Searching for a Kite

The Carolinabirds email listserv has been on fire lately due to the incredible news that a Snail Kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis) has shown up near Lake Marion, South Carolina. This is the first record of a Snail Kite ever occurring north of Florida. The first ever. Needless to say, the Carolina birding community is really really excited, if that actually means anything at all, haha.

So I figured, hey, I have nothing better to do, why don't I go seek out this creature? It sounds like it's sticking around, and I don't anticipate being in the Florida Everglades any time soon, and they're rare there anyways, so why not give it a shot? I sketched out a quick itinerary, adding a second day to bring Huntington Beach State Park into the trip, and made the necessary preparations.

It was a long and grueling drive down, but after four hours I finally got off I-95 at the necessary exit. From there, I went further and further down unmarked rural roads. Every time I thought I'd gone too far and missed the unmarked turn, I spotted a noted landmark and knew I was on the right track. How in the world this bird was found in the first place, I will never know.

10 miles out from metaphorical Nowhere, I finally found myself at Elliott's Crawfish Farm, where the bird had been spotted. Srsly, how the original discoverer or the Kite itself found this place is a complete mystery to me. I noted a lone birder standing by Pond #1, and after speaking with him, I learned that he'd been circling this pond for the past hour, and had not found the Kite. I helped him search for a few minutes before the eponymous Mrs. Elliott showed up with her toddler in a pickup trick, and gave us some tips on where it'd been seen that morning.

As we headed around, I suddenly noticed a dark bird flying low over Pond #2. Brought up the binoculars, and found myself looking at a slate-gray raptor, white base to the tail, and then the distinctive orange bill. Frickin' Snail Kite, baby!!!

By the time we got to Pond #2, it had flown again and perched itself on a low overhanging branch in plain sight of our vantage point. Beautiful, beautiful bird. We got great binocular views, and it filled a scope view as well. I watched the Snail Kite for a full hour, as it flew to various perches around the pond, and unsuccessfully dove for crawfish several times. I hope this guy makes it okay; the theory regarding why he's up here is that the drought and wildfires down in Florida have driven him desperate and up into this unfamiliar territory, eating crawfish instead of the usual Apple Snails. All indications are that he'll stick around, but hopefully the crawfish diet will suit him just fine. I wanted to get to my hotel in Myrtle Beach in time for a dinner, so I bid farewell to the two newly-arrived birders who had joined the Kite's entourage, caught one last glimpse of the Kite soaring to another perch, and headed back on the road.



Other birds noted: A cooperative Yellow-crowned Night-Heron at Pond #2, replete with long breeding-plumage head plumes, first time I've seen them with those plumes, cool stuff. Also, a soaring Wood Stork on the drive to Myrtle Beach. At first, my heart skipped a beat as I thought it might be a Swallow-tailed Kite, but no such luck. Of all my remaining Nemesis Birds, the Swallow-tailed Kite is the most beautiful, alluring siren of them all...someday, you will be mine...wow that sounds a little creepy, haha.

Photos from Royal National Park

An hour's train ride south of Sydney
Hiked 10 km on the famous Coast Track
Probably one of the most beautiful parks I've ever visited











I believe those flowers are Heath Banksia (Banksia ericifolia), though I could definitely be wrong.

Anyways, it was just a fantastic walk. Coming to visit this park again may have actually become the #1 reason I would want to come back to Australia, overshadowing anything in Sydney or tropical north Queensland. Actually, the Great Barrier Reef comes close as well, but who knows how long that'll be around. But yeah, my walk covered only the tiniest sliver of the park's territory, and there's some really different habitats in the other corners that I'd love to see someday. Just a great park in general, it gets my highest recommendation.

As for Sydney, I browsed through a Sydney Food Guide in the bookstore, and have now singled out some completely clutch hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the labyrinth commonly known as Sydney Chinatown. For dinner today, I walked into what looked like one of those apartment/business building complexes that nobody actually uses, went up one floor, and suddenly found the best Japanese ramen noodles I've ever had, for five dollars total. Swish.

But I'm also leaving for home on Sunday. Honestly, my fond memories of the program are much less intense these days, so it feels like the right time to head home. I had a great time on this mini-vacation, but it's definitely time for me to dive back into the real world. See you there!

Wanderlust

Elegans

Mentioned this earlier, but the past month has been really hectic, as I’ve worked on my Directed Research project. All said and done, I have a 24-page document on my hands, clipped into a nice professional-looking binder, and one of the best achievements in my academic career so far, I really couldn’t be prouder.

Some interesting results were teased out, and there’s been talk of publishing it, probably joined along with some of my classmates’ research and some further research to be conducted by next semester’s group. More interesting was a conclusion I reached from my results, which I assumed to be completely logical and already part of common knowledge, but may actually represent a revolutionary concept in plant evolution. What. I refuse to believe that this is actually a radical new idea, but my research professor seems convinced that it’s new. So we’ll do some reading up in our free time, to find if that’s truly the case, and publish that too. I’d rather not discuss it on here, for fear of mischievous bandit scientists publishing before us, so ask me about it in private if you really care. No offense taken if you don’t, haha.

I had to give a presentation on my research as well, and the professors liked it enough to give me a shot at presenting it to the public, at the semester-end Community Night. I didn’t stress out much, figuring that the audience would mostly be the local yokels or kind senior citizens without the slightest comprehension of what I was talking about. The day before the presentation, I learned that this assumption was actually false, and that the audience would essentially be a panel of scientists from the local universities. Gulp.

Fortunately, my high school debate training proved useful, and so I spoke with my best speaking voice and made a pretty powerpoint, all so that people would be bowled over by the presentation skillz and wouldn’t actually listen to what I was saying, haha. Nah jk, I did actually stick some content in (unlike some of those local debate tournaments years ago, good times). I got some good compliments afterwards, some of which were surprisingly laudatory and sincere, so I’m glad that all went well.

And then, suddenly, that was it. The program was over. There was barely enough time for a farewell dinner, and then we left the rainforest forever, in the darkness of three in the morning. Before I realized it, we were standing in the Cairns airport hugging out our goodbyes and laughing over jokes a few final times. A solid group of us were on the same flight to Sydney, but three of us were staying in Sydney while the rest were flying on to the States. That produced a particularly preposterous farewell, as three of us went to the baggage claim while the rest went to the international terminal, with those two destinations in opposite cardinal directions, 180 degrees. Final hugs and goodbyes, and then we turned our backs and walked away. Straight out of a movie, I tell you.

Cultural Vertigo

The experience of being in Sydney was utterly overwhelming. That’s the blunt way to put it. To spend three whole months hiking through the lush rainforest, completely immersed in the wonders of nature, and then to suddenly emerge into a tree-less skyscraper metropolis, swimming through massive hordes of businessmen, shoppers, and tourists was possibly the biggest shock of my life. I was totally overwhelmed. I met with a friend from the program for dinner, and she had been overwhelmed to the point of wandering through the city until she found a park with trees, and collapsed in its shade to recover. I really cannot emphasize enough just how overwhelming Sydney was.

Over the next few days, we slowly adjusted to the tempos of city life, and I can say that after three days, I was pretty much acclimated to civilization once again. But it wasn’t satisfying. Walking for 30 minutes through a city is absolutely nothing like walking for 30 minutes down a forested path. The long walk from my hostel to downtown Sydney is more stressful than I thought any walk could possibly be. It’s the crush of people, the blaring traffic, the flashing lights: there’s no room for solitude, reflection, or an appreciation of one’s surroundings. In any other context, I can tell that I’d probably love Sydney, there’s a great range of interesting shops (including one of the best record shops I’ve ever seen), lots of interesting people to observe, and of course incredible architecture and art, Sydney Opera House being just one obvious example. But coming here right after this program felt totally wrong.

Wonderland in Alice

And it was in that mindset that I escaped to Alice Springs, near the very center of the continent, the Red Centre. Most visitors to the Alice use it as a base camp for excursions to Ayers Rock/Uluru, that famous red monolith that’s in the Outback Steakhouse logo, among other places. Uluru and the Sydney Opera House are undoubtedly the two biggest landmarks in the country.

But I didn’t come to visit Uluru. It seems like the type of landmark that is completely overrated, and not worth the significant resources required to visit it. It’s just a large red rock, after all. Granted, I’ve talked with not one, but several people who were of the same mind before they visited the Rock, but were totally blown away once they got there. That weighed on me very heavily. I may never be in this part of the world ever again. Sydney and Cairns perhaps, but not the Red Centre. So this may be the literal Chance of a Lifetime to see a Global Landmark, such as if you were in Egypt and refused to go see the Sphinx or the Pyramids of Giza. But in the end, I made the decision to forgo a visit. It was either going to be too expensive, take up far too much time, or both.

My plans for Alice Springs were first, to see the famous dry Outback landscape that I didn’t get to see in tropical northeast Queensland, and subsequently, to see the impressive array of new birds associated with that environment. The latter point may have been more important. Predictable, I know, haha. Birds are probably the subconscious goal of every trip I do, everything from a walk on campus to an airplane flight to an Outback outpost.

The trip to Alice Springs was immediately therapeutic. It was the perfect marriage between the natural immersion of my program and the cultural values of the big city. I got wireless internet in my hostel, and three blocks away I was out of the city and into the Outback. Being able to go on long hikes helped immeasurably to clear my mind and relieve all the stress I’d accumulated from the shock of city life. On Tuesday morning alone, I hiked over 14 km of the Larapinta Trail, which stretches for over 200 km in total. I wanted to go longer, but I forgot to pack a lunch, haha. I could have gone all day, even despite the heat, and the swarms of flies.

On a side note, if you’re ever in Alice Springs for whatever reason, I would strongly recommend staying at the Alice’s Secret Travellers Inn. It is the best hostel I have stayed at anywhere in Australia. Great rooms, great location, and the friendliest staff ever. Best hostel. Also, the Italian restaurant Casa Nostra is extremely delicious and relatively cheap. I haven’t even found anything that good in Sydney yet. So go there.

Cheers

And now I’m back in Sydney. Perhaps it’s because I knew what to expect this time, but I wasn’t so overwhelmed this time around. However, I do plan on taking long train rides out to the nearby National Parks, which should be great. I’ve given up on taking photos of the Sydney Opera House, first of all because it’s impossible to capture its full beauty, and secondly because it’s not like you guys haven’t seen pictures of the thing before. Trust me though, the pictures don’t do it justice. Sydney Opera House = best house ever. I can also now say that I’ve seen an event inside the Opera House. I would’ve loved for it to be some orchestra performance or, heck, an opera, but I settled for an Aboriginal film festival, which was incredibly well done and mostly quality, worth the price of admission (free) and definitely then some for sure.

