Life Goes On (Part 3 of 7)

I only spent a week in Jacobacci but my days quickly began to follow a pattern. Without meaning to, my daily schedule turned into the following:

10am – wake up, sort gear (notice the lack of sunrise images….I am not a morning person)
11am-1pm – wander the streets looking for images
1pm-2pm – massive lunch
2pm-4pm – nap, sort gear
4pm-6pm – sort more gear
6pm-9pm – wander the streets looking for images
9pm-10pm – playtime with Camila
10pm-12am – long dinner usually with friends, neighbors, extended family
12am-2am – sort gear, stare blankly at wall

Playtime With Camila (Part 2 of 7)

When I arrived in Argentina I headed straight for a small town called Jacobacci out in the rural steppe of the Rio Negro province. I had a wonderful time there the previous year and I was excited about seeing my friends again, but I was also starting to wonder what exactly I was going to photograph. It was a relief to not have an assignment or a deadline to worry about, but still I found myself getting anxious about the project.

Ashes to Ashes... (Part 1 of 7)

On June 4th 2011 the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic complex erupted in Chilean Patagonia sending millions of cubic meters of ash and rock into the air. Most of this material, called volcanic tephra, landed in Argentina due to the prevailing winds in the region. The areas most affected by this eruption are the same places I visited just 6 months earlier as part of my project to photograph the wetlands of Patagonia.

Above: A "remolino" (dust devil) out in the dry Patagonian steppe. The ash has the consistency of baby powder so it is easily remobilized by the lightest breeze.

Photo ID

I realize things are getting a little stale around here. I've been working on a really interesting project and I promise to get some fresh content up soon. While I am organizing my field notes into blog material, I thought I would share a fun anecdote from a few months back.

 I was traveling to Washington D.C. from the west coast and I managed to lose my driver's license along the way. I didn't have enough time to replace it before my return flight so I decided to try an unconventional form of photo ID - a copy of the October 2011 issue of National Geographic Magazine. In 2010, I received a Young Explorer Grant from a branch of the National Geographic called the Expeditions Council. My project was to document wetland diversity in northern Patagonia. The magazine ran a picture of me on their explorer page so I showed up to the airport security checkpoint with a copy of National Geographic and a handful of assorted cards from my wallet.

 The TSA agent laughed and had a hard time recognizing me from the photo, but eventually waved me through. Apparently, that was the first time anyone had tried to pull that stunt on him.

Consolation Prize

By our last field day, we had no sound recordings, no high-speed video, and no decent pictures of the Gorgeted Woodstar.  What were we supposed to expect from a species that is so poorly known?  I guess we have been spoiled by our success in studying other bee hummingbirds.  Of the 21 species I have helped Chris track down so far, we have only had two species that didn’t displays for us.  But for these two, the Magenta-throated Woodstar of Costa Rica and the Sparkling-tailed Woodstar of Guatemala, at least I got a few decent photos.  

Bug Photographer's Paradise

We decided to relocate to the Wild Sumaco lodge for the last two days of fieldwork because we knew the woodstars visited there regularly.  Getting to the lodge turned out to be a little tricky.  A few days earlier, a Coca Cola delivery truck had overturned on a bridge on its way to deliver its goods to – get this – the city of Coca.  We needed to cross this bridge to get to the lodge and we were considered abandoning the car, fording the river, and getting picked up on the other side.  We were getting desperate to see any woodstars, even if they weren’t going to display for us. 

Amazon At Last

After five days of looking for woodstars, it is clear that we are here at the wrong time of year.  We have seen several males visiting flowers, but they aren’t defending territories or showing any interest in the nearby females.  Since we have no hope of getting data at this point, we decided to blow off a day and go visit the lowland rainforest.  The Amazon jungle starts a few thousand feet below our field site and stretches across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.  It is so vast that referring to it as a single entity doesn’t make sense because it is made up of so many different forest types.  Still, “the Amazon” has been in my dreams for as long as I can remember and this was my first chance to set foot in it.