Brazil

Lapwing at Botanical Garden, Curitiba

It's been a while since my last post. A month perhaps. I have a lot to cover. Denali, Anchorage, Philly. Pine Barrens, Key Largo and Brazil. I write this in a private Brazilian hospital emergency room waiting room. I'm waiting for program's TA as she has come down with bronchitis and has a high fever. I'm watching a TV show about Cape gannets in Portuguese. I'm in Curitiba, a city of two million in the state of Parana in southern Brazil.

It's fitting that the show I'm watching is about South Africa as I am in another part of the southern hemisphere's sub tropics. I find the southern temperate regions especially fascinating. I want to spend more time exploring these regions. I am especially interested in auracaria forests. Curitiba's city seal is of a Brazilian pine, an auracauria. These columnar trees with strange upside-down umbrella crowns are found thorough the city. Unfortunately I don't think my trip will visit any wild stands auracauria forest. It will have to wait till my next visit when I also travel to Argentina and Chile to see monkey puzzle tree forests.

I guess I'll start in Brazil since I'm here. I'll fill in the rest with “retro-blogs” when I'm home. We arrived in Brazil about two weeks ago. We landed in Sao Paulo and took a connecting flight to Curitibia. Not surprisingly the first bird was black vulture followed by a southern lapwing. The hostel we stayed in was fantastic and had fantastic grounds to bird. Tropical parula, an unidentified spinetail and many southern house wrens and rufous bellied thrush were found from the decks. Rufous honeros are everywhere here and it's really cool to see their mud dome nests on telephone poles and Brazilian pines. We spent the rest of the day eating at a churrascaria (Brazilian barbeque and buffet) and visiting the botanical gardens.

Southern lapwings are everywhere, and I mean everywhere. All over the botanical gardens, even walking on top of the topiary hedges. Lapwings are noisy, the local name, “quero-quero “ means “I want, I want”. It's apt as the birds do sound like a whiny child. I even saw a lapwing with chick remain on the field during a football match. Coritibia aka Coxa (Curitiba's team) played the Corinthians from Sao Paulo. The lapwing and chick never left the field! Occasionally a player would come too close and the mother would fly up and even harass the players. I don't know how the chick wasn't trampled.

OK back to the story. After some morning birding at the hostel and breakfast were off to Paranagua. Brazilian breakfast consists of sweet breads, caramel spread, chocolate cake, ham and of course, coffe. We took the ferry from Paranagua across a bay to Guaraquecaba.

. During the crossing we saw cocoi herons as well as great egrets and little blue herons feeding on mud flats near mangroves. The bay in surrounded by rainforest covered mountains. We had several dolphin sightings. The low triangular and non curved dorsal fins made me think they may be La Plata dolphins, the South American estuarine members of the river dolphin family. However they are apparently shy of boats and occur in low densities. Maybe we saw more than one kind of dolphin? Soon we saw our first brown boobies diving into the dolphin pods. Magnificent frigate birds were constantly overhead and often mixed with black vultures in thermals over islands. Occasionally a frigatebird could be seen pursuing a booby or royal tern. I believe I saw a snowy-capped tern, but I'm not sure if they occur over such open water. I think they are more of a marsh tern. Out n the bay I witnessed one of the most amazing wildlife spectacles I ever witnessed, two rafts of neotropic cormorants in the THOUSANDS!. I never know neotropic cormorants occurred in such congregations. There must have been ten thousand between the two groups. Brown boobies were also in big numbers, in groups of dozens and even some in the hundreds. With the bay surrounded by mountains I suspect the bay could be quite steep and deep, maybe there is a canyon and an upwelling like a mini Monterrey Bay? Maybe it is a seasonal occurrence, the birds and dolphins drawn to spawning fish or a anadromous fish run.

Web Tagging

When we find a nest with hatching ducklings or when we catch ducklings by driving them into a net or with a dip net we will "web-tag" them. A web tag is a small monel metal tag with a four digit number that is attached through the webbing of a ducklings foot. We do this because ducklings under a certain age cannot be banded yet. We gain valuable data about these ducks movements and for our research survival relative to avian influenza infection. It's pretty awesome to get to handle these unbelievable cute duckings, but it can be stressful because of trying not to injure them. It's also a bit unnerving and messy when you web tag a hatching ducking just breaking out of the egg. When a ducking begins to hatch it it referred to as "pipping". Let me tell you, pipping ain't easy.

Nest Trapping

After we discover a nest and determine that it is of sufficient age and depending on if we have a fecal sample etc, we will put a trap on the nest. This is called a "Weller" trap after that famous waterfowl biologist who invested the trap. The trap consists of a welded wire cylinder with a top that sits over the nest, the hen trips a treadle entering the nest that depresses a trigger rod holding up a trap door. The trap is staked down. This way the hen can incubate the eggs until she is processed and released.

Upon capturing the hen we band the bird, do an oral and cloaca swab for avian influenza, weigh her,and measure the wing chord, tarsus and head.

This was the first time I was able to handle a northern shoveler as we didn't have any hens to use during decoy trapping. Apparently it is very difficult to keep shovelers in captivity and especially hard to keep the hens healthy as use as decoy birds. Shovelers have a difficult diet to replicate. They use that amazing bill to sift through mud and water for small organisms. Check out that amazing bill!

What quality is that poop? The glamour of nest searching

The next phase of our work here is nest searching. Avian influenza can be detected in the fresh feces of ducks. We are looking for epithelial cells that are shed when the birds defecate, not the feces itself. Ducks often poop on their eggs when they flush. This can be a deterrent to predators from eating the eggs.

When we find a nest, we record, the number of eggs, the GPS coordinates, the flush type (hen absent, human, rope or dog)the egg age and if there is poop and what quality is the fecal sample and whether it was on the eggs or the vegetation. One person records while the other crew member calls out the information, so often one of us will say, "What quality is that poop?". Egg age is determined by candling the egg. The egg is placed against the end of a foam tube and rotated while being held towards the sun. We have a chart that we use but eventually memorize that correlates what we see to the age of the egg. We can predict to the day when hatch will occur.

We nest search by dragging a 60 foot rope with cans tied at intervals through nesting habitat to flush the hens. Brant also had brought his awesome yellow lab, Delta, to find nests. She is obviously the best nest searcher, it it amazing to see here work. Quartering back and forth the grass and willows Delta sniffs out nests and indicates in her body language that Brandt can read where the nest is.

Delta loves to nest search, she gets so excited when it's time to go out. When we are doing nest checks or something else that doesn't involve Delta, she'll still jump on the boat, hoping to go out in the field with us. On morning while gearing up to go out, I head a bird sing that I didn't recognize. I went over to behind the cabin to look for the bird and Delta followed me. Delta could see I was in search mode and started hunting across the trail and looking back at me, she was so excited. It was funny that she was trying to help me find the bird but actually causing more noise and distraction. She was so unbelievably cute.I never did find the bird in question, I believe it may have been a gray jay.

Horned Grebe caught in duck trap

We sometimes catch horned and red-necked grebes in our decoy traps. Unlike ducks which just try to escape, the grebes will try to stab us with their bills. Ryan even had a horned grebe attack him after he released it! There is video of it, hopefully I can upload it.