So with my remaining three days, I’ll be searching for birds, sweet records at the record shop, and gawking at the Opera House some more. Really what I should’ve been doing in the first place. I can’t even remember what I did the first time around in Sydney, other than stagger around confusedly and then gawk at the Opera House some more.

Alright, got some photos left over:

Brainstorming for my research paper topic

Forty Mile Scrub National Park, where we did a lot of our sampling

Standley Chasm, in the West MacDonnell Ranges outside of Alice Springs

Kickin It With Cousinz

Looks like I've been out of touch for a number of weeks, but I sort of have an excuse: I've been traveling around for most of it, on various field trips.


Daintree National Park

The Daintree protects some of the few remaining coastal rainforest left in all of Australia, so it merited a visit. It's also the wettest region of Australia, and we happened to visit during the Wet Season, so surprise, it rained for three days straight, the entire length of our stay. But we're used to that now; it wasn't as bad as the deteriorating cyclone that dumped rain on us for five days straight, without stop, in early February. Ah, life in the rainforest.

Ever on the lookout for new birds, I was hoping for some of the lowland specialties, but struck out on almost all of them, only Bridled Honeyeater was a worthy pickup. Noisy Pitta was the main target, but none were seen or heard during our stay. The other amazing lowland bird we were hoping for, the Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher, did fortunately make an appearance at the Mardja Boardwalk. But I'd already gotten this bird over Spring Break, near the summit of Mt. Whitfield north of Cairns. For the record though, it remains one of the most spectacular birds I have ever seen in the wild. The other cool bird we got was a Cassowary crossing the road near Cape Tribulation, with two chicks in tow!

On our final morning at our secluded rainforest hostel, we were sleepily munching on cereal when a thunderous crash happened, in the direction of some of the cabins. We rushed over to the scene, and Ian was smart enough to grab a First Aid kit. What we found was pretty sobering: the loose waterlogged soil had caused a massive tree to fall, right onto one of the cabins. We swarmed around the cabin, knocking on the few remaining doors left standing, looking for the injured, but thank goodness, we found that the cabin had been unoccupied at the time. Ten feet away from the tree, in the next cabin over, a mother had been sleeping with her 11-month old child. She was pretty shaken up by the close call, but talk about being fortunate.

The other occurrence of note in the Daintree was a stop at the Daintree Ice Cream Company. You don't get to pick your flavors, you have to get Today's Special, which is a mix of four flavors. We got Wattleseed, Soursop, Passionfruit, and a fourth fruit that I'd never heard of, forgot the name of, and tasted like deliciousness. Actually, in general, it was the best ice cream I'd ever had, despite the fact that three of the four flavors were completely new to my senses. It was so, so good. Holy cow.


James Cook University - Townsville

Just two days after returning from the Daintree, we departed for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament at James Cook University in Townsville. Being one of the better players in the program, I signed up for an entire day's worth of games, knowing full well that I was about to get physically hammered. Temperatures climbed into the upper 90's, and the air was incredibly dry, making for a really strenuous environment to do heavy exercise in. I made sure to keep hydrated, but halfway through the first game, I was getting dizzy spells, a really terrible sign. Worse yet, the tournament organizers failed to provide the usual bagels and bananas for the players, making it tough to find the necessary calories.

Our ragtag team played surprisingly competitively, against the full-practicing JCU teams, and in our final game of School for Field Studies vs. James Cook University, we almost pulled off the upset. Two absolutely epic points dominated the middle of the match, as both teams played tough defense, and drives down the field were shut down just before the endzone. I was physically doing better than a lot of my teammates at this point, with fresher legs, so my defensive assignment was to shut down their captain Megan, the quickest player on the team, with a constant source of energy. I kept up with her through the first epic point (won by us) and through most of the second epic point, but nearing the end of that point, both of us absolutely hit the wall, and just stood there, planted to the ground. She dug deep and made one final desperate cut, I caught up, and that was it, we were done. On the other side of the field, JCU scored the point, and it took the last of our energy to get off the field. I spent the rest of the day gulping down water, dried bananas, and pizza, and passed out on the bus home. The next day was pretty brutal, but man, the whole tournament was worth it.


Coming up next: homestays, and directed research. Or, in the short-run, a.k.a. tomorrow: finals.


Some more photos:

Mossman River, in the Daintree




And I want people's opinions on this. It's a poster I made for my Socioeconomics Values & Environmental Policy course, based on a paper I just wrote. All the students are making posters, and the best one is getting presented at a conference in New York. I just made this poster for fun, but I showed it to a few people, including a professor, and they seem to think that I've already clinched the trip to New York. That can't be true, right? It's fun to look at it, but there's no way I can present this at a professional conference, is there? Anyways, let me know what you think of it!


Leeches attached: ~100 (Woohoo!)
Leeches that have feasted upon my blood: 6
Brushes with the Stinging Tree: 2

Rolling Down the Esplanade

Most weekends here, Saturday is like a weekday, filled with classes and field exercises, and Sunday is our only free day of the week, which most people spend lazily lounging around the Centre, reading books, listening to their iPods, and watching the rain. This weekend, we were tipped off on an Australian Soccer preseason game being played in Cairns, featuring two of the top teams in the league, and so we made plans with the staff to skip out early on Saturday and spend that night and all of Sunday in Cairns instead of at the Centre. Probably glad to get those troublesome kids off their hands, the staff agreed, transportation was arranged, and by Saturday afternoon we were off into the city, for the first time all semester.

Even Saturday morning was a bit of a break from class. The day started with community service work, as we helped TREAT (Trees for the Evelyn and Atherton Tablelands (we're on the Atherton Tablelands, I have no idea where the Evelyn Tablelands are, sorry Evelyn!)) plant rainforest tree seedlings on an abandoned farm on the banks of the Barron River. Trowels in hand, we removed saplings from their pots and carefully planted them along the existing rainforest edge. Our little group of 16, including a one-armed kid (dislocated elbow from frisbee two weeks ago, not a fun thing to watch), with the help of a handful of regular TREAT volunteers, managed to plant over 2000 trees in just over two hours' time. We were rewarded with an incredible barbeque at the planting's end, I drank a lime-flavored drink that looked like mouthwash but tasted like lime brilliance, and we headed off to the Yungaburra Markets, a monthly event where vendors from all over the region gather to sell their goods. We had been regaled with tales involving firebreathers and jugglers performing amongst booths filled with inventive crafts and fresh fruits, but instead we arrived at a nearly desolate field populated by a handful of small gift sellers. The only substantive purchase made was a VHS copy of Biodome, if that says anything at all about what was available. How disappointing, but we were assured that this was not normal, and vowed to return next month. Afterwards, I followed a few of the girls into a nifty-looking shop in downtown Yungaburra, which turned out to be an unfathomable mistake as the girls spent the next hour trying on skirts, asking for my wholly uneducated opinion on them. I emerged completely shell-shocked and shaken to the bone, and we drove back to the Centre for a short afternoon of lectures before we finally loaded up the vans and headed into Cairns.

Cairns is the one large city in our area; it's large enough to have a busy international airport, to give you a rough idea of its size. If you plan on ever visiting the Great Barrier Reef, you'll ultimately come to Cairns, as it's the gateway to the Reef which everybody comes through. Because of that, it's a really touristy city, there's Tourist Information Booths on nearly every block in addition to the dense concentration of Outdooring and Diving stores. To us though, it was civilization, and a chance to escape the increasingly suffocating boundaries of our relatively remote Centre.

We stayed at Gilligan's Backpackers, a hostel in downtown Cairns, and though I've never stayed at a hostel before, you really don't need to have any points of reference to tell that Gilligan's was an incredibly nice hostel. It didn't feel like a hostel at all, it felt more like a luxury 4-star hotel for young, attractive people. Instead of a ballroom, there was a nightclub attached to the hostel, and instead of fine dining, there was a retro bar and casual restaurant where I munched on Fish and Chips while watching rugby on a massive wall-sized television. But we didn't stay at Gilligan's for long, we dropped off our stuff and hailed a taxi to get to the football game.

I may have misled some people with information about this game, and part of it is due to my own misunderstanding: we were not going to watch a rugby game, or a soccer game, or an American football game, we were here to watch Australian football, a unique sport endemic to this continent which is best described as a cross between soccer and rugby. Instead of carrying the ball in for a score like American football and rugby, teams tried to kick the ball between goalposts like in soccer. Or at least, that's as far as we could tell. None of us knew the rules as the taxi rolled up to the stadium, and as we bought our tickets for the uncovered, outdoor spectator area, it started to rain. By the time we found an open place to stand on the hill, it was pouring, driving rain. And it didn't let up. We got absolutely soaked. My rain jacket was overwhelmed and even my t-shirt underneath got waterlogged. My khaki shorts got totally saturated, and even my boxers were dripping wet and soaked with rain. At times, it was raining so hard that we couldn't even see the players on the field. It was pretty much a stereotypical Idiot Male scenario; men drinking beer and disregarding the pouring rain to watch guys on the field throw a ball around and then smash everyone into the ground. It was a total blast. At halftime too, a bunch of little kids were brought on to play some Australian soccer, and we all jokingly picked our Fantasy Stars of the Game as the uncoordinated schoolkids bumbled around in the rain. After they were done, some of the guys ran down to the field to high five their fantasy stars, and then the rest of the kids too. Hilarious. I don't even know who won the game, we couldn't see the important part of the scoreboard and didn't really know the rules anyway, but we wooped and hollered and had a great time anyways. After the game, most of the group went clubbing, but instead I went to bed. Srsly, can you see me in a dance club? Ever? If I had to choose between clubbing, or helping girls shop for skirts, I'd probably...throw spears at Woolly Mammoths and watch football. And that was Saturday.

On Sunday, I didn't feel like wandering around the city with bitter, hungover college kids, so I got suckered into joining a group of girls to ride the Skyrail into Kuranda. The Skyrail turned out to be a cablecar ride over the canopy of a rainforest, and it was one of the most touristy attractions I've ever seen. Fortunately, everyone else realized this too, and we spent most of the ride mocking the tourist brochures with our now superior knowledge of rainforest ecology. Near the end of the ride, we stopped over at an overlook to see Barron Falls, a very impressive waterfall that was swollen way past its usual capacity by the wet season that we're in. The Skyrail journey ended in Kuranda, a town which seemed to be populated entirely by tourists or tourist shopowners, I'm not sure if it has any permanent residents otherwise. How absurd.

