I'm in Santo Domingo now. We safely made it up to Macaya--an arduous two-day hike with mules, porters, and guides cutting a trail to the summit. We succeeded at finding a handful of courting Black-capped Petrels as well as Golden Swallows, Hispaniolan Crossbills, and Bicknell's Thrush. I enjoyed a small taste of Haitian culture, learned a spattering of Creole, and marveled at their amazing singing voices. While staying in the small village of Formon, they bid everyone a bon voyage with a dawn procession and hymns. It was incredibly moving and beautiful, and just one of the many times I wished I had sound recording equipment.

Meals were basic--plain spaghetti for breakfast, rice and beans for lunch, and cracked wheat for dinner. That is, if we had three meals a day. Fortunately Jim brought along some sun-dried tomatoes and chipotle peppers to add a little flavor, but I still craved citrus the entire time. We were at too high an elevation--2300 m--for any fruit to grow on the trees.

Other highlights were all the birds, frogs, butterflies, and other insects. The cloud forest was very lush where it hadn't been burned over. There were several huge pine trees, some over 4 feet in diameter. We didn't have any crossbills on the summit of Macaya, however, which was disappointing since that's where Jim and my former supervisor, Chris Rimmer, had observed large groups. Many of the large, old pines on the summit had fallen since they visited a couple years ago. It wasn't clear if they had died from fire in 2006, strong hurricane-force winds, or both. We did see a dozen crossbills on the saddle between Pic Macaya and Pic Formon and a few on Pic Formon. While waiting for dusk and the petrels one evening on Formon, Jim and I watched a small family group of crossbills foraging. The juvenile bird still had a stunted tail and was begging for food.

Tomorrow we head to Oviedo to spend Christmas with some friends. From there we'll head north into the Sierra de Bahoruco to a site called Lomo del Toro. Petrel and crossbill encounters in our future....

-Julie

(top photo: Jim, local porter, Enold, and Anderson hiking up to the town of Formon)

(bottom photo: Anderson cliffside along the western ridge of Formon)

Today I am on my way to the Caribbean. I'll be spending the next month, essentially all of winter break, traveling around the island of Hispaniola. The primary focus of the trip is, of course, bird research. I'll be traveling with a friend and PhD student at Cornell who studies the endangered Black-capped Petrel and Golden Swallows. I'll also be looking for Hispaniolan Crossbills and conducting some Bicknell's Thrush surveys for my former job. I'll be keeping daily eBird checklists and hope to add at least a few species to my life list.

The first leg of the trip is to the Macaya Biosphere Reserve in Haiti. I have never visited, but have only heard stories of how amazing the area is. It's one of last remaining wild areas in Haiti and still host to many endemic species, including 13 frog species found nowhere else. I'm looking forward to it, but from all accounts it sounds like a grueling trip. We hike for two days, over two mountains, with porters wielding machetes to clear the trail. The nearest water is a two-hour hike down the mountain. All this in weather 70 degrees warmer than it has been here the past week! I'll post more, if I survive!

The first blog entry is always a tricky one. Do I discuss what I will write about in my blog in the days to come? or recent, notable events? or future happenings I am looking forward to? or how I came to be here writing this blog? I hope that in future entries my background will slowly become clear.

So do I talk about the Fray concert last Saturday, cross-country skiing in the Snowy Range on Sunday, what it's like to be on the search committee for a new Conservation Biology professor, rock climbing at the Half-Acre gym, or my (bird-focused) winter break plans in Hispaniola?

Or I could talk about some of the really interesting things I've discovered in researching the history of bird migration theory for Ecology 5100, the first of two PiE required classes. I hope all those other bird nerds out there heard about the first documented migratory double breeding in Mexico--researchers found five migratory bird species that breed in northern North America, migrate to the west coast of Mexico and breed a second time, and then migrate farther south to the tropics to spend the winter (Rohwer et al. 2009). Migration research is expanding so rapidly right now, it's hard to keep up!

The current issue of Conservation Biology has the last regular editorial by David Orr (who's written 63 columns over the last 21 years) , which I think provides a good outlook on the future of conservation and sets the tone for my future blog entries, so I'll end with this:

"...21 years ago it would have been difficult to plausibly imagine the scope, scale, and rising intensity of the global movement to build a decent, fair, and sustainable world. The resilience of the human spirit in difficult times is the news of our age. It is evident in the pages of this journal and in the rising tide of science dedicated to issues of human and ecological health. But it is also manifested in the rising chorus of voices of people worldwide working on natural-systems agriculture, green building, biomimicry, community forestry, urban renewal, green business, renewable energy, wilderness and land preservation, and peace. Paul Hawken calls this "blessed unrest" and likens it to a planetary immune system. Perhaps. But something is clearly stirring worldwide and it is our privilege to be a small part of what our descendents may someday recognize as humankind's finest hour when conservation of biological diversity, land, people, and prospects became irreversible and irrevocable." -David Orr