The Countdown

October 16, 2010

Cuddling a baby degu!

I'm not sure when I started measuring the time I had left in Santiago in terms of weeks instead of months. And I fear that it will quickly slip into days, then hours, then poof! The five months that seemed like an eternity at the beginning will have passed and all that will be left will be memories. Plus a zillion photos, a handful of new but solid friendships, a much better grasp of the Spanish language (including some very unique vocabulary), and an urgent need for a gym membership as the result of a cafe/gelateria filled existence here.

Mitten Dog was out in all his glory!

At first Santiago seemed like an impersonal, busy city that was somewhat less than inspiring. To be fair, coming from the very charismatic San Francisco has left me with high expectations. But the longer I have spent here, the more immersed I have become in an actual life here, the more I want to stay here. Tina and I have lamented that 5 months is just enough time to establish ourselves but leaves us wanting a lot more- another week, another month... another year.

Recovering from my almost-mullet haircut experience

The turning point was really the Spanish lessons I have been taking with a tutor. As many mistakes as I still make, as many holes as there are in my vocabulary, as impossible as it still is for me to use the subjunctive tense, I can hold a passable conversation and have the confidence to talk to people who don't speak perfect English- or sometimes any English at all.

The days have sped by with degu field work in the morning- early morning- 4:30 in the morning, followed by afternoons in the lab or cafes working on my project and the all-consuming task of applying to PhD programs. Tina and I have indulged our gelato obsession with alarming frequency at our favorite place, maybe on earth, Emporio La Rosa. We have become conosouirs of the cortado- espresso with layers of milk and foam- which has become a staple in my diet and a blessing/curse that allows me to have time for something resembling a social life; dinner or drinks out with my roommates or friends, even the occasional Chilean date! Sleep has become more of a luxury than ice cream.

Juan with a baby degu in his pocket

I'm confident I got what I came here for- international fieldwork experience, an opportunity to do (and hopefully publish) independent research, a network of colleagues and collaborators, a better understanding of Spanish, and a stronger grad school application. But my experience has exceeded my expectations as to how wonderful life can be here, how little victories in daily life can be totally satisfying, and how even with a language barrier we can still find enough in common to build legitimate friendships.

I don't think that Chile is the "bland" Latin American country- I think you just have to give it a chance to warm up to you.
Santiago Gay Pride Parade

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

Practical Spanish 101

Learning Spanish in a classroom can never really prepare you for life in a foreign country, especially doing biology fieldwork every day. I have begun to put together a dictionary of my own most commonly used Spanish phrases from sitting on a hill everyday, using telemetry to track radio collared degus, watching owls and foxes, and walking around town. Here is a sampling of the collected works:

Oh chasquido! = Oh snap! As in, “oh snap, owl! You just tried to eat my degu!”

Oh Chasquido! (proper noun) = name given to said burrowing owl

Tu travieso pequen = you naughty burrowing owl (usually in reference to Oh Chasquido)

Phantasma degu = ghost degu (we think he was eaten by Oh Chasquido a few days ago)

(Searching Oh Chasquido's burrow for the remains of Phantasma Degu, who we are now quite certain got eaten)

Cortecésped degu = lawnmower degu (his radio signal sounds like he is mowing the lawn)

Extraterrestre degu= alien degu (sounds like an aliean)

Taxista degu = taxi driver degu (we pick up some taxi driver static on this degu frequency)

*For fantastic drawings of our favorite degus, check out Morgan's blog!!!

El zoro = the fox

Bocando = snack (update. Apparently in Chile, "snack" is also used, as is aperitivo which is harder for us to say and thus not as popular).

Perro con Manoplas = Mitten Dog (the oldest, fattest dog who has incredibly fluffy paws that look like mittens)

Juliano = Military Dog (not really vocabulary, but actually his name. We know that because he has a military name tag sewn onto the back of his military dog jacket. He also usually wears a purple scarf, depending on how cold it is).

I Finally Saw a Degu!

Tina, Loren & Michael looking for degus

Sunday was our first day in the field. We got the truck, it stopped raining, and there was no riotous football on the schedule. All of us new kids went out with Loren to Rinconada, which is a little less than an hour from downtown Santiago. It is an interesting matorral (equivalent to the chaparral of California) landscape with acacia trees and some really large cacti. It actually looks a lot like parts of California.

Degu burrow with "runways"

We saw lots of degus running around and their burrow systems with little “runways” between holes. We practiced our radio telemetry skills by hiding a little radio collar like the ones that have been put on some of the animals and I got to “be a degu” and run around the field while Morgan tried to track me. Michael also decided to be one with the coruro (the subterranean rodents he and Monica are studying) and was crawling on the hillside for a better look.

Michael sneaking up on coruro

In our field site we saw a couple of eagles, a ton of hawkish looking birds called caracaras and even a burrowing owl! He was cute and very grumpy.

Morgan with the radio tower to track degus

A New Adventure

It's been about 9 months since returning from the land down under- high time to stuff the backpack and set out again! This time I will be going to Santiago, Chile, because apparently I'm one of those people who wants perpetual winter. On the plus side, I can always find good end-of-season sales.

This trip is about more than "just for fun" (though hopefully there will be a good bit of that in here too!). I'm going to work with a team and research the degu, a burrowing rodent that lives in the wilds of Chile. I will be working for about 5 months, then doing some traveling on my own for 2 more. After months of planning and a few hours of last minute packing, I think I am ready to go!