El Bosque de Fray Jorge

On our last afternoon, Tina, Morgan, and I finally hiked up to the forest fragments

There are just a couple of areas on top of the mountains by the coast where there are forests like those in the South of Chile- very different from the semi-arid landscape we were used to working in!

They get the perfect combination of cloud and rain to sustain them

The vegetation was so different from just down the mountain!

And who knew- we were so close to the ocean the whole time we were in a desert!

We met Juan when he was finishing up his work for the morning

And he explained a lot about the forest and the plants. He's worked in this park for 20 years!

We took a beautiful path back to the cabin, through fields of wildflowers with cactus. Bizarre.

And of course, our last day wouldn't be complete without another guanaco sighting!

Fray Jorge- in Photos

Many, many sunrises in the field

One of our favorite things to do was pull cactus spines out of our hiking boots with pliers. Not even joking.

Sad Cactus

We had to drive to the city of La Serena, about 1.5 hrs away, for groceries every few days (there was no refrigeration in the cabin, so everything that needed to stay cold went in the cupboard). In La Serena we discovered a fantastic supermarket called Jumbo. On our first visit, these girls were giving out free samples of Miller Genuine Draft. And clearly dressed up like Uncle Sam and an albino Statue of Liberty. Oh, also at Jumbo, we would buy 2 kilos of cheese to last us 5 days. That's about 4.5 pounds of cheese. It was amazing.

After grocery shopping we went to dinner and the beach!

Sometimes in the cabin we would have Spanish lessons with Professor Raul. Other times we would have Cafe Literario (book club) where we read out loud and discussed Martin Rivas (the first novel written in Chile and a super popular period TV show. We watch it whenever we can on our one channel, and decided to all buy the book for when we were out of TV range)

When the girls did night telemetry, the boys had to cook dinner. Sometimes we came home to candle light and wine! Usually we wrote "recetas" on the whiteboard to make sure there would also be something edible...

This is why there are fragments of cloud forest!

The bathtub outside of our cabin (un baño al fresco). One day there were other researchers coming to the park, and as we drove up to our cabin I remarked "Oh- there's a truck in our driveway." And a second later "OH- there's a man in our bathtub!" Thus, Bañera Juan got his nickname (amongst ourselves).

This was the day the muffler fell off the truck...

Luckily we got it reattached before the 6 hour drive back to Santiago. I don't think it would have fit very well. Chao Fray Jorge!

Guanaco Ataque!

In addition to adorable small mammals, Chile is home to some pretty awesome large ones as well! Most people have heard of llamas and alpacas, but their wild relatives, guanacos, still roam parts of South America. There are two families of them in Fray Jorge and we were really hoping to catch a glimpse of one of them. We spotted them on a hill a ways away one morning and felt really lucky. Little did we know...Morgan's awesome attack picture

Guanaco ataque! We were all on the hill doing telemetry one day, and a guanaco ran through our valley! It was so cool! We were just getting over how exciting it was, when the guanaco reappeared over the ridge in front of us, followed by another one- who was chasing it! They raced back through the valley, heading directly at us. I was standing with Morgan and Loren, and we all thought we were actually going to get run over. Which would have been terrible, but also kind of awesome! At the last minute, the guanacos changed their course and thundered past us.

As if this wasn't enough excitement, maybe half an hour later I spotted one guanaco about 15m from where Morgan and I were standing. It was near a big dead cactus looking into the valley behind us. It reared up twice, then trotted back through our degu valley and out of sight. Crazy guanacos!


After this we continued seeing guanacos pretty often, sometimes alone and sometimes a whole group. We liked to joke that the guanacos were stalking us and were going to attack, and the night before Tina, Morgan, and I spent the day alone in the field we were having our usual laughs about guanaco attacks, when Juan decided to tell us stories about the rogue guanaco that roamed the park years ago. This young male would sneak up on unsuspecting tourists and bite them or charge them! All of a sudden, guanaco attacks were not quite so funny to us. Luckily, we made it out of the park unscathed. Sneaky guanacos!

Abrocoma Amor

Morgan, me and Tina are thiiiiiiis excited!

In Fray Jorge I found, hands down, the new love of my life. It's name is Abrocoma, it has giant ears, nubby toes, and it loves to cuddle.

Abrocoma was cleaning his face while I was holding him!

From the first day in the cabin Tina, Morgan, and I became obsessed with seeing an abrocoma. These rodents are usually active at night, were supposed to be very docile (tranquilo), bigger than degus, and very sweet. We talked about abrocomas all of the time, went outside at night and peered under the porch in search of them, and joked about "accidentally" setting traps to see if we could get one. I even got nicknamed "Abrocoma" because I have a furry hat I wear when it is really cold.

LOVE

One morning we were trapping at a new site and- best thing ever! There was an abrocoma in one of the traps I was checking!!! We abandoned the degus and Tina, Morgan, and I fawned over the little guy for about an hour. After five thousand photos, a lot of cuddles and a couple of kisses, I had to resist the urge to put him in my pocket and we let him go back to his home. Best wild animal ever!!

Goodbye abrocoma. You are the best!!

So... you do WHAT in Chile??

So I understand that what I am doing out here in Chile is somewhat of a mystery to most of my friends and family back home. "Chasing degus" doesn't really conjure up a full mental image for most people, so I'll explain some of the finer points of degu-poking just so we are all on the same page.

The Degu Crew. Morgan, Raúl, Tina, Loren, Me

I am helping study the home range of degus- where they go, who they hang out with, who they sleep with (haha) day and night. We do this by putting little radio collars on the animals and following them with telemetry- during the day we locate them once an hour, 6-8 hours a day, for 6-12 days.
The first step is to catch a bunch of animals and collar them. We use wire traps and bait them with oats. When the animals walk in they step on a treadle that shuts the door behind them, and then we walk around and check the traps every few hours. We take them out of the traps, determine the sex, reproductive status, weight, and snip a bit of the ear off to both mark that we have caught them before and for genetic analysis (at Rinconada, the field site near Santiago, the animals have ear tags with ID numbers on them).

Tina with a fat lady-degu in a trap

Animals that were over 150g were big enough to be collared, which took about 4 people to successfully do! Someone holds the animal, another person holds the paws so they don't get stuck in the collar while it is being fitted, another person puts the collar on, someone pulls the ends of the wire to tighten it, another person crimps the wires once it is the proper size, and then the ends are trimmed. We put plastic tubing around the wire collars so they don't rub the animals' necks. When we are done with all this, they look like little remote control degus with their antennas sticking up!!

Poor little degu getting fitted with a radio collar!

The radio collars emit a particular frequency, and so using 2 teams with antennas and receivers we search for the beeps until we can get a good fix on their location. Then we take a compass reading of the position and record it. We take GPS coordinates of our radio towers, and Morgan is plugging all the data into a program now which will tell us, based on the GPS position and compass readings, where the animal was at that moment in time. With 40+ points, you can get a good sense of how far an animal travels.

Morgan with the radio tower. She was the degu finder, I was the compass reader.

To figure out where they sleep at night, we use a single hand antenna attached to a receiver and walk around in the dark, pointing it at bushes until we find the strongest beep. It really is as bizarre as it sounds!! Some animals sleep in the same burrow system every night and are really easy to find, but other ones move around a whole lot and we have to tromp around the field site for a while to find them.

Me, Tina, and Morgan finishing up night telemetry!

Finally when we are done with telemetry, we have to set traps again and catch the animals with collars so we can cut the collars off. And that's it! No more robo-degus!Morgan and Raúl removing a radio collar