Pray and wish

Before arriving at work yesterday, I visited my co-workers who were conducting their weekly survey on bird assemblage and noise levels in TBG.

A beautiful Plumeria rubra flower falling on the ground.

Tree squirrels feasting on the ripe pomelos still on the tree. Some squirrels even dug their heads into the fruit and enjoy the fruity flesh inside. Yum!

Yesterday was the mid-month of the seventh month of the Lunar Calendar. The seventh month is known as the Spirit Month where spirits from the purgatory are free to wonder to the human world, and we have to provide food for them to wish them well and safe travels going back. There are also prohibitions among elders to avoid going to dangerous places such as in the mountains or to the ocean or rivers, as the mountain and water spirits (i.e. people who passed away in these areas) will drag you to purgatory with them. Researchers who deal with animals (wild or lab) also pray and thank the animals that gave up their souls for the greater good of science. Quite an honorable tradition, I think.

We provided lots of snacks and food to thank the spirits.

Burning paper money and lighting incenses.

In the end, it was time to enjoy the food.
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Finally...

Finally, a bit more outdoorsy tasks today than the past three days. One task was checking up on the status of a nest site where eggs should be hatching soon. This nest started with four eggs, then three, then two yesterday, and when we checked this morning, one nestling had hatched and was wearing a half-egg-shell as a diaper. So cute. In the afternoon, there was still one egg and one nestling, and based on our past experiences, eggs laid on different days should still hatch on the same day so it is quite possible that the remaining egg is empty.

While using the endoscope on the nest cavity, I found a yellow female Trabala vishnou guttata. I believe it was laying eggs on the shrubs, and close by there was a pupal cocoon too!

Another task was photographing a small Red-bellied Tree Squirrel resting in a tree cavity. It was a pretty interesting sighting since it was the first time us seeing a squirrel in a cavity. Furthermore, since the hole entrance was about the same size as a Muller's Barbet's nest entrance, this shows the possibility that squirrels are capable of entering a barbet's nest and wreck havoc!

The third task was that one of the morning exercisers found a very young barbet nestling (still a week away from fledging) on the ground. Why did it leave nest so early, we do not know. We brought it back to the office and took care of it. Soon, it was time for us to head to the garden to look for its parents and potential siblings. After a long search, we finally found another young barbet just learning how to fly. After observing it, we saw the parents coming back and feeding it (with cicadas, berries, etc).

After watching the interactions, we brought the rescued barbet back to the garden and allow the parents to find and feed their missing offspring. As dusk arrived, we decided that it is simply impossible to the young birds to survive their (first?) night outside and decided to bring them back to the lab for an overnight stay before releasing them tomorrow morning.

After working indoors for several days, I forgot how exciting but also tiring field working is. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed everything.

PS - I shall be going on a river trekking trip this weekend (leaving Friday night) in Hualien, so stay tuned next week for some exciting stories and photos. Here's to wishing everyone a nice weekend (in advance). Cheers!
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Typical work day

Today was more or less the same as yesterday with morning spent barbet observing and afternoon doing data entry.

The barbet nestlings are getting more courageous facing the outside world. Pretty soon, you will be able to see at least half of its body and they will be leaving the nest by then.

While barbet-watching, a few things caught my attention. One was this unknown wasp dragging a dead spider across the ground right in front of me. The spider was larger than the wasp and carrrying it was quite difficult for the insect - especially with me being a nuisance and putting the spider right in front of me to photograph it more closely.

Eventually, I allowed the wasp to carry the spider away, and last time I saw them, the wasp was dragging the spider along a branch of a shrub.

Black-crowned Night Herons are a common sight in the botanical garden, especially at the area just right behind where I am looking at the birds.

This Red-bellied Tree Squirrel was eating some red fruit in front of me before finishing it off and dropping it on the ground.

Lastly, as my shift ended, a stray female cat was napping. The number of stray cats in the botanical garden is becoming quite serious that one of the research assistants in our department offered to catch the kittens, and bring them to the vet for physical check-up and neuteration, and placing them in a stray animal adoption agency (that she's familiar with).

Thank you.

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First Day Interning

I arrived back to Taipei last night from my 5-day group orientation (a.k.a. traveling and partying all over Taiwan). I was so exhausted when I came back home that my energy level remained low at work today.

I am still organizing and compiling all of the photos from the trip. The trip itself was quite boring to me since most of the places we visited were in the technology and/or humanities fields - none in the ecology or biology field. Same goes for all the guest speeches we heard. Plus, I am not a big party person or a heavy drinker. So, it was hard to keep me interested for a long time, let alone for 5 straight days. Nevertheless, I kept my eyes and ears sharp whenever we were near natural places and still managed to see some pretty cool stff, so be patient.

Some things happened when I was away from TBG, such as discovering a new nest tree, capturing a new fledgling (but missing another), etc.

The new fledgling that my co-worker caught yesterday. I tried to look for its sibling that we failed to catch today, but I came up short.

This adult seemed to be its parent.

This past few days, my co-worker had been caring for this newborn Red-bellied Tree Squirrel. It must be only a few days old.

Such a small thing

Feeding it milk

Caring for this baby is such a dilemma (for us) since we will release it back to TBG when it's older, but also knowing the overpopulation issue of squirrels in TBG and the direct predation effect it has on Muller's Barbet as well. Sigh.

In the afternoon, an adult Malay Night Heron was spotted in the parking lot of our building (right across from the TBG). Some workers saw it carrying sticks in its beak. Maybe it's building a home here?

PS - After thinking and discussing my internship research topic with my supervisor, we decided that 1.5 months is too limited for me to produce a detailed scientific paper. Therefore, we decided to compile and write a short report on the general biology and breeding ecology of Muller's Barbet in TBG, which seems like a very important missing work too. So now, I will have to read a lot of papers to see what kind of variables do biologists usually write about in a general report.
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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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