Weekend Announcement and Cute Baby Tree Squirrel

Really need to keep today's post short today since I am going to spend the weekend in Fushan Research Station in another county in northern Taiwan to look for my internship project topic. Originally, I am suppose to intern at the Fushan Research Station for 1.5 months. However, after spending this past month volunteering in Taipei Botanical Garden (TBG), I am really learning a lot about research methods and techniques here researching about Muller's Barbet. Therefore, I asked for a transfer to TBG instead (both areas are owned to the Taiwanese government as Taiwan Forestry Research Institute). Nevertheless, I am still very much interested in going to Fushan since it's a restricted access (to the public) area with parts of it opened to the public as Fushan Botanical Garden, and the rest for research purposes only; thus, you can imagine how natural and well-preserved the area is. This weekend, I hope to find some nest trees of Muller's Barbet in Fushan Botanical Garden and then I can conduct a comparative study between the differences in the characteristics of nest trees and cavities in urban and reserved botanical gardens.

Today, we set up a video camera recording one of the nest trees. However, after we set up the camera, no parent barbet came back to incubate the three eggs inside the nest cavity. This got us quite worried. Perhaps the camera was too close to the nest entrance (about 1.5-m away) and the parents were worried about the strange thing pointing at their nest. So we moved the camera to a better-hidden location, and the parents came back shortly afterwards. Whew!

The initial (bad) location and the fina acceptance of new location.

While going back to the office, a security guard in the garden gave us a baby Red-bellied Tree Squirrel (Callosciurus erythraeus) that was under attack from a stray cat in the garden. Thankfully, it wasn't badly injured.

Isn't it a cutie? Aww.

I won't be able to post anything over the weekend, but be sure to check-in to see some pretty amazing sights and animals! Have a great weekend, everyone!
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