One of the best things about fieldwork (and science in general) is that it is rarely predictable. I like to think that after years of research in remote places, I am a little jaded. Fifteen-hour bus trips, open-air toilets, and swarms of insects no longer faze me. However, I admit to being pretty surprised by our visit to the field station outside Yekaterinburg.
When planning this trip, Yekaterinburg was our biggest wild card. Unlike the other places we’re visiting, I hadn’t emailed directly with our contact here before we showed up. Instead Alex, our Moscow collaborator, had simply told me that “Gennady” could help us in Yekaterinburg. Gennady didn’t speak any English, so he would find an interpreter for us during our visit; in the meantime, Alex relayed our schedule and plans. I was worried for several reasons: Gennady told Alex he was afraid it was too early in the season to catch barn swallows; he quoted us an very high price for the week, involving a car, driver, and cook; and I had no idea where we would be staying or if the people we were working with were familiar with the area. Still, it was important to sample this site, so we decided to go for it and hope for the best.
Talking with Alex in Moscow did little to allay my concerns- he told me that Gennady had confirmed that the barn swallows were there, and that we would be staying at a field station, but he didn’t provide any other details. He also told us we needed to buy train tickets not to the big city of Yekaterinburg, but to Kamyshlov, a small village 100 km outside the city. Gennady would be there to meet us. So, with Gennady’s cell phone number and train tickets in hand, and no idea what to expect, we set out on the 32-hour train ride from Moscow to Kamysholv. The train itself was shockingly pleasant; although the trans-Siberian railroad is famous for being one long, drunk party on wheels, vodka has been recently banned on the trains, and our 60-bed car thus slid slowly and respectfully through hundreds of miles birch forests, agricultural fields, and tiny villages (many seemingly abandoned) en route to western Siberia.
Liz, Nick, Victor, and the shashlik grill master When we finally arrived at Kamyshlov and dragged our 150 pounds of equipment from the train, I began to feel better immediately. We were greeted by Nick, a biologist from Yekaterinburg and our interpreter for the week, and Gennady’s brother Victor, an ornithologist who would be our driver. As we drove to the field station, Nick discussed our plan for the week in impeccable English. “We are most concerned about ensuring that you collect sufficient sample sizes,” he told us. Phew. Us too.
When we pulled in to the field station near the big town of Irbit, we discovered what is the probably the closest thing on the planet to scientist summer camp. Nick and Victor led us to a brand-new log cabin, containing a kitchen, dining area, and room for us to stay in. The room was decorated with stuffed roe deer heads, antlers, a wasp nest, and blown up photos of local wildlife, and had windows overlooking a pond. There was a table with plates of candies, dried fruit, and nuts. The dining room table was set for tea and had baskets of pastries, bread and jam, and more candies. Awesome.
Victor helps Nadyezhda serve us Beshbarmak When we pulled in to the field station near the big town of Irbit, we discovered what is the probably the closest thing on the planet to scientist summer camp. Nick and Victor led us to a brand-new log cabin, containing a kitchen, dining area, and room for us to stay in. The room was decorated with stuffed roe deer heads, antlers, a wasp nest, and blown up photos of local wildlife, and had windows overlooking a pond. There was a table with plates of candies, dried fruit, and nuts. The dining room table was set for tea and had baskets of pastries, bread and jam, and more candies. Awesome.
A tour of the field station revealed a banya, picnic tables, and several additional buildings under construction to house visiting scientists, hunters, and tourists. We learned that evening that Gennady and Victor are in charge of monitoring and maintaining a 10,000 ha area of “ornithological importance”- basically, an area of Russia that is home to rare or interesting bird species and is consequently protected. Gennady is trying an interesting experiment there: building a research infrastructure around this reserve that will make it an attractive destination for Russian and international researchers and naturalists. He is trying to mimic the quality of his experiences doing ecological surveys for private energy companies on Sakhalin Island. The station outside Irbit is quite new, and we were only the second international visitors, meaning that we became guinea pigs for this novel idea of treating scientists like they work in the private sector. We’re used to grungy tents and weeks of rice-and-bean diets in the field. Not at Gennady’s station- he had brought in Nadyeshda, a professor of hospitality from a local college, along with three students training in hospitality and restaurant service. For an entire week, every meal we ate had three courses, was made from fresh, local food, and was unbelievably delicious. Gennady and Victor are serious hunters, and they dug into their own freezers for us- we had roe deer steaks, grouse liver, and wild boar they had shot, as well as homemade salted herring, beshbarmak (a traditional Kyrgyz dish) with handmade noodles, borscht, blini, and on and on. It was amazing. The first evening, we feasted on shashlyk and salads, and of course vodka- a bottle decorated with bullfinch images was brought out, and when Gennady discovered that we liked it, we doomed ourselves to a bottle of vodka a night for the rest of the week. That first night, the vodka was mixed with a liqueur made by soaking local aromatic herbs in ethanol, which was supposedly good for your bones but as far as I can tell just made us all giddy. We discussed science with Gennady and Nick until the vodka was gone, then guitars were brought out and Russian folk songs were sung. We returned to our room stuffed with good food and feeling pretty excited about the week.
