Saying goodbye

The days have flown by with Michael and myself working so hard in the field to collect as much data as we could before he returned to Berkeley with the samples for his parasite study. He returns early to learn the flotation techniques for his fecal samples from an expert in the field currently visiting UC-Berkeley. He begins his fall semester in just a few weeks! For me this is hard to imagine.

Oh, Michael...

The days seem to melt together. Only the unique spectacles of the animals around us distinguish the days. For example, just yesterday we observed a 'midflight degu transfer' between mama black chested buzzard eagle and and junior. Amazing! I wasn't nearly fast enough with my camera, but Dr. Soto Gamboa, days before, had captured some nice photos of them. However, I snapped this one.

Impressive, isn't it?

Last week, Mauricio Soto Gamboa, one of my committee members from Universidad de Austral in Valdivia, came to visit and work on my project with me. He gave excellent advice on my protocols, and also had some good news and bad news for me...

The good news was that we were able to use the data loggers (much like the frog loggers) to collect data on frequency of alarm calls projected from burrow openings to measure predation risk at each of my studied colonies. We are up to eight with this data!

The bad news is that my acoustic recordings are "no beuno". What I mean by this is that they were recorded in the wrong format. This sort of thing happens all the time with research. A little miscommunication can have serious repercussions down the road. I am so grateful that Dr. Soto Gamboa came when he did to help me correct the error before there was no time to recover from it. However, I will still be able to use these recordings for part of my analysis. All it means is that we have to capture more coruros in the following months.

No problem! Right?