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.
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