Ah yes, the dairy None of the good food and company would’ve mattered if we didn’t get good data, but fortunately we pretty much crushed it in Irbit. When we first arrived at the station, Gennady directed us to two barn swallow nests in their sheds; we caught the males before dinner on our first evening with about 20 minutes of netting effort. Easy. On our second day, we left Matt to record singing birds while Nick, Victor and I spent the morning driving around the countryside looking for large barns and houses with tractable nests. After two sleepless nights on the train and only a few hours of sleep after our big welcome dinner and subsequent 5am wakeup, I was feeling pretty awful as we bumped along the rutted dirt roads. We found some promising nests in the village near the field station, but netting individual pairs of birds at houses is time consuming and inefficient. I really wanted to find a big barn, like the horse barn outside of Moscow- these tend to have dozens of nesting pairs of swallows, and it’s easy to string nets up in front of the barn doors. We checked out a few big granaries and abandoned farms, but found no birds. Then, as we drove through another village looking for more pairs nesting in houses, I saw four big barns a bit outside of town. It was a dairy farm- barn swallow nirvana. There were 60 or 70 birds swooping in and out of the barns, skimming insects off holding ponds and picking up mud to build their nests. It was perfect. Victor pulled out his cell phone and began to work his magic, and within 5 minutes he had arranged for the mayor of the village to contact the owner of the farm, and in another 15 we had permission to work there. My concerns about sample sizes began to evaporate.
Kindergarten schoolmaster where we banded a pair of birds Over the next week, we caught 51 birds around Irbit, about half in the dairy farm and the rest from people's houses in villages and other farms. Working in a dairy farm is messy business- after a few hours, you are covered in a fine layer of grime and manure and your clothes reek of cow shit. Fortunately, Gennady made sure to have the banya going for us nearly every evening, which was likely as much of a service to everyone who had to be near us at the station as it was to us.
After it was clear we could get big sample sizes by working at the dairy, we spent some time catching birds in villages as well, to both diversify our sample and get good song recordings, since it’s often easier to record one bird sitting on a wire than 10 flying around in a barn. One of the simultaneously fun and frustrating things about working on barn swallows is that they live around people, and this means you often have a peanut gallery watching on while you try to catch them. And Russians, it turns out, love their barn swallows. We were surprised to find that when we knocked on doors and asked if people had lastichka nests, they not only knew what we were talking about, but could give us whole histories of swallow families at their houses- where the nests had been the year before, how many chicks they had, that one time their cat ate the birds, etc. One particularly enthusiastic man with gold teeth and lovely garden gave us a long genealogy of his swallows, and quoted us a Russian proverb about how barn swallows are indicators of a happy family. He nervously allowed us to catch the pair nesting in his shed, which we processed as fast as we could under his watchful eye. We saw him again the next day, and he happily updated us: the birds were back with their nest and appeared none the worse for the wear.
Celebration beer from Chyelebinsk: the place where the meteor hit After it was clear we could get big sample sizes by working at the dairy, we spent some time catching birds in villages as well, to both diversify our sample and get good song recordings, since it’s often easier to record one bird sitting on a wire than 10 flying around in a barn. One of the simultaneously fun and frustrating things about working on barn swallows is that they live around people, and this means you often have a peanut gallery watching on while you try to catch them. And Russians, it turns out, love their barn swallows. We were surprised to find that when we knocked on doors and asked if people had lastichka nests, they not only knew what we were talking about, but could give us whole histories of swallow families at their houses- where the nests had been the year before, how many chicks they had, that one time their cat ate the birds, etc. One particularly enthusiastic man with gold teeth and lovely garden gave us a long genealogy of his swallows, and quoted us a Russian proverb about how barn swallows are indicators of a happy family. He nervously allowed us to catch the pair nesting in his shed, which we processed as fast as we could under his watchful eye. We saw him again the next day, and he happily updated us: the birds were back with their nest and appeared none the worse for the wear.
When we hit bird number 37, we decided to spend a late afternoon and evening netting at another promising-seeming dairy 20km away, for the sake of sample site diversity. Unfortunately, everything was terrbile there- there were too many people around, the birds refused to fly into the nets, and the two we did catch were hard to get blood samples from. That promising-seeming dairy left a bad taste in our mouths, and we wanted to end our day on a positive note. We had 39 birds, one away from our goal of 40 per site. On the way back to the station, we stopped at a surprisingly clean dairy at 7pm, and discovered it was full of pens of calves. Although the calves were adorable, it didn’t initially look good for birds- only a few swallows, and lots of closed windows. But Victor and Nick found a second barn with a bunch of birds, and within a few minutes we had three in the net. We banded our 42nd bird on the side of the road, with the evening sunlight glowing on the hay fields. “FORTY TWO!” we shouted as the last bird flew away. We named the GPS point for the site “DON’T PANIC.”
-Liz
Stay tuned for Yekaterinburg: Part 2
-Liz
Stay tuned for Yekaterinburg: Part 2