I soon found out that the whole reason the girls were here was because an Animal Park in Kuranda allowed you to hold a Koala, and so the girls were just OMG KOALAS and Blaine and I were suddenly trapped. We got to the park, and spent some time looking at kangaroos, wallabies, monitor lizards, and some other things, but then as we got closer to the Koala enclosure and the girls saw the Koalas for the first time, they started squealing, I just about lost my hearing, and wanted to blow up the sun. The girls paid another fifteen dollars to have their pictures taken while holding the Koalas, and as they posed with the Koalas and the other girls squealed even higher, I was crossing my fingers for apocalypse. By the end, I'd gotten dragged into a group photo with the Koalas, which I hope to never lay my eyes upon ever, and Blaine and I finally escaped the Koala enclosure. Oh well, I guess that was their payback for the Australian Soccer game, well-deserved then. Which ultimately means that I'd rather stand in the pouring rain for three hours watching a sport that I don't even understand, rather than hold a koala? Amazing.

We rode the Skyrail back to Cairns, and headed for the famous Esplanade, a street along the beachside with tons of shops, restaurants, and a saltwater swimming lagoon. But once I got to the Esplanade, I saw something that I hadn't seen in more than a year, and missed sorely: the ocean at low tide. Exposed mudflats. Shorebird habitat. Crunchtime.

Lauren and Blaine and I, the three birders, spent two hours on the Esplanade, and only covered 100 meters of its length, a frighteningly slow pace. The reason: in those two hours, we found almost 25 new species of birds for our lists, probably the highest density of new birds we've had all semester. I doubt that the Esplanade is an especially great birding spot in the grand scheme of it all, but since none of us had been to the Australian coast before, all of these birds were new for us. Even the abundant gulls flying around were a new species, the Silver Gull. The evening closed with massive flocks of Pied Imperial-Pigeons wheeling over the city, another exciting new species for us, and we hopped back into the vans. Before we even knew it, we were back home at the Centre.

In two weeks, we've got our mid-semester Spring Break, and I have no idea what I'll be doing. Since I don't want to go horseback riding for five days, or spend ten hours driving stick shift on the left side of the road down to the reportedly 'totally sick' Whitsunday Islands like other members of the group, I may be stuck with the Koala girls again. Hopefully, no more Koala-holding or skirt-shopping will happen, but even with those nightmare occurences, it was still a fun weekend. Rehab is going well thus far.

Danger Danger Danger

That last post must have jinxed me or something. We headed out into the field the next morning, to the same forest fragment as before with the wait-a-whiles and stinging trees, to cut some more transects. Halfway into the second transect, it happened. I touched the stinging tree. I actually touched it! All of my wonderful dreams finally came true! I started drifting into a beautiful meadow, skylarks singing their songs on the wing as a rainbow soared over the sky, my dreams, they'd come true! Or maybe the pain was just making me go crazy, haha.

No but seriously, it's not bad at all. The first few minutes, okay, pretty intense. It was a lot like my experience with Stinging Nettle last year, except this time I'd somehow gotten stung through my pants, and I started to come to grips with the fact that I'd have to deal with this for months. The stinging tree has clinched the award for greatest tree of all time at this point.

But then, turns out that the pain isn't continuous; it's not like my knee will throb with pain every moment that I'm awake for the next few months. It comes and goes, I'll completely forget about it for hours on end, then for two minutes my knee will just spontaneously burst into really sharp pains, only to disappear just as suddenly, and I forget about it again.

And then, it even turns out that the pulses of pain only happened on the first few days. Right now, I am just about 100% okay, and I think it has to do with how I was stung. One of my professors posted a long article written by a scientist who had done her PhD thesis on these stinging trees, and it gave a pretty comprehensive history of the plant. How it works: Tiny silica hairs are found on the leaves and stem, and when someone brushes against them, they break off the plant and embed themselves into the skin. Whenever these hairs are exposed to moisture or to sudden temperature changes, they burst and release a neuro-toxin which causes all the pain, though scientists are still unsure as to how this neurotoxin exactly functions and triggers the actual pain. Anyways, the reason you stay in pain for so long is that the body cannot break down silica, so hairs can stay embedded for months before bursting. So I think I got lucky: most of the silica hairs probably got stuck on my pants, not my knee, so I should make a full recovery very very soon, if not already. I've done my laundry too, which is good, hopefully all the silica hairs will wash off, because apparently they also stay active for a really long time. A dried specimen kept at a herbarium in Brisbane was collected in 1910, and it still causes pain to those who touch it. Amazing. Also of note, when one of my other professors first moved to the area, he accidentally walked into a field of stinging trees while wearing shorts, and required extensive hospital treatment for shock and for lymph node swelling, and got injected with Morphine as part of the recovery process. Incredible. Best plant ever.

So yeah, I touched the tree, but I'm fine! I had a lot of fun while the pain lasted, and now I'm starting to wonder if I might be able to get stung more so that I can build up a resistance to it. Haha, no I probably won't be trying that. But this was a nice little intro, I'll be much more prepared the next time around. Though it's sort of demoralizing to know that you can still get stung through your clothes. One of my friends got stung through a rain jacket and t-shirt, and it caused welts. Intense.

Just for some more quick science, we also got to read a quick article on leeches. Most land leeches have three jaws, causing a y-shaped incision, but the Australian land leeches only have two jaws, causing a v-shaped incision. I thought that was really, really cool. Also, leeches have suckers on both ends of their body, but the front sucker is the weakest, so usually leeches attach with their posterior sucker. If a leech successfully feeds on your blood, you bleed for a long time, as I mentioned before, but the actual amount of blood lost is quite minimal, and doesn't really cause any adverse health effects. You're just being nice to the leech, in a way. And after a blood meal, the leech usually, "...retires to a dark spot, to digest its meal..." in the exact words of this formal scientific paper. Incredible.

In other wacky and dangerous organismal news, the Centre director's husband Alastair caught another Scrub Python on the property's access road. As a note, this is actually part of his job, he works for the government's wildlife service. I honestly think that he's one of the coolest people I've ever met, he's seriously like Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter, except a few years older and much more humble and kind. He just runs around Queensland capturing snakes for a living. He's sort of my hero. But anyways, he's doing a research project tracking Scrub Pythons around the area, so after he caught this newest Python, we helped him measure it this afternoon. Turned out to be 10 feet long, weighed about 8 pounds, thicker than my fist. Huge snake. Holding the snake straight out for the length measurement, the snake was squirming in my grasp, and woah, I did not realize that they were so strong. Turns out they're actually the world's strongest vertebrate, in terms of muscle mass or something. Even the very tip of its tail could probably crush most people in arm wrestling, the muscles were that strong. So it was really cool to spend some time examining this massive snake up close and personal, and we released it later at the same spot it was captured at. We also saw a Small-eyed Snake this afternoon, one of the most dangerous snakes in this area. One of them bit a cabinmate of mine two weeks ago, but luckily he got bitten right on the sandal strap, and missed the foot. You could not get more lucky.

And that's basically it, for these past few whirlwind days. Tomorrow the whole group is going to Cairns for a weekend break, with everyone heading to an Australian Football game tomorrow night, which I'm incredibly pumped about. Sunday, we have no idea what we're doing. We were planning on kayaking on the Great Barrier Reef, but it looks like weather conditions will be too harsh, and that'll get canceled. The girls wanted to go horseback riding, I think they wanted revenge for getting dragged to the football game, but that turned out to be too expensive. Four people just decided an hour ago that they want to go skydiving, which is sorely tempting, but it's a bit too short notice. I want to pump myself up for a few weeks before I go skydiving, and believe me, I want to go skydiving at some point. But not two days from now. I'd rather find something much more peaceful and relaxing to do.

And also, after my program's over, I'd been planning on spending ten days in Sydney, but after having a long conversation with Alastair the Crocodile Hunter, I've decided that I'm probably going to fly to Alice Springs to spend a few days. Alice Springs is in the center of the continent, right in the middle of the Outback, and that's an environment that I desparately want to see before I leave here. Plus, the birding will hopefully be incredible. And I trust Alastair's advice, actually I would trust him with my life. If we really had gone sea kayaking, and our kayaks had flipped, and sharks (or octopuses) were circling, I could totally see Alastair skydiving to our rescue, wrestling with the sharks (and octopuses), and saving everyone without breaking a sweat, and flying off to return to his job and find some more huge snakes. What a ridiculous country that I'm living in.


Leeches attached: ~70
Leeches that have feasted upon my blood: 3

Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles

Most of today was spent in the field, collecting data for a field exercise in my Forest Management course. We were running transects into edge habitat in the Curtain Fig National Park, in order to investigate how physical conditions on edges affect the ability of invasive weeds to proliferate. That part probably doesn't interest any of you, so I'll get to the exciting parts. In order to cut our transects, teams of us armed with clippers and sharp knives dove into the thick brush, hacking away at the plants ahead of us in order to clear the way for the data collectors to move in. Sometimes the brush was so thick that we couldn't cut straight through it, and we ended up constructing TUNNELS THROUGH THE BRUSH. So much fun, you don't even know. At one point, we had to climb up a huge fallen log, and on the other side, you dive into a tunnel. I've never had so much fun while getting torn to pieces by thorns.

Which I should probably mention. Not only was the understory thick with plants, but most of these understory plants were either the weeds we were researching, or the two most feared plants in this corner of Australia: the stinging tree, and the wait-a-while (also known as a lawyer vine). I've probably mentioned the stinging tree to most of you. If you touch any part of it, you will be in pain for months. Months. And there's nothing you can do about it. You're just going to have to be in pain for months. I cannot fathom this. I ran into some Stinging Nettle in the Crum last spring, in the Skunk Cabbage Hollow behind the Fieldhouse, and I couldn't feel my leg for almost five hours. But running into the stinging tree would put you in that position for...months. Unbelievable.

But don't worry, I didn't run into any. According to my professor, it's basically inevitable that I'll run into one at some point if I choose to do my resarch project with him, which is my current plan of action. But I haven't run into them yet. Today, a few of my colleagues ran into them, our first close experiences with them. Two were in extreme pain, especially one fellow who got stung on the top of his head. They've been told that they'll have to deal with the pain for months. They did not appear to be especially pleased by this news, oddly enough. Two of the others who got stung didn't seem to mind too much though, so that's good news. The closest I got was one section of the trailblazing where I was working on cutting down a stinging tree, and removing it from the area of our path. Clipping it branch by branch, the wind nearly blew a few leaves onto my hands, but I lucked out there. So I'm fine. So far. Hehe.

