Winter in Augusta, Now back in PA

Around the end of November, shortly after my little brother died, I drove down to Fort Gordon (Augusta), Georgia to work on a wintering songbird study on the military base. Our boss, Bok Lee left after spending two days trying to teach us her protocol (Her English was broken, and there was quite a large language barrier right off the start), and spent the next ten weeks in Korea, China and Thailand. It took two days to get in touch with her (Her advisor, Dr. John Carrol had since left for Africa to oversee another student's project) and the problems began to pile up. She (Bok) had expected us to be working a lot faster than was actually (humanly) possible. Once we got the flagging and surveying down time-wise, our next problem was that our 2-wheel drive truck was constantly getting stuck on the icy, sandy tertiary road and we required a tow from the Natural Resources guys a few times a week. We also had to replace a tire and the electrical system (speedometer, odometer, other dash board lights) still hadn't been fixed by the time we left. It had also taken UGA 6 weeks for me to receive my first paycheck(!) and I'm still waiting on my last two checks. The trailor I had been living in since late November still didn't have running water, a workable toilet, or heat for cooking and heating (I ended up buying my own little plug-in heater eventually)the entire two moths and change I worked there. These things, along with her protocol (which I will go into a bit of detail in a moment) led Nora to write her "I quit" emails a few days before Bok's return, and I soon followed suit, although I could have stayed if I wanted to. On top of all of the logistical, vehicle, living situation and not getting paid parts, there was the protocol itself.

From day one we could tell there were many flaws in her protocol, which in essence was a combination of Area Searching and Transect counting. On a 100 meter transect, the primary observer walked along the transect 25 meters at a time, while the secondary observer walked 50 meters away from the transect at an angle and then 5o meters back. So, the secondary observer had to walk four times as fast as the primary obsever di, both recording the birds and their movements at the same time. From start to finish the whole process was supposed to take 10 minutes, although there were several occasions 12 minutes still wasn't enough time. Her original thought was that the secondary observer would be flushing birds into view for the primary observer- a scenario that happened maybe once out of almost 200 surveys. This method would and does work fine in prairie or grassland habitat, but we were working mostly in Longleaf and Loblolly Pine plantations, or young (10-15 year old) Oak stands. We were flushing birds from the canopy, often away from the transect and it became obvious that this type of protocol would be a bad one for the birds and the habitat we were surveying in.

The habitat and the birds weren't so bad. Flocks of Pine Warblers were a daily occurrence, and other half-hardies (at least referred to back home in PA as such) included Black and White Warblers, Palm Warblers, Eastern Phoebes, Eastern Towhees and Chipping Sparrows. Brown-headed Nuthatches were almost as common as the Carolina Chickadees, and I never grew tired of their squeaky-toy calls. There were several days when all 8 species of Woodpecker were observed, with Red-headed and Red-cockaded being the hardest to nail done. I also ran into a few Bachman's Sparrows, and other more common species like Loggerhead Shrike, a few Red and White-Breasted Nuthatches and many Red-shouldered Harks among others.

Overall, the whole project was poorly planned. Nora and I had brought up several foreseeable problems before Bok had even left, but they didn't seem to concern her at all. When things started to snowball, and we still could not keep a steady dialogue with her, we both came to the conclusion that we'd had enough. If she really expects to eventually get her PhD she had better start caring more about the project in general. Bok returned on February the 3rd, and I was back home to PA here by the 7th. I did manage to squeeze in a rushed but semi productive trip to Florida to visit Cheech and look for some birds I/We needed......