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There’s no more candle

by Sam Williams

It's nearly midnight on Friday night and if I was on Bonaire I'd be out enjoying a wee rum and coke and having a dance to shake out a week of parrot field work. Some would say burning the candle at both ends. But I'm not on Bonaire, booooo! I'm in North Yorkshire (which in itself is lovely, you really should visit!) and I'm about to run out of wax for the day, it's all on gone on writing this never ending thesis, both ends. It is parrot work but not as I know it. I've just finished a second draft on Chapter 2 a description of the parrot's life history, how many eggs, how many tiny pink bundles of joy and how many of those grow into big ol' fledglings. I'm actually pretty pleased with it. But there's still so many more chapters to do.

Fieldwork may be tough but it's tough in a "I'm so tired my legs have gone numb, I want to go back to bed and I have to walk up that hill under the relentless tropical sun" kinda way. In reality that's easy! Sitting at a desk and writing up science, Man that's tough! Everything else becomes fascinating. I'm not one for sitting still at the best of times so just staying on the chair is the first challenge. It's a constant battle to stay focused. Then I'm going through all the events of the previous seasons and my mind wanders all over. Today I was reviewing this chapter, a sentence needed tweaking, "with the exception of two nests, all late nestling period failures were due to poaching" or something. So I'm thinking about those exceptions: the first I went to the nest and two chicks were starving, their sibling had not made it and something was clearly wrong. Either the parents had abandoned them which is unusual given they'd got so far along or more likely one or both parents had died. The chicks had lost about 100g each. So I packed them in my rucksac and rode home with them. Luckily the parrot team are a healthy bunch and we had plenty of fruit in the house and I made a nice smoothie for which they were very grateful. A week or so later we fostered them into two different nests and they fledged hoorah! the other nest was the one I wrote about last year. Honey bees had moved into a nest cavity which had three chicks in it and the chicks had died, maybe from bee stings, maybe from starvation because the parents couldn't fight the bees. It's becoming a common problem, on Bonaire and elsewhere. That nest is a great abseil its off a 20 meter cliff and from the top you get this great view of Klein Bonaire an inshore, island where there's great diving, I kayaked around it one time. I even kite surfed to it one time..... FOCUS! You see, in those day dreams I've lost a few precious minutes of thesis writing time and I'll never see them again and there's so much still to do... Chapter 3 is on the factors affecting productivity and that needs a lot of attention, 4 and 5 are ok, 6 is good. I've still to write the introduction (1) and final discussion (7) chapters and then all the formatting, contents and title page aaaaarrrrgghghhhh.

And there's so much to tell you too, you can see movies and blogs from this season's field team on ParrotWatch.org but I also have (more exciting than thesis) news: I had a quick visit to Bonaire and then a trip to Antigua for a regional meeting (because writing a thesis isn't quite enough stress), there's the future plans for the project and I'd like to share some of these results too but I'm afraid it's all going to have to wait until next month.

This morning I woke to the hoot of an owl at 5 am. No, (sigh) I couldn't go back to sleep, my brain turns on immediately and then I'm stuffed. Other than making those endless cups of tea, 3 meals on the garden bench and a sneaky siesta, I've been sitting at this desk all day, ALL day! And it's still Friday night. But its' okay I've got my Friday night Bonaire soundtrack on, regaton is playing and I'm gonna dance around the room like a nutter.

Then do it all over again tomorrow.

Posted by Sam Williams on 08/14 at 03:48 PM
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I’m in the Caribbean, and the Audubon mag!

by Sam Williams

I've managed to escape from the UK and get over to Bonaire! It's odd to see the project chugging along but not be part of the fieldwork. Rhian has been extremely busy training and managing the team and then scattering them across the island every morning and every afternoon. The logistics of this is incredibly tricky because by the time you have got the hang of it (ie. during the incubation period) the situation changes.

Things have been going well and one pair has even laid five eggs, which Rowan and I had never seen in our 3 years. Even on Bonaire I was doing quite a bit on my thesis but I did manage to get out into the field and see some parrot chicks, which was great for me.

A big reason for the trip to Bonaire was to take the opportunity to meet with other NGOs on Bonaire. The week ended up being even more manically busy then usual but we did get to talk with lots of people about our future ideas for the development of the project. We even talked with policy advisors and the Commissioner for the Environment. Everyone was very receptive to our ideas for further, broader conservation and research initiatives and it is a very exciting time!