But I mentioned another plant earlier, the Wait-a-While, something I didn't know about until I got here, but it's almost just as feared as the stinging tree. It doesn't sound bad on paper, it's just a really thorny vine. What I can't emphasize enough, based on experience in the field over the past three weeks, is how easily these thorns catch on your clothing and skin, how violently they rip up your clothing and skin, and how long those thorns stick in your skin if you're unlucky enough to have that happen. Most of us have gotten Wait-a-Whiles stuck on our clothing, and one of today's stinging tree victims even had his favorite Philadelphia 76ers t-shirt ripped to shreds on our first day in the field. It's a good thing that a 76ers shirt is nothing to flaunt around, it's not like they're a good team or anything. Anyways, today were the first experiences of Wait-a-Whiles on skin. I was completely covered up in rain gear, but it didn't really help, my left index finger knuckle has about 8 Wait-a-While thorns completely embedded in it at the moment, and there's nothing I can do about it except wait-a-few-weeks. The thorns are more like thin splinters, but you can't extract them because there's also tiny side hooks that are angled such that they slide into your skin easily, but don't slide back out without intense pain. Sitting in my knuckle though, it's not too bad, no wuckers, seriously. If I try and take them out, then yeah, it hurts, but if I don't do anything, it's barely noticeable. No wuckers, no wuckers. All semester, we've been trying to find a slogan for our group t-shirt, and so far the two front-runners are:

SFS Wet Season 2007: No wuckers, mate!
SFS Wet Season 2007: It wasn't that bad

The latter was in response to a stinging tree encounter. Hilarious. Anyways, I also got a Wait-a-While across my face in one of the tunnels, but luckily it didn't stick, I carefully peeled it off without a scratch. Phew.

By the by, I've been told that an Australian naturalist (whose name I've suddenly forgotten) has written a book of the title 'Stinging Trees and Wait-a-Whiles', detailing humorous adventures of his in this part of Australia, which comes highly recommended from several of our professors as a great read. Obviously I'll read it at some point, but if any of you are in need of a good book, take a look.


So that was my day! On a more pleasant note, there have been some really beautiful sights over the past week as well.

- Tens of thousands of bats flying over the town of Chillagoe at sunset.
- A crop duster gracefully gliding low over some fields below Halloran's Hill. Even in North Carolina, I don't think I'd ever seen a crop duster in action before this, but it's quite beautiful, the graceful plane soaring over the fields.
- Oh, during this entire day in the field with the stinging trees and wait-a-whiles and everything, it was also pouring rain, harder than it has all semester. It stopped raining just before dinner, and a rainbow appeared just above the hills to the North.

We'll leave things there.

Chillagoe

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, I'm starting to get used to life in the rainforest, so the excitement level is inching back towards normal, and I have less to report on. For most of this past week though, I've been camping on the edge of the Outback, and I feel like there's some things to mention about that.

We spent our time in the area of Chillagoe, a small town to our west which took four hours to reach on poorly maintained country roads. Biologically, Chillagoe was fascinating because its dry, arid environment is so different from the lush, tropical one we've been frolicking in for the past few weeks. For me in particular, that also meant a whole slew of new birds to watch out for, and the area did not disappoint me, bird list to be updated as soon as I'm done with this. The other two birders got many more species than me though, mostly because their van got lost and drove on through the Outback for an extra 90 kilometers, through some apparently incredible habitat that netted them stuff like Sarus Crane, for which I will forever be jealous. I mean, c'mon, Sarus Crane! Whatever, I'm relatively happy with the birds I got to see, and that's good enough for me. I did get to be the only observer of a Black-breasted Buzzard on the way back, which I did not realize is an astonishing sighting, our Centre Director (who's also an avid birder) has only seen three in her entire life, and two of them were sitting on a nest she was directed to. So yeah, I was pleased with that, wish I got a better look rather than just a quick drive-by glance, but I'll take whatever I can get with that bird.

Our first night camping was pretty rough unfortunately. It was scorching hot, I was sweating buckets, and my sleeping bag could not have been more uncomfortable. The guy (not) sleeping to my left ended up abandoning his sleeping bag completely and rolled it up to use as a pillow, a strategy which I quickly stole and was subsequently also adopted by the (not) sleeper on my right. At one point during the night, the kid to my left got up to use the bathroom, and since he's also one of my cabinmates, I know his general schedule, so I figured oh, it must be 4:30 in the morning, since that's when he usually gets up to do this, and that means the night's almost over! I looked at my alarm clock anyways and, no way, it's only 12:30?! I clenched my eyes shut, cursed silently at the Chillagoe night, who didn't respond, and tossed around some more in frustration. At some point during the night, it started raining, highly unusual for the area, and at some point after that, part of our tent collapsed from the rain. Highly amusing stuff to deal with in the rain at 5 in the morning. At least we didn't get flooded like a few of the others. Fortunately, I was a lot more comfortable the next night, and by comfortable I actually mean that I got flooded with mosquitoes and biting flies instead of rain. But I slept through that at least!

Chillagoe is a small town, population around 250, and I learned something intriguing from my Poli Sci professor. In the big cities of Australia, like Sydney or Brisbane, people wave with their entire hand, much like we're used to seeing in the US. But the further you move away from the population centers, the fewer fingers people use in their waves. As you head into the country, people start waving with just four of their fingers, then three, two, and finally at Chillagoe the locals were acknowledging our presence with just one finger. It was interesting to watch. People seemed to be really freaked out by this, and for some reason I wasn't as much, and I couldn't figure it out for a while. Then I realized something: I don't know when I started, but for years, I've been waving with three fingers. That didn't occur to me until this trip. I still do the full palm wave occasionally, but only sort of ironically and playfully to certain friends who I find especially amusing. If I'm saying hello to anyone else, from across a room or down a long hallway, it's my default three-fingered wave, which I really didn't realize that I used, until now. Isn't that exciting?! Why didn't anyone point this out to me? I wonder if it comes from North Carolina, though Raleigh seems more like four-fingered territory. Maybe I need to move further out into the country, amongst my three-fingered comrades. This three-fingered wave feels completely natural to me, and I feel really strange doing the full palm waves unironically at this point. Curious.

I wish I could post some of my photos from Chillagoe and from this entire Australian adventure in general, but like I said earlier, the internet connection here at the Centre is slower than frozen molasses, so not happenin. I finally got to try out the Internet Cafe in a nearby town today, but it was pretty amazingly slow as well, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised since Atherton is still just a country town, somewhere between Cairns and Chillagoe. Anyways, none of my photos were done uploading by the time I headed out to play Ultimate Frisbee with all of the guys, so we'll have to wait a bit longer. I'll see if I can wrangle a bit more time at that cafe, or if I can find a better connection over Spring Break, or something at some point would be good. We'll cross our fingers and shoot for then, whenever it is.



And of course, leech update!

Leeches attached: ~65
Leeches that have feasted on my blood: 2


Got my first exams on Monday, but I'm not too worried. Hopefully I'll get back to you guys sooner rather than later this time. Peace out.


Edit: It look like two of my photos mysteriously made it through the upload process, which is cool. So here's the two that randomly made it through:

Lindsay, Wynnie, and Josie on the Site Walk


Cathedral Fig in the Danbulla National Park, a 4 km walk from our property

The Bloody Sock

Spent the entire day on one of those field trips that are supposed to be educational, but nobody ends up learning anything at all, so we just end up goofing around. Yeah, it was one of those trips.

Started off at Lake Eacham, to take a swim test. Turns out that the lake is actually the crater of an extinct volcano, and has been filled entirely with rainwater, and has no river outlets. It's also something like 50 meters deep. So yeah, treading water in the middle of the lake, fun stuff. I was starting to imagine a giant squid rising from the depths and dragging us down into its inky lair. Oh well, at least it wouldn't be an octopus. Okay, just looking at that word typed on my screen, I'm shuddering. I'm seriously thinking of deleting it.

Anyways, at one point I was standing in the shallow end, and I felt this thing poking my ankle, I thought it was a rock at first, but then it stopped poking, and then came back in. Then I realized that A FISH WAS BITING MY ANKLE WTF. So now I have a small bite mark above my left ankle. I hope it scars over, best scar ever?

A few stops later we ended up at another extinct volcano, this one with an incredible overlook over a 80 meter deep hole, at the bottom of which was another lake. This crater was contained within a national park with some nice rainforest habitat, so we spent some time exploring it, and by exploring I actually mean playing frisbee on the lawn beside the parking lot. Come on, we see plenty of rainforest every day, what could possibly be new about this place?

And that's when we heard that a Southern Cassowary was standing next to the trail.

Okay, woah. Oh man.

This is THE bird that everyone comes to Australia to see. It is a national symbol, alongside the koala, kangaroo, platypus, and all that other stuff. It's critically endangered, it's beautiful, it's got character, it's the perfect storm of a bird. Did I mention that it's critically endangered? It's incredibly difficult to find, and hadn't been seen in this particular park for many many years. It was absolutely incredible luck that we happened to find one at all, much less standing right next to the trail, 50 meters from the parking lot. The whole group was ecstatic, taking dozens of pictures (I left my camera in the van again, I really need to make it a habit to carry it around), and generally just going wild. This was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that you're actually self-aware of as they're happening, and everyone realized it! I hate cliches, but it really was pretty magical. Previous groups have gone an entire semester without seeing a Cassowary in their prime lowland habitat. At this rate, we'll see one every week!

I did pay a price for the Cassowary though: my first leech bite! I got back into the van, and as we pulled out of the parking lot, I gradually became aware of some pain below my right ankle, so I looked down and noticed a leech right on my sock line. I ripped it off and threw it out the window, but it was too late, I was bleeding, and I didn't stop bleeding for the next five hours. Fun stuff! I ended up getting a bloody sock, Curt Schilling-style! And just as worth it, hah.

After a few more stops on the trip, I got back to the Centre. While all of my classmates are nice folks and fun to be around, they're also pretty fond of drinking, so most of them are spending the night at a pub in Yungaburra, the nearest town. It's just Blaine, Lauren, and I hanging around here. The three birders! We took advantage of the situation and went on another Blue-faced Parrot-finch expedition once we got back. This time, we got more lucky, and I got to show the other two their very first Blue-faced Parrot-finches. So in one day, the three of us managed to see the two most sought-after Australian birds. Simply amazing. Tomorrow, we'll see if our momentum can hold as we go on the 6 km hike to the nearby curtain fig tree, a local attraction.

