What am I doing now in Taipei?

Kickboxing! My friend Megan found a kickboxing class held at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial taught by a former Danish champion. I went for the first time today. It was pretty fun! We did a lot of calisthenic core stuff and now I'm nice and tired. I have to say, Hinar though, it was not quite as intense as Monkey Kung Fu. I'd have to show them some frog walks and crazy monkey and make them unable to climb stairs. But it's a good workout for now. the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial area is a nice place to practice kung fu at night. There are lots of other people practicing; maybe I'll go back some time to practice on my own. I'd fit right in.

As for the bats, it's back to sitting in the conference room with my growing pile of stuff annexing more and more of the conference table. I actually have stuff to do now - analyzing my data, figuring out how to map it, and trying to make myself officially employed so I can get some money. And taxes.

Anyways, this post would be no fun without a picture, so here's one:

This is one of the younger bats we caught in the mist net.  The young ones are so nice and tame; they're almost like pets.  This one's all wrapped up because he fell into a pond after getting tangled in the mist net.  He kept sneezing, poor guy.

BACK

I'm back - back online and back in metropolia: Taipei City. Unfortunately, my last few days at Turtle Island were without internet. I did a lot of reading of the only book I had: a Comprehensive Wilderness Medicine Manual. Don't count on me rescuing anyone soon though. If you have a pneumothorax emergency, I don't know if I'd have the guts to stab you in the chest with a pointy object no thicker than a pencil above the third rib to release trapped air in the pleural cavity. Eeesh.

Well how does it feel to be back, you ask? Tired, I say. My legs are still tired from hiking each day on Turtle Island. The one trail that goes along the north shore of the island is pretty rough. I think the biggest danger working there isn't snakes, or giant spiders, or "tiger-faced wasps" (虎頭蜂, I'm told one sting will put you out for half a day, and several stings may kill you); but falling off the edge of a trail. Some areas are right up against a pretty high vertical drop. I would probably get vertigo walking along them if my safety wasn't belied by profusely abundant grass and annoying flowers whose spiky seeds get stuck to everything, growing over the edge and hiding a sheer drop into oblivion. Well not oