Wednesday, December 23, 2009

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)

Monday, December 7, 2009

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!