Lingo update: Gas station attendant said G'day to me as I bought a coke. Later, receptionist at Herberton Mining Museum said G'day to our Poli Sci professor's wife. But no else. Hmm...

And I almost forgot, the Coca-cola I got came in this slick new slimline can, how new is this? Are they available in America? Also, Coca-cola tastes a lot better with cane sugar than with the artificial stuff they use in the US.

And last, it's time to update a few things. First, the bird list has been updated, I wasn't able to do so the past few days, but now it's fully up to date. 58 species?! I think it took me four or five years to get my last 58 species before this trip, so my mind is getting blown a continuous basis at this point, basically. I've added a link to the list on the sidebar as well. And now, on Evelyn's suggestion, I think I'll start a leech count too!

Leeches attached: ~30
Leeches who have feasted on my blood: 1
Fishes that have bitten my frickin ankle: 1
Rogers that are having the time of their life: 2. Oh wait. 1. Well, maybe there's more than one Roger having the time of his life, who knows. But there's at least one out there for sure.

And one last thing: I feel like such a dirty hippie when I sit on the veranda and play the acoustic guitar as the sun slowly sets over the rainforest. It's a good thing that I suck at the guitar and it's cloudy most of the time.

Crikey, Mates!

With so many new things to see and do every day, I really don't know what I should say here, and what I should choose to leave out. So a few random occurrences, even though I feel like I'm leaving out tons:

Yesterday the group spent the day exploring local towns, getting a feel for the area's attractions, general character, and history. I ended up in the large town of Atherton, notable among the students here as the location for some of the area's better pubs, and also the only local hospital where we can get treated for venomous snake bites. Yeah, if I ever goto Atherton again, let's hope that it's just to pick up minor school supplies. For some reason, Wal-mart is known here as Big W, but everything else is the same, including the slogan, the rollback smiley mascot, the employee uniforms, everything. Curious. Anyways, by far the best part of Atherton was the kebab restaurant across the street from the shire courthouse. It's often frequented by our Rainforest Ecology professor, who highly recommended it to us, so we stopped in. The food we're getting cooked at the Centre is really surprisingly great, I haven't had a disappointing meal so far, but man, this kebab place was incredible by any comparison. You can pick two sauces to include in your wrap, so being the spice-loving guy that I am, I got spicy chili and bbq sauce. It was...incredible. Everything about it. The quality of the pita bread, the flavor of the chicken, the quality of the ingredients, the contributions of the sauces...best wrap ever. So...I ordered another one, which is apparently unheard of and completely unprecedented, even according to our fanatical professor. But that first warp was just so good that I wanted to have another one, and try a different combination of sauces. So the second time, I picked tahini and garlic yogurt. Also amazing. Okay, so we'll adjust the previous statement: I will be in Atherton as often as possible, if only for the wraps at this kebab place. I guess I'll just happily munch on a wrap while my classmates get wasted at the bar or get saved from lethally venomous snakebites.

Speaking of snakes, we found a massive Scrub Python between Cabins 1 and 2 last night. And by massive, I mean that this snake was almost 10 feet long, and was a good deal thicker than my fist. This wasn't even a particularly large Scrub Python, but it was still really, really big. The guys all yelled and hollered, probably out of a combination of excitement and sheer terror, as the snake just sat in the road watching us. I'd left my camera back in the cabin, so I didn't get off any photos, by a few others did, so I hope those turn out well. After a five minute standoff on the road, the snake backed off and slithered off into the bush. We stood our ground and watch its entire length go by, refusing to believe that a snake could be so long. Thing was frickin' amazing. Imagine seeing that in the Crum Woods! This is why I went abroad.

I'm seeing fewer and fewer new birds, which was obviously expected, but two of my most recent pickups were quite memorable. The first was the Tooth-billed Bowerbird, a species only found in this sliver of Australian rainforest, and that's it, for the entire world! Bowerbirds are famous for their elaborate mating rituals, in which the males build 'courts' filled with various found objects in order to attract a mate. Probably the most famous example is the Satin Bowerboard, which will weave an elaborate den out of sticks and then pick a bright color to show off. For example, if the bowerbird picks the color orange, it will find every bright orange object in its territory and artistically place it around the court, it could be orchid flowers, fruits, or even human artifacts like bottle caps or pieces of plastic, all of it gets placed around the bowerbird's court. The Tooth-billed Bowerbird isn't quite as elaborate as the Satin, but its court is still fascinating, as it finds leaves that it likes and creates a mat of turned-over leaves. Anyways, I wasn't expecting to find a Tooth-billed Bowerbird, as they normally occupy their courts during the dry season, during which they stand on their favorite perch and sing for hours on end, making them among the easiest birds to find in the rainforest. However, we're now in the wet season, and during that time bowerbirds are nearly impossible to find. I got lucky. The Centre director Amanda, who's an avid birder as well (there's so many of us, yes!) told me a few days ago that she'd heard two Tooth-billed's singing at their courts along the Centre's access road (the road we hurtled along after the terrifying entrance). This is an extremely late date for them to be singing, but I hoped that I could catch them in the next few days before they disappeared for good. Yesterday morning I went out and checked, but no luck, there was nothing but Chowchillas singing at the two bowerbird sites. Today however, my luck came through. I heard a bird calling stridently from the vicinity of bowerbird court three. After fighting my way through some thick brush, I tried to get a better angle on the hidden singer, and after some searching, I finally found the Tooth-billed Bowerbird, sitting still on its favorite perch about four meters above its court. I watched it for a few good minutes, before it dropped down into the brush, and I looked at my watch and decided that it was time to head back to the main building for breakfast. But I'm so glad that I got a chance to see this unique bird, because I have no idea if it will still be there tomorrow, even.

The other great bird I got was the Blue-faced Parrot-finch, a rare denizen of the Australian rainforests. The species is also found in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, but because of the relative inaccessibility of these locations, many birders come to Australia to find the bird, and indeed Amanda's husband Alastair stated that it's probably the second-most sought after bird in the rainforest, after the Southern Cassowary of course. Fortunately, this is the best time of the year to find the parrot-finch, and even more fortunately, the bird can occasionally be found on the centre's property. Amanda and Alastair pointed me towards some of the more promising locations around the property, and I watched over them vigilantly over the next few days. This afternoon, with some free time available, Lauren (one of the other avid birders) and I decided to launch a Blue-faced Parrot-finch expedition, to find this beautiful but elusive bird. Lauren had stood at the abandoned orchard below the main building for an hour without any luck, but decided to keep her vigil there, while I split up and headed uphill for the nursery. After a few minutes sorting through the dozens of Red-browed Finches, I noticed a small green bird at the edge of the grass. It was light green, with a red tail, and that led me to believe that it must be an immature Blue-faced Parrot-finch or something. But I wasn't totally sure, so I watched the bird for another minute, collecting notes on its behavior and plumage. Suddenly, two adult Blue-faced Parrot-finches flew up into the branches around the first bird, and I pretty much flipped out. They were absolutely beautiful. Blindingly bright green, with a shocking blue face, and bright red tail, these were probably the most striking birds that I'd seen here yet, and that's with some pretty impressive competition to boot. I watched them for just a few seconds before sprinting downhill to find Lauren, hoping that the birds would stay in the same general area. The two of us ran back uphill to the nursery, but after standing around for ten minutes, it looked as if the birds had unfortunately moved on. We moved to the water tower at the top of the hill, where the flock of Red-browed Finches seemed to have moved, but there was no sign of the Blue-faced Parrot-finch, and then it started to rain, as it always seems to in the rainforest. It's an apt name for the habitat, most definitely. So while I'm glad that I got some brief, good looks at the bird, I'm a little disappointed that Lauren didn't get a look, I wonder if she even believes me! Hopefully we'll get to see the bird again, we'll certainly try our best.

The leech saga continues as well. There's an acoustic guitar in the common room, and yesterday morning I found two leeches on the guitar strings! They were just waiting for us, those devious 'suckers'. Oh wow, terrible joke. But yeah, the sight of two leeches attached onto guitar strings, waving around in the air seeking my blood, was completely surreal. Went on a hike this afternoon too, before the Blue-faced Parrot-finch expedition, and somehow two leeches ended up on my neck. I plucked them off before they feasted on my blood, but I really have no idea how they got there, but I wish I knew so that I could prevent it from happening again. Two of my friends here got leeches in their armpits, and on their stomachs, and they just don't have any idea how that could possibly happen. It's sort of ridiculous, and there's nothing you can do about it except cover up your body and stay vigilant, there's no leech repellent or anything. At least I haven't had to deal with too many mosquitoes.

By the way, I think I forgot to include my contact info in the last post. Email is probably the best way to do things, though I will warn that our internet is very spotty, we rely on a very slow satellite connection that doesn't always work. The phone on site doesn't accept incoming calls, but I can make international calls on the cheap, so let me know if that sounds good. As for letters, it actually looks like I'll be able to receive it quite promptly, it turns out that one of the staff members checks our post office boxes on his commute to work. It'll take around three weeks for me to receive anything, but if you really want to send me anything for whatever reason, try:

Roger Shaw
SFS Centre for Rainforest Studies
PO Box 141 Yungaburra
Queensland, 4884 Australia

Unfortunately that still means that I'll have trouble sending out mail back to you guys, but if you'd really really like to, let me know, and I'll try my best.

Oh, and pictures! They're on my computer, but the internet here is astonishingly slow. By the time this post finishes publishing on blogger, I'll probably be done with breakfast. I have a lot of free time later today and tomorrow, so I could try and just settle into the computer lab here to upload a few, but until then, more black text will just have to do.

Oh, and on the lingo front, 'tuckers' is the same as lunch, and I still haven't heard anyone say 'crikey'. Well, except by us, jokingly, when we saw that massive snake.

Say G'day!

Got into Australia on Monday morning, and since then I've basically been in a sense of constant awe. This is already one of the most unbelievable experiences of my life. But why don't we start a bit earlier.

Arriving at the gate in LA, I looked around to see if I could find other SFS kids, after all this was the group flight that most of us were supposed to be on. There were a few other college-aged kids, but none of them looked like the type to be heading off into the wilderness for a few months, but there were some open seats, so I sat with them anyways and opened up a book, scoping out the gate area every now and then to check out any new arrivals. Two hours went by. Finally, one of the kids piped, “Hey, are you SFS?” All six of us looked up at each other. Hah. Well, that turned out pretty well.

