It was 8:00 in the morning and I was staring at a washed-out road that was crushing all my hopes and dreams merely by existing. Or by not existing, as the case may be. The road had been our only shot at driving to the top of the Ford Mountain site and the handful of survey points (randomly generated, remember) clustered there. Without the road, not only would we have to survey the very, very steep site entirely on foot, the high cluster of points became, barring heroic effort on our part, completely inaccessible.

I said a bad word and got back in the truck. What else could I do? We drove back down to the bottom of the mountain and started walking. It was 8:00 in the morning and the day was already off to a bad start.

Continue reading →

The problem with random points is that… they’re random. In this way, they are probably no better than systematic points, which have their own problem of being, well, systematic. Either way, the points are placed with no consideration, kindness, or mercy for the poor sods who have to go there and collect data. The poor sods in this case being Chris and me.

Armed with a bunch of dots on a map, some surveying instruments, and a sense of fatalism, we set out to collect our habitat data. It was not quite as miserable as we predicted, though considering our low expectation this isn’t saying much. Some points were in the middle of a road: easy enough. Some points were on the far side of a raging whitewater river at the top of a sheer, towering cliff: absolutely impossible. Some were in mosquito-infested swamps that soaked our boots, or surrounded by piles of slash in clearcuts, or right in the middle of thickets so thick we could barely stand upright. A very, very few were in beautiful, open forest. It was a long two days, unpleasantly enlivened by two shocking events.

Continue reading →

I don’t think I can describe to you what it was like. Maybe if you’ve been to the tundra, or the Great Lakes, or some other part of the continent infamous for its biting bugs, you might understand. Maybe we can come together and form a support group for people who have suffered at the mouthparts of insects. But if you have lived a generally normal life in generally normal places—as I had up to this point—I’m simply not sure you can comprehend
how
many
mosquitoes
there
were.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Again.

The Mt. Currie site seemed promising at first. An overgrown road allowed us to drive most of the way to the nest and walk the rest. A flat, mossy patch of forest provided the perfect trapping area to set up nets and blinds. But there were early signs that this site might be a challenge. On the first walkthrough of the site, the female stooped on the scouts and actually struck Jeff, even though they were still a good distance from the nest. Yet once the nets and blinds and owl were all in place, she returned to her nest and stubbornly stayed there, no matter how much we hooted and shrieked to draw her in.

We all waited inside the blinds, bored and mildly miserable. It was a hot day, but there were too many mosquitoes to leave the blind door open. Where the bottom of the blind didn’t quite meet the uneven ground, mosquitoes slipped in. We tried sealing the gaps with our packs, without much success. The air inside the blinds was warm, sticky, and buzzing.

The nest wasn’t visible from the trapping area, so eventually a small group ventured (cautiously) back to the nest to make sure the female was actually still in the area. Not only was she still in the area, their presence got her attention in a way the hooting owl hadn’t. She abandoned her nest to circle above Chance, weaving in and out of the branches overhead. Finally she made a dive from directly above him, which is the worst possible scenario when using a dho-gaza trap—it’s the only angle from which the goshawk has a chance, albeit a small one, of striking the owl without striking the net.

At this point everything descended into barely-controlled chaos.

The goshawk did not strike Chance, but did hit the nets. Jeff rushed to get the goshawk out of the net. Mel rushed to help him. John rushed to climb the tree. Chris rushed to spot him. I rushed to… I honestly don’t remember what I did. What I mostly remember is feeling rather useless and underfoot. At some point I wound up in one of the blinds with Mel and the goshawk, taking notes and handing her things. It was so hot in there we both had sweat running down our faces and we had to leave the door open because we were afraid the bird would overheat (something birds do rather easily). With the door open, the mosquitoes were terrible. I was so busy swiping them away from my face I could barely write. I swatted a few against the data sheet, leaving dark smears of blood and mosquito across the page.

The female would not stop screaming. There’s a lot of discussion (rightfully so) in any project involving live animals about “distress.” It’s important to recognize when an animal is in distress, to minimize its distress as much as possible, and to know when it’s too distressed and needs to be released early. This bird was not what I would call “distressed.” This bird was angry. This bird was furious. This bird wanted to kill us and everyone we had ever loved. When she screamed, it was a scream of pure, elemental rage.

This was the uncomfortable moment when I realized I was somewhat afraid of my own study species.

I didn’t have time to dwell on this realization because the barely-controlled chaos was still going. Almost as soon as we had the female out of the net, we heard the higher, sharper call of her mate, and Jeff hurried to get the nets back up so we could continue trapping. Only a few minutes later the male was caught, as well, and I was called away from Mel and the terrifying bird she held to help Jeff untangle the male from the net.

Here the real agony began. The mosquitoes had been bad inside the blind, but even with the door open they were nothing like how bad they were outside the blind. They were everywhere. Flying into my eyes, my ears. Crawling over my face, my hands. Because I needed both hands to hold the male goshawk, I couldn’t brush them aside. There were dozens of them on me at every moment. The pain was so continuous, it no longer felt like a series of insect bites but instead like pins and needles, or a burn. I began to sway from foot to foot, trying to distract myself. I focused on my breathing. I tried muttering a mantra under my breath (a mosquito flew into my mouth). When I looked at my hand I could see them coating my skin, each proboscis buried all the way to the head, each belly swollen ruby-bright with my blood.

Screw waterboarding, I thought. They should try mosquitoes at Guantanamo Bay. If there was someone to whom I could confess all my top-secret information, I’d do it right now.

Right about at the moment I decided to throw the male to the ground and run screaming out of the forest, science be damned, Mel and Jeff finished with the female and took the male away from me. I rubbed frantically at my skin, almost crying with relief. I don’t even remember the birds being released. We frantically grabbed our gear and fled back to the trucks.

My lips were swollen where I’d been bitten; my cheekbones and forehead were so mottled I look diseased; my hands swelled until my thumbs looked like sausages, and my left hand didn’t return to its normal size and shape for two whole days—but it was totally worth it because we tagged both birds at the site that day. And that was a pretty amazing thing.