself out.” And an hour later we had him...after some trouble. First attempt: Wait for the pair to go into the shed, run the net across the entrance, only to find the birds have a secret exit under the eaves. Clever birds! Second attempt: set up the net across the entrance, while I wait for, oh, twenty minutes or so in some Russian guy’s shed until the birds come in through the eaves. I would then scare them into the net. This worked once, but the male bounced out of the net because the wind was blowing the wrong way. Third attempt: leave the door open and set the net up at the eaves, wait for a bird to fly in, shut the door, and spook the male into the net at his secret exit. Success! But, unfortunately, the female never went back in after that. So after two and a half days, we had two banded birds. Noooot good.
Our luck soon changed for the better, though. Alex and Liz left me to try to record birds in a neighborhood as they went in search of more banding sites. While I earned weird looks from people as I chased after birds with my parabolic microphone like some kind of deranged spy, they happened upon a newly constructed horse barn. We later caught half of our birds and got several recordings here...it was awesome! Besides all the birds and the surprising lack of people, the horse barn also had the added benefit of having almost no mosquitos. In the city, where we had been staying at the Darwin Museum, there weren’t very many bugs. But at the research station, and pretty much all across Russia, there are a truly ungodly number of mosquitos. At an abandoned metal structure we named “Thunder Dome,” we caught over a dozen birds, but endured hundreds of mosquitos swarming in our faces, biting any flesh that was not covered with thick clothing or 40% DEET. I cannot stress enough how bad the mosquitos were—and how little excited I am that they will probably be even worse, according to Alex, at our next stop. And like all Russians, apparently, they’re not phased by cold weather! These mosquitos can and will find any surface you didn’t put DEET on in seconds. And if you think you’re safe taking a quick pee in the rain...well, you’re not!
Anyway, last night we had a celebratory dinner, after we finished banding our last bird and it commenced raining for the rest of the night. Alex made some awesome Shashlik (kebabs) under an awning and we drank vodka with Alex and Anton (one of the managers of the station) and listened as they played us traditional Russian songs on the guitar. It was an awesome send-off for us, and a nice bookend for what has been an alternatingly dizzying, action-packed, vexing, comical, and maddeningly unpredictable introduction to field work in Russia. We have met some pretty interesting folks, like the woman today who came out of her house to apparently interrupt my recordings, insist on calling me Boris, suggest that I should meet her daughter, and shake her head at me for coming here to study some birds. This was all in rapid Russian, of course, translated between giggles by Alex. And our experience so far makes me excited about what is to come. We will stay at the Museum again tonight, and tomorrow we should have the opportunity to check out some of Moscow and have dinner with Alex and his wife at their apartment before hopping on a train to Yekaterinburg. The train will take 32 hours, which is plainly insane to me. Russia is HUGE! I have been led to expect a lot of sharing of food, drink, and stories on the Transiberian Railroad...but more on that account to come. Til the next Wifi Hotspot!
-Matt
*I just added about 200 photos, which you can access on the new Photos tab.
-Matt
*I just added about 200 photos, which you can access on the new Photos tab.