The flight into Cairns, the nearest city, was just stunning. We dropped below the clouds, and suddenly we were right over the Great Barrier Reef, and looking down we could see the reef's expansive beds of coral even from our high altitude, an unbelievable sight to behold. Wrestling our eyes upwards, we looked towards shore and saw pristine beaches straight up against lush mangrove forests, sloping up to a range of cloud-topped mountains. It kind of looked like one of those Corona Light beer commercials replete with the hammocks and everything, or like a scene from the latest swanky James Bond film. We hadn't even landed yet, but all of us agreed: this was already incredible.

So we were met at the airport by two of the Centre's staff, and began the drive out through suffocating heat. It's been a mild winter at home, but I'd forgotten that you could get this hot and humid sometimes. We drove through the city and then turned south on the highway, leaving the buildings behind and passing through vast fields of sugarcane on the coastal plain. One more turn, and we were on the Gilles highway, working our way up into the mountains. It started to pour down rain as we ascended, and so we labored through dozens of switchbacks and slope-hugging curves, rain pelting the windows, the silhouettes of a great forest in the distance. We continued on for almost two hours, and at one point the van slowed on the road a bit. Is there traffic ahead, or an animal in the road? No, because WE VEERED OFF THE ROAD STRAIGHT INTO A WALL OF TREES before suddenly finding the van hurtling through the thickets on a narrow road completely concealed from the highway, thick rainforest flying by the windows as we charged on with reckless abandon. None of us could stop laughing at the surrealness of the situation. We were in the rainforest now, for real!!! But more stunning to us, we had, seriously, veered STRAIGHT OFF THE HIGHWAY, INTO A WALL OF TREES. My life may have flashed before my eyes, and I may have said some goodbyes to loved ones, haha. To call that move a surprise would be a great, great understatement. I almost had a heart attack. Seriously, we veered off the road. Into a wall of trees. I cannot emphasize how terrifying this was, and how mind-blowing it was to suddenly find ourselves on a small path in the rainforest. It's not like we slowed to a stop, flicked on the turn signal, waited a few moments, and then slowly turned into the wall of trees. We just veered off the road, into a wall of trees. Three days later, I think the adrenaline is still pumping.

The School for Field Studies' Centre for Rainforest Studies, where I'll be spending the next three months, is just gorgeous. It really is right in the heart of the rainforest. Walking from our spacious cabins towards the main building for dinner, I couldn't help but notice dozens of birds flying between the trees, and every single one of them was a new species. My binoculars have been on fire the past few days, and with every new bird, I just cannot contain my excitement. My classmates probably think I'm somewhat crazy. Well, I probably am, I think that's pretty clear at this point. But hey, there's two more avid birders here too! So I'm not even the only crazy one!

Oh, and the bathrooms are not attached to the cabins, they're a good walk down the trail, so speaking of unique experiences, I woke at 5 yesterday morning to get an early shower and find some birds at sunrise. So I headed down for my shower, flashlight in hand because it was still pitch black outside. The cicadas were so loud that it sounded like a fire alarm, nocturnal frogs, geckos, and other mysterious creatures screamed every few moments, and large animals trampled somewhere in the underbrush. Imagine hearing all that in pitch black darkness, walking down a muddy trail in the middle of the tropical rainforest. All at once, it was terrifying, surreal, and absolutely beautiful. Later, I headed for the main building, still under the cover of darkness, and the trail from my cabin to the building is a hairline trail on the side of a hill, with a precipitous drop to the left. I did this again under total darkness, with the birds beginning to wake and screaming at the arriving dawn. When the sun finally did rise, and I worked my way through dozens of new species flashing before my eyes every minute, and it was absolutely magical.

I'm not even going to try and give a chronological summary of what's been going on, so here's just a few scattered highlights from the past few days.

We went on a 6 km hike this afternoon in our free time, so I ran to my cabin to grab my hiking books. Sprinting down narrow rainforest trails, I seriously felt like Indiana Jones or something. It's so much fun.

I haven't actually heard anybody say “G'day, mate!” I've heard 'mate' quite a bit; I think I've actually heard it from every native Australian I've encountered (including the Customs officer at Immigration, which was pretty sweet). However, I've only heard G'day once, from the pilot on our flight from Brisbane to Cairns. Oh, and also my calling card is from a company called Say G'day! (the exclamation point is part of the name, but it also signifies my excitement, how convenient!) .The Centre's phone does not accept incoming calls, but I can call people very very cheaply, so lemme know if you wanna talk! The only other interesting piece of lingo I've picked up is 'no wuckers', which is roughly analogous to 'no worries', which Australians use quite a bit as well.

Professor Hiebert Burch was right, there are so..many...leeches. The group went on the property's 2 km-long Site Trail, and by the end all of us had picked off about twenty leeches or so. The best thing about leeches is that while they're feeding on your blood, they introduce anticoagulants to stop it from clotting, so if a leech has fully engorged itself, the bleeding just will not stop for so, so long. People have been bitten, and there's been blood everywhere...man, it's not pleasant, haha. Fortunately I haven't gotten to that stage yet, I've managed to pick off all the leeches that have attached to me, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I provide a blood meal for a hungry leech. I can't wait! Actually, I think I can, hah.

One of my cabinmates spent a few weeks in the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil last month, and he's told us that we should expect our clothes to either be dry, or to be clean, but not both. So far, that seems completely accurate.

One of the girls brought a banjo from home. Yeah. We've been rockin' it pretty hard.

I'll see if I can remember more later. But so far anyways, this has been plain amazing. Then again, I haven't started classes yet, and looking at the syllabus, this may actually be quite intensive, so I won't have as much time to explore for myself. But if the classes are quality enough, I won't have any complaints about that. And that's it for now. I have a few photos on my camera, but I haven't had time to move them onto my computer yet, but I'll definitely post some later. Until then, I hope everyone else is doing well! Rock on.

Devil's Sink Hole

Hiked around 10 miles through Eno River State Park with Marissa and Meg yesterday, and had a total blast. The excursion's been in the planning stages for weeks now, but the weather foiled us last week, and so we scrambled to work out the details at the last minute for this week.

After some missed voicemails, late night emails, and early morning phone calls, the three of us finally managed to meet at Meg's amazing house on Thursday morning, ready to go. It was amusedly noted that her street number isn't located anywhere on the house, causing Marissa to drive by the window three times, completely confused and lost, before Meg and her sister finally took notice and reeled her in to the correct house. Just before we left for the Eno, someone stated that they were glad this hike was happening, because all of us were beginning to get a little bored at home. Laughing, I said that I was way, way past that stage already. Nothing like a good hike to bring me back to sanity.





We decided to try out the Cox Mountain Trail, a 4-mile loop through the heart of the park that climbed to the summit of the eponymous mountain, hopefully providing good panoramic views of the surrounding country. On the way to the trailhead, we crossed a nice suspension bridge spanning the Eno River, chuckling nervously as the bridge bounced and swayed, and somehow spotted a Great Blue Heron on the bank upriver as well. There was also a sign nailed up on one of the bridge supports, noting the level of the Eno after Hurricane Fran hit in 1996. The sign was probably a good 15 feet above the current level of the river, and taking into account the vast floodplain of the Eno, that must have been a massive flood. The frightening thing is, after witnessing the destruction Fran caused in the area, I wasn't really surprised at all. Later on in the day, all three of us reflected on the night Fran hit and its aftermath; it really was an experience that binded North Carolinians together. Everyone remembers where they were that night, and what they did to get through the week. I really can't fathom how the survivors of Katrina or Andrew must feel.

Anyways, we continued on the trail, and soon found ourselves laboring up the steep climbs of Cox Mountain. We paused about halfway up, to catch our breath, to soak up the great view, and to watch a Turkey Vulture soaring low over the trees. Soon, we began to notice other birds in the area too: I spotted a female Eastern Bluebird that unfortunately disappeared before Meg could locate it in the binoculars, and then we all got decent looks at a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker foraging on a tree downslope.



The rest of the climb was substantially easier, and the crest of the hill was relatively anticlimactic, with the view obscured by dense stands of trees, and so we continued down the other side. A beautiful creek flowed into the Eno on the other side of the mountain. Meg wondered aloud: If I was a salamander, which rock would I be hiding under? She carefully turned over a promising rock, and waited a few minutes for the sediment to settle, but no luck. We followed the river downstream for a while, noting that the puddles and rain pools had frozen over on the surface, a sight I'd forgotten about during this unusually mild winter. We also passed a maple marked by a beaver attack, some beautiful lichen growing on a tree, and a Wild Ginger plant with a sweet scent, before we paused to chuckle at a sign noting a Primitive Campsite ahead.

At this point, we unfolded the Trail Map to mark our progress along the loop, when I noticed something curious on the edge of the map. About three miles upstream from our stopping point, an arrow marked the location of Devil's Sink Hole. No trails led to the sinkhole. No description of the sinkhole appeared in any of the park brochures. None of us had any idea what it could possibly be. So of course, we had to investigate, and the only way we could do that would be bushwhacking along the riverbank for miles past the trail's end. Of course, the three of us were completely stoked for this adventure.



Where the trail veered away from the river and back up Cox Mountain, the three of us exchanged glances, drew in some breath, and charged into the brush, Meg blazing the trail in front. And so we trekked on through the abundant reeds and rushes along the riverbank for several miles, before pausing a half mile before the sink hole, to watch a kettle of vultures soaring above a powerline cut. We watched in fascination as the kettle of vultures grew, and suddenly I noticed that among the Turkey Vultures were a few of the locally uncommon Black Vulture. Eventually, there were more Black than Turkey Vultures, and they all circled low over the cut before soaring upstream, perhaps to the Devil's Sink Hole, we joked.

From here, the bank suddenly grew extremely steep in places, forcing us to either to climb over rock cliff faces (my stubborn, macho approach), or to go around the steep spurs by climbing the adjacent ridges (probably the smarter approach, haha). At the final bend in the river before the Devil's Sink Hole, seeing some intimidating steep sections ahead, we paused on a rockfall for lunch; I tore into a Chick-fil-a Chicken Biscuit with gusto as more vultures circled overhead, and I sighted a small Winter Wren flitting around the opposite shore.