In addition to doing the field work Rhian has been courting the media! She has taken over the bi-weekly local newspaper project updates that I had done in previous years and she's been posing for a photographer friend who has written an article on the project for a Caribbean magazine. The main picture from this photo shoot even made it on to the front page of the main Papiamentu newspaper which was a big success.

And finally we've had another excellent bit of media coverage. Following a visit last year an article by the Audubon Magazine has just come out, you can see it on this link:
http://www.audubonmagazine.org/features0907/greentravel.html

Posted by Sam Williams on 07/18 at 09:03 AM
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Not a parrot in sight.

by Sam Williams

Writing up your PhD is an all encompassing task that leaves you with almost no spare time to do anything remotely fun. It is incredible that the intensity of work can reach this high and that deadlines can appear so frequently. This is one of the reasons I've not posted for so long, The other is that as I am not in the field I am seldom experiencing the kind of moments I can write about to make parrot work seem glamorous and enviable! What is remarkable though, is that I am not actually hating this part of parrot research as I, and everyone who knows me probably thought I would.

It is fair to say that I'm the kind of person that likes adventure. I do extreme sports and activities, and I love to feeling of pushing my own boundaries. Until this blasted PhD sapped my energy I could barely sit still, or is that age catching up? So how on earth can I be satisfied with sitting in an office crouching over a laptop looking at rows and rows of numbers?

I think it is because after those three arduous (yet glamourous and enviable!) field seasons this number crunching and analysis is really bringing it all together. It doesn't matter that I am having to learn to use a horrid statistics package, nor that my posture is so bad I have neck pain, nor that I wake up at stupid o'clock unable to go back to sleep because maybe if I excluded the nests found with chicks from the analysis I might find the truth!

So it is coming together but what does that mean? Well so far it means I've been able to sort out all the data on reproductive success and see what patterns are there. Compared to other Amazons those on Bonaire are doing ok but not great. I'm not going to even begin to explain that here, I'll leave it as a cliff hanger until a future PsttaScene article appears!

Next up I will be looking at the factors that affect reproductive success, do pairs in "good habitat" areas do better than those in poor habitat areas? Do pairs using tree nests produce more chicks than pairs using cliff nests? Do pairs in areas where there are several nests do better than pairs with isolated pairs? The list goes on, as indeed does time and so I really ought to go and get back to those stats.....

Posted by Sam Williams on 02/20 at 11:19 AM
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Emotional turmoil

by Sam Williams

What a busy and emotional few weeks it has been for the parrot team! Right now 7 chicks have fledged. In the nests that we are monitoring a further 14 grumpy chicks are getting ready to go. About two weeks prior to fledging the chicks actually weigh more than their parents but then they loose weight as the parents basically starve them in order to leave their cosy nests and jump into the big wide world. So when we go to conduct a nest inspection the chicks are more cantankerous than ever.



We were really happy because the number of nest we are monitoring has gone up as we found a couple more nests sites while out working. Rowan actually got suspicious of some parrots while out running and with a minor diversion added another nest to the list. The parrot team’s work never stops!

Yet more parrot chicks have been lost but the relatively good news is that this was not due to people stealing them from their nest. The sad news comes from a cliff nest high up on a 20m rock wall. This is always an exciting nest to inspect. You would have to hang on the rope with a good 12-14m of air below you while you checked the progress inside the dark cavity. Rowan and Rhian had noticed an increasing number of bees visiting the nest over the previous week and so when it came to be my turn to check the nest it was with great trepidation that I descended down the cliff.

The honey bees we find around the cliffs are not native to Bonaire, they are introduced from Europe. Thankfully they are not the aggressive Africanised bee. This was little consolation when as soon as I saw the nest entrance I could see plenty of bees. I approached slowly but as I drew closer the bees were clearly getting upset. We know these cues pretty well by now and the parrot team have had more than their share of stings. Being stuck on a rope is not a nice feeling when bees starting bumping into your head, to suggest you leave the area.

I was desperate to find out if the chicks were still alive although I knew there was little I could do to help them. The bees were getting agitated and so I just released my descending device fully and instantly dropped down the rope, my heart in my mouth. All I saw as I plummeted past the nest were two parrot chicks lying face down, dead.

The bees flared up but luckily for me they drew off their chase about 3 meters from the ground and I escaped without a single sting. That was little comfort for the loss of parrot chicks that were otherwise going to fledge within a week. We had known them since they were eggs. We had delicately handled and measured them since they were pink bundles of joy weighing little more than a £2 coin. It was heart breaking and we were not even the parents.

Posted by Sam Williams on 08/02 at 04:24 PM
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