First few weeks in Hayfork(More remote than Thailand)

I am working in Hayfork, California right now and everything is going well. I have been here for ~10 days now and I am having a lot of interesting experiences - really too many to tell you about. But I am working with a guy from Boston(Eric), a girl from California(Rayma), a guy from Pennsylvania(Dustin), and a guy from Japan(Taka)… I have had many conversations with Taka and he is a really kind, modest guy. He has taught me a little about Japanese culture and has offered me 3 books on Japanese culture to borrow. He and I have bonded greatly due to our common interest in Asia. Recently we had a discussion about the differences between Japanese and Thai Buddhist thought and practice. They are more different than I originally thought!

I have been out into the forest roughly 4 times and have spent over 35 hours hooting, listening, watching, and collecting owl poop. We collect scat so it can be taken back to the lab and analyzed for stress hormone levels. This tells us how stressed the animals are under normal circumstances. Then we take scat after an off-highway vehicle(OHV) passes by the nest and analyze the stress hormone levels in that and there we have our control and our experiment (and my summer)…

The field work is an exercise in patient alertness… We need to be patient while waiting for a response to our 4 note hoots but we can’t fall asleep or lose our sense of hearing because sometimes the response will come full minutes after the Initial hoot... or not at all…

My first time out we got lost due to my mistake with the maps (duhh… geography major…) by the time we got to the point of entry it was too late to hoot into the woods and we had to go back to the truck. We slept on the road side, got up, I called into the woods and got an immediate response. What a rush! We crashed into the woods and followed the sounds. We found the owls and began our observation. The owls seemed restless and began to fly from tree to tree and we chased after. At one point I was chasing the owl down the mountain and watching my step when I looked up and caught the owl staring me in the face. He(or she) was about 2 meters away watching me with his deep all-black eyes. I was stunned. Eventually, he went for a sip of water and I relaxed.

So that is my work this summer. I’ll keep everyone updated through this blog… Best wishes!



ps. Yes, Hayfork is more remote than Thailand... I had cell phone signal in Thailand!