The Devil's Sink Hole threw some more obstacles in our way as we approached, as we carefully negotiated some more steep banks, with one massive fallen log on a steep embankment causing particularly awkward problems for us. A loud slap on the water was heard, and Meg and I agreed that it may have been a beaver, which was pretty cool. Once we finally got past those rocky sections, we found a creek that had to be forded, and spent a few moments trying to find a way to cross. Marissa and I ended up leaping onto a fallen log in the middle of the creek and using that as a springboard to reach the opposite shore, while Meg managed to tightrope on a long log spanning the creek. We fought our way through more dense stands of reeds, before houses began to appear on the other shore, indicating that we had probably reached the edge of the park boundaries.

I pulled out the GPS unit, which is supposed to be used just for driving purposes, to check on our exact location. I was half expecting for it to give me driving directions to the nearest Chinese restaurant or something, but it was more reserved than that, and its map showed us that we'd passed the Devil's Sink Hole by several hundred yards. The three of us then began our return journey, looking for any sign of the sink hole. Sadly we found none, this stretch of the Eno looked like any other, and we continued the arduous trek back to Marissa's car, stationed at the park headquarters four miles away. In the woods around the supposed sink hole, we found a nice Eastern Phoebe, and then all three of us got spectacular looks at another sapsucker.



Before we joined up with the Cox Mountain trail again, there was another small creek to ford, which we had no trouble with on the journey up. This time, as I stepped onto the bank of the creek's edge, my feet suddenly slid on the slippery mud, and I fell on my side right into the creek! Panicking, I quickly got myself up and tried to get up the opposite bank...but oh man, it was completely muddy too, and I slid back into the creek! I tried to get back up to where Marissa and Meg were laughing, only to find that the entire bank I'd just fallen down was muddy. So I tried once again to get back up the opposite bank, but this entire shore was muddy too! So basically I was stuck in this u-shaped muddy hole, with my feet's skidmarks on either side, as I stood laughing, hopelessly stuck between unscalable riverbanks, as the creek flowed around my cold toes. Meg, ever kind and helpful, eventually lent me a hand as I tried to find enough momentum to push myself up the bank, getting myself extremely muddy in the process. Marissa had slipped earlier, and the two of us basically looked like we'd taken a nap in the swamp and sunk a foot or two as we slept, haha. Alas, Meg escaped our fate, the lucky girl. Clearly, she knew what she was doing.

Finally, we all got back to the park headquarters, and decided to ask the park rangers about the Devil's Sink Hole. Two of them had no answer. The third ranger we came across told us, "Oh yeah, you won't be able to see anything. It's just this deep spot in the river. I forget the history behind it, and why it's called that, but yeah it's just a deep part of the river, you really can't see it." Oh well, the day's adventures were worthwhile on their own qualities, we all agreed. I told Marissa that it certainly beat sitting at the computer all day checking Facebook, a comment that struck both of us a little too close to home, haha, so once again Facebook-less Meg came out with a clean record, clearly she knows what she's doing. We drove back to Meg's house, rocking The White Album all the way down, before we said our goodbyes, and I drove back home through early rush hour traffic, grabbing a Blackberry Carolina Concrete from the esteemed Goodberry's just before reaching home, where I took a quick shower, and collapsed on the nearest sofa, falling into a deep nap, awoken only by the tantalizing smells of Mongolian Beef emerging from the kitchen. What a great adventure.



What a week, really. I had an incredible time this past weekend in Boston with Joanna, the memories of which I'll have to hold onto for the next four months as I head into the Australian rainforest. The fact that I'm going abroad really hasn't sunk in yet, and probably won't until a week into the program when it's too late to start freaking out, haha, so for now, I'm just blissfully wrapping up the last of my preparations and beginning to pack. I'll enjoy the experience I'm sure, but for now I'm enjoying all the sweet tea that North Carolina has to offer, as well as any inkling of civilized society that I can encounter.


Links gathered before the great adventures:

• The British mail system delivered a letter with no address, only a vague map. Actually, it turns out that others have done the same, on purpose even.
• A new restaurant has opened in Beijing, in which you sit in total darkness while eating your food, the idea being that the loss of your visual sense will elevate your other senses, including taste. The waiters and waitresses walk around with night vision goggles to see what they're doing. Amazing.
• There's a handful of underwater hotels already, but now Dubai is building an underwater luxury hotel. I would love to visit Dubai at some point, it just seems like such an absurdly ridiculous spot at the moment.
• The New Year's fireworks in Taipei were quite spectacular.
• After his infamous World Cup headbutt, Zinedine Zidane retired, but he's not totally done with soccer, here's some footage of him playing a pickup game with friends, and absolutely schooling everyone. Fantastic.
• True Hoop does some research on how NBA stars may influence baby names. How common of a name is Shaquille these days, for example?
• A quick and easy way to screw up any webpage, and make things spin. Bizarre, it's like surfing the internet on acid!
• Find out how to beat that arcade game where you pick things up with that giant claw.
• And finally, in the spirit of all this linking, Jason Kottke lists his favorite links of 2006. If you're bored, this should occupy you for a while.
  

You Should've Been a Clerk

Man, this past week.

It wasn't really anything to do with finals. Granted, finals this semester were about 89 times tougher than any finals I've had before, but at least I saw that train wreck coming months ago, and there wasn't much I could do about it. Well, maybe there was, but I wasn't willing to do anything that early, haha.

It's more about the end of a semester, with the next semester being abroad, and the necessary good byes and good lucks. Friends I won't see for nine months, seniors I may never see ever again, professors to thank. Add in the unexpected arrival of a wonderful romance, and I've been walking around campus for a week with a bleeding heart, completely unlike my usual self. There were so many acquaintances who weren't aware that I was going abroad, and who told me to have a nice break, and I just didn't have any heart left to tell them I'd be away. So yeah, if anyone tried to talk with me in the past week about the Iverson trade to Denver, or that Silent Shout album on Pitchfork's list, and you got some noncommittal grunt or whimper, I apologize, and now you know why I've been in that state. We'll talk later.

Now I've settled in at home, and Swarthmore is beginning to recede into the back of my memory; I'm not really the type to really dwell on such things. For some reason, I immediately set up my workspace in the sunroom, an area of the house I've never used in my entire life. Maybe it's because the large windows and views of the woods remind me of Hallowell (I just noticed a Red-shouldered Hawk soaring above the pines, I thought I'd heard it screaming earlier...), but that never entered my conscious thought.

What I have noticed, however, is that for some reason, I feel like a completely different person on this return home. My old computer room seems totally unappealing; I don't think I've spent more than 10 seconds in that room, where I used to spend the vast majority of the day; a move to the sunroom made sense then, as a sort of really lame New Beginning. It would probably be a foolish mistake to try and pinpoint exactly why I feel differently, but it must be a culmination of everything that's happened in the past week, the past month, and/or the past semester. Best semester ever? You could certainly make the case. I had a blast.

But yeah, it's nice to be home. I look out these windows, and I know this yard like the back of my hand. It strikes me that I've always referred to the small creek that runs through the back as, simply, The Creek. I looked up the actual official name of the creek many years ago, but I never remembered it. It's always been The Creek to me, and it always will be. Meanwhile, my dad is either reading the newspaper, watching football, or watching incomprehensible kung fu movies, and my mom is either getting some work done, doing Sudoku puzzles, or getting emotional over Korean soap operas. Ah, home.

But now that I'm home, let's catch up on a few things.

First, the Iverson trade.



I don't think anyone can make a good argument in Philadelphia's favor here. You traded away a transcendent superstar, an icon of the city, a beloved rallying point for the fans. In exchange, let's see what you got.

Andre Miller, a perennially underachieving point guard who's jumped from team to team over the years, probably indicative of the fact that he's a clubhouse tumor that nobody wants to work with, talented or not.

I didn't even realize Joe Smith was still in the league. Was he really the top overall pick in the draft? He was fairly good in his prime, but these days, I'm sure he'll grab a few rebounds before heading to the bench with a bad back.

Two draft picks? Remember that a draft pick doesn't necessarily turn into a young stud superstar. The Sixers could use their pick on some like, say, Tyler Hansborough, as much as it pains me to say. The kid's good at the college level, but I can only envision him being completely bewildered at the professional level. He hasn't looked all that good this year anyways, while Brandan Wright has literally looked unstoppable. If I wanted to rely on someone in the post in crunch time, I'd goto Wright, not Hansborough at this point. Anyways, I just don't see how the Sixers can win with this trade. They'll botch the draft picks, and sign some decrepit veteran with their expiring contract money. For all that, they lost their transcendent superstar.

Meanwhile, a lot of ink has already been spilled on Iverson's role in Denver. Bijan Bayne wrote a nice article on the topic at nbadraft.net (best website of all time?), basically showing that it's extremely difficult to accommodate two superstars on one team. They either must have complementary roles (think Stockton and Malone) or they must both be unselfish team players (think Duncan and Robinson). I love how I can just prattle off last names, and every basketball fan knows exactly who I'm talking about, as if they're kings or gods of some sort, of basketball I suppose. In any case, it's difficult to create those situations, and more often than not, the experiment fails. That'll probably be the case here in Denver, as Iverson and Anthony play very similar scoring roles, and since they're competing for the same limited resources (the ball, shots, attention), both economic and ecological analysis will show that the two cannot successfully coexist.



Also, I'm watching the Falcons-Panthers game, and I can't stop laughing at the Panthers' strategy on third down. They're taking quarterback Chris Weinke completely off the field, and snapping the ball directly to runningback DeAngelo Williams. Why didn't we think of this earlier? Wienke has been the most incompetent quarterback that I have ever witnessed, and the Falcons have a horrendous run defense. How do the Falcons not see this coming? At this point, the Panthers have run the play 8 times, and picked up the first down 7 of those times. You know the Panthers are going to run, how do you not stop it. It's not like DeShaun Foster is actually any good, because he's not. Meanwhile, this has got to be so demoralizing for Weinke. Yeah, we don't even need you on the field for these critical plays, even though you're supposed to be the centerpiece of our offense. Why is he even on the field. If he's just going to hand the ball off, bring in Basanez to at least give some threat of the pass. I'm so sad that the Panthers have slowly crumbled into this lowly state.
Okay, the game just ended, and basically we won by taking time off the clock and relying on our defense. Wienke completed four passes, for 32 yards. Sorry, but we've gotta bench this kid. If we don't have any confidence in him, why even bother?



As for Silent Shout, why don't we leave that for another day.

