Yet Another Summer in the Gila 1 May 2005 I've been up at camp for just about a month now. It's been a whirlwind trip so far. I left home the day after an AMAZING U2 concert (after which I still had a lot of packing to do). The drive to Silver City, NM was fairly uneventful except for the whirlwind storms of butterflies crashing into the front of the car. We spent a few days working at the Forest Service office getting the supervisors prepared for the season. Ann was back in San Diego at various meetings so I was left in charge of our motley crew. The drive up the mountain was only slightly more rugged than usual (many new potholes had gathered over the winter). I staked out my territory at a decent distance from camp (far enough to sleep during the day but close enough to hear the air horn in an emergency) but had no tent to set up since it was arriving with Ann the next day. Since it was too cold to sleep outdoors, I set up a temporary home in the still empty office trailer. I got a new tent for this summer, my old 5-person palace was just too sunburnt and suffering from several holes to make it one more summer. The new place is smaller, but much sturdier (i.e. I won't be awake all night fearing for the stitches in my tent walls). For those of you who don't know what I do and are wondering what the heck I'm talking about, here's a quick rundown of my job for the past four years. (The rest of you can just browse this paragraph; this is pretty much the same as it always is). I work for Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, a non-profit research organization. My boss, Dr. Ann Bowles, is a well-known and highly respected bioacoustician. She is the Principal Investigator for this project which is studying the effects of military jet aircrafts on the nesting and reproductive habits of the Mexican Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis lucida) in the Gila National Forest, New Mexico. So every summer, Ann and I head out to New Mexico for four months. The project is run by Geo-Marine, Inc. who provides the majority of the staff, equipment, etc out here. We live in an awesome camp in the Gila National Forest on the western border of New Mexico. The nearest town is Reserve (commonly referred to as Reverse by us since many things in that town are, well, backwards) and is about 35 miles away from camp, but takes about an hour to drive the forest road. Albuquerque is about 4 hours away and is the source for the major shopping requiring anything other than a small grocery store or a Laundromat. It's absolutely beautiful out here. As for camp, well, it's pretty well stocked. Chuck Sundt is our logistical coordinator; he provides the mess tent, stoves, BBQs, fridge truck, work tents, generator, water, and showers (hooray for the showers!). So we're camping, but we're not camping. The crew lives in their own tents of various sizes scattered around the outskirts of the main camp. There are several crews out here, all working on different aspects of the study; noise, vegetation, survey, behavior. I work mainly with the behavior team but I also manage all the biological data that comes in (and that's a lot!). The short version (too late, huh?) is this: the survey crew goes out late at night and early in the morning to locate the owls; the noise crew goes out and sets up and then monitors sound level meters (SLMs) which are placed throughout the studyarea collecting 2-second samples of all the noise in the forest; the veg crew goes out to many many locations in the studyarea to collection vegetation data which help to determine where the owls could be located; the behavior crew goes out during the daytime (although we still start really early) and big a backpack full of equipment (video cameras, scopes, half a dozen tripods, etc.) to observe the owls' behavior with and without jets present. This whole thing goes on from April until the end of July at which point I go back to San Diego (hooray!!) to go over the data and help to write the annual report. This is the sixth year of the study and who knows how much longer it will go. It was supposed to be a three-year study originally, but that obviously didn't happen. It was promised last year that five years was it, but here we are again (with mixed feelings) so no one really can tell. One major change for Hubbs (and myself) is that my co-worker Chris left us last fall. Sam, his replacement, is awesome and a big help out here as well as in the office. New blood is always a good thing in jobs like this. There was the usual training and such the first two weeks, then another week of training for the behavior crew only. The weather has been uncooperative (more so than usual) since we finished training. Just before dinner yesterday it started snowing big fat snowflakes and now, blue skies. The crews are starting to get on their own feet, only a few more outing where we have to accompany them to make sure all is going well. There is a lot of on the job training here and a lot for them to take in. Having returnees always helps, but we only have a few this year so there is a lot more responsibility on the shoulders of the supervisors. Technically, I'm the Biological Data Manager (a title I'm pretty sure was invented for me last year), but I do a lot of work with the behavior crew in addition to overseeing all the data (except the noise data, that's Sam's job) that comes in (hence the title). Still no jets so far this year. It doesn't look like we're going to get the support we got last year, which was great to the point of exhausting. We're up to nine nests right now, hoping to get quite a few more (there were 25 last year - a record for our study). And everyone is hoping to see three owlets from one nest again this year. We had six nests last year that had "triplets"; not unheard of in the world of Spotted Owls, but never seen before in our study. So I was planning on sending this off last night, but we got a phone call at 8:30 pm that there were jets flying this morning so we had to quickly pack and get to bed so that we could get up at 4 am. It was a good day, even though it was long and I'm just about useless right now. It seems that for every hour of field work there's about two hours of paper work. Of course, that's all my fault because I'm in charge of creating the paper work in the first place. I've got a mountain of it on my desk right now but it's going to have to wait until the morning. I'm taking a few days off (actually, a whole week!) beginning the end of this week. I can't wait for showers and a real bed!!! Take care! Love and sunshine, Stefanie ;) top of page letters from camp