Links for today:

• True Hoop takes a good look at the psyche of Allen Iverson, and what makes him tick as a basketball player. Great read.
• Another transcendent basketball superstar, Renaldo Balkman, has his own Myspace page. Endless lols.
• All the slingshots I made as a kid were way too flimsy, I'd love to have my hands on this pro Jack Spade Sling Shot.
• Someone accidentally put their baby through the airport's x-ray machine. Oops. Man, I can't even joke about this, what a terrible thing to have happen.
• Google has published their year-end Zeitgeist, featuring the most popular searches of the year and lot's of other cool stats.
• Not a link, but Steven Jackson just scored a game-winning touchdown in overtime, on a 21-yd run, giving him 250 total yards and two touchdowns on the game. Absolute monster. I still can't believe that I managed to trade away Cadillac Williams to get him in my fantasy league. Sorry, I'm just really pleased, and had to throw that out there.
• Here's a nice article on the most dangerous roads in the world. Unreal.
• I hope everyone has a great holiday season, keep in touch for realz, we gotta be trill. Missing everyone tons...
  

Electricity in the Cities

Cities fascinate me; it's probably the result of growing up in suburban North Carolina. Philadelphia was a primary reason I chose to come to Swarthmore, the school provided an idyllic and tranquil suburban campus with easy access to the benefits of a large city. Those benefits have become relatively trivial for me, I basically only go into the city to buy records or to watch arthouse films now, but it's nice to have those opportunities at least, certainly better than going to some remote school such as Williams.

Probably my favorite part of the cities is the public transportation. Even as a young kid, I was always fascinated by trains, subways, buses, and other forms of transport; on visits to Washington DC, I would want to ride to subway just for fun, with no particular destination in mind. On the train ride into Philadelphia this morning, I started to wonder what drove that interest. What made a train so radically different from a car? I think it may have something to do with the human aspect; for some reason I love the idea of riding a cold, soulless machine that will transport me across a city. Obviously that's not entirely accurate, as there have to be brakemen, engineers, conductors, and track operators to ensure that the train runs along smoothly. But that human element is certainly far more removed on a train than in a car. That still doesn't entirely answer my question of why I like public transportation, specifically why I would prefer getting a ride from a piece of machinery rather than from a human, but it's a start. Doesn't entirely explain buses either, but I will admit that I vastly prefer subways and trains to buses. I know, it makes no sense.



I guess the other aspect of cities I really enjoy is the people-watching. There really aren't enough characters in the suburbs, everyone is just a typical middle-class family working office jobs and sending their kids to school, just like in the '50s. When you venture into the downtown portions of the cities in my area, all that's really there are businessmen and city government workers. I feel like in the South, all the true characters ride around in the rural areas, waving their confederate flags and hunting quail, whereas in the North all the characters are in the city, with a much higher concentration and density.

Just getting off the train at Market East Station, a middle-school aged kid strode up the stairs with a massive mohawk and at least a dozen chains jangling from various articles of clothing and piercings on his body, accompanied by his relatively normal-looking parents. A white-haired 60-year old man walked by, with blue jeans hiked up all the way, and a vintage black Ramones t-shirt. A pair of 30-year old twins wearing identical Sufjan Stevens shirts passed me on the street. Those are sights that I would never dream of witnessing down in North Carolina, but do denizens of the northern cities become accustomed to such encounters? I'm incredulous that it could even be a possibility. At AKA Music, my favorite record shop in the world, the cashier was having trouble swiping my debit card through his machine, and he began to grow increasingly frustrated. The swipes became faster, harder, stronger, and he seemed to become genuinely furious at my card. On the final two swipes, he slammed the card through the machine so hard that it flew out of his hand and calmly fluttered back behind the counter. For some reason, it finally worked on the last try. I feel like this would never happen in North Carolina, there's just too much patience and Southern hospitality, and so I was fascinated by the display put on by this indie record store clerk.



As usual, I came into the city this weekend with the intent of purchasing records, not for myself this time around, but for the radio station, which didn't receive a few crucial records from their respective labels over the summer. That objective was quickly accomplished, and so I killed time by browsing the used bins to find some little gems for myself. For some reason, today was an unbelievably exceptional day in the used bin, and somehow I emerged with eleven albums, with an average cost of around five dollars per record. My mom would probably be thrilled to learn that I was saving so much money, but really I'm just cheap. If a three hundred dollar box set was on sale for thirty bucks, I probably wouldn't take it. I'm more concerned about the final price than I am about the discount.

Here's what I scored for myself:

• Elvis Costello - My Aim is True | 4.99 | retail: 18.98 |74% savings
  
• Decemberists - The Tain EP | 5.99 | r: 9.99 | 40%
  
• Bob Dylan - Bringing it All Back Home | 2.99 | r: 11.98 | 75%
  
• Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde | 8.99 | r: 13.98 | 36%
  
• Pavement - Spit on a Stranger EP | 0.99 | r: out of print
  
• R.E.M. - Out of Time | 0.99 | r: 13.98 | 93%
  
• R.E.M. - Automatic for the People | 0.99 | r: 13.98 | 93%
  
• Secret Mommy - Hawaii 5.0 EP | 0.99 | r: 8.50 | 88%
  
• Talking Heads - Fear of Music (DualDisc) | 8.99 | unavailable outside of boxset
  
• Talking Heads - Remain in Light (DualDisc) | 8.99 | unavailable outside of boxset
• Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues (DualDisc) | 8.99 | unavailable outside of boxset

So far, the Secret Mommy EP was pretty aimless and forgettable, My Aim is True was pretty derivative and wasn't as catchy as I expected (I'm sure that opinion will change in time), while Bringing it All Back Home is completely destroying me, it's not as cohesive and consistent as Blonde on Blonde but some of the songs are a lot better, 'Bob Dylan's 115th Dream' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man' (obviously) in particular. I have to say that I'm incredibly excited about the Talking Heads purchases, I had kinda planned on slowly purchasing each album one by one in chronological order, but I couldn't pass up this kind of deal. I will be spending a lot of quality time with these records.



Back on campus, Meg was clever and nice enough to post a Crum Woods Sightings Board outside the Bio department office, enabling college students and staff to share any cool experiences in the Crum. Professor Hiebert Burch sighted a Bald Eagle soaring behind Martin one evening, which was unbelievable.

Not to be outdone, I climbed up onto the Parrish fire escape the next morning, trying to catch the peak of Broad-winged Hawk migration. Over a thousand had been seen in Media the day before, so I felt like my chances were pretty good. Apparently I forgot that hawks require warm thermals to soar in the air, and said thermals don't form until much later in the day as the temperature rises, so I didn't see any hawks that morning. Looking at my watch, I had about 20 minutes until my Genetics test, so I thought I'd head over to the Science Center Coffee Bar, grab a cup of coffee, and sit down for the exam.

And that's when I discovered that the fire escape door didn't have a handle on the outside. So I was locked on the fire escape.

I panicked. I was trapped sixty feet in the air, with no escape routes, with an important test in 20 minutes, with no cellphone, and nobody inside to open the door for me. I thought about punching through a window and scrambling back in. I tried picking the doorlock, but even then I had no way of actually opening it, so no luck. I thought about ramming through the door with brute force. I even briefly considered climbing down the side of the building, Spiderman-style. The birds flying all around me mocked me with their wings. I had a test in 10 minutes, and I was completely trapped. Finally, I noticed a woman walking on the ground far below, so I yelled to try and capture her attention. She looked up, so I explained my situation. She didn't respond at all, just slowly walked into the building. My only hope, and it's gone! I have a test in 10 minutes! #$#)@!)(#@%$#@()!!!!!!!1!!!!1111

Fortunately, I heard the elevator doors open, and a few seconds later the woman emerged through the fire escape door and let me back in. I thanked her profusely, but she seemed sleepy and utterly confused as to what I was doing on a fire escape so early in the morning, so I thanked her one last time and ran to the lecture hall for my test. Which I felt I did pretty well on, thankfully, but it was an absolutely bizarre way to start the day. If I ever go up there again, and that's a big if, I'll certainly remember to prop the door open.



Later that afternoon, I ventured into Crum Meadow for one final attempt at catching some hawks. All I saw was a lone juvenile Red-tailed, but as I started to head back I saw a small gray bird foraging in the knotweed. Snapping it into my binoculars, it was immediately apparent that this was a flycatcher, just based on structure and habits. But what kind of flycatcher?

I ruled out the tyrant flycatchers and Myiarchus flycatchers by size and shape. I ruled out Eastern Phoebe, as it had an incredibly bold eyering, wingbars, and the wing feathers were well-defined. I ruled out Eastern Wood-Pewee, as there was no dark vest on its chest, only a faint yellow wash on the belly, and a white breast.

So that left me with the Empidonax flycatchers. This was a very gray bird, with a short bill, ruling out the common Acadian Flycatcher and the possibility of Yellow-bellied Flycatcher. That left Willow/Alder, and Least Flycatchers. Again, I was struck by the incredibly bold eyering, the small bill, and the flat head. That led me to Least Flycatcher, a life bird, and a bird that doesn't even appear on the offical Crum Woods checklist! Strangely, it is mentioned in Pulcinella's Delaware County guide as occuring in the Meadow during migration, but that possibility, along with many others, are contested by the school's observational records. Despite this, I'm about 95% sure that this was a Least Flycatcher, an exciting finding to be sure.



Combine all this with my recently sprained ankle, suffered during a soccer exercise, and last night's successful WSRN party, and we've got an unusually eventful week for me. But I'm not one for drama, so here's to hoping that the next few weeks bring more tranquility, more peace, and less work.



But, more links:

• Get an inflatable iceberg for your swimming pool. It sounds pretty dumb, but for some reason I really want to see one.
• Google Maps uncovers a monstrously enormous killer insect.
• The absolutely hysterical Goosebumps blog delivers once again with its review of #24: Phantom of the Auditorium. This is probably the most hilarious blog in existence, in my opinion, you should read this even if you've never read Goosebumps before.
• The equally amazing Cockeyed provides a brilliant photo series from a recent barbecue.
  
• Overview of the 2006 MacArthur "genius" grant recipients.
• For some reason, I'm Asian, but I can't twirl a pen to save my life. This video illustrates the heights that I must aspire towards.
• Before my injury, we were imitating this ridiculous Xabi Alonso goal that was scored last week.
• Sometimes, I really lose all confidence in the concept of democracy.
• Slate does a good job explaining why I hate Zach Braff.
• SquidSoap, one of those mind-bogglingly brilliant inventions that comes along every now and then.
• Hook your fishes up with a pretty hott crib. You can try it outdoors too!
• The art of going to concerts alone, perfectly encapsulated. Hilarious because it strikes a little too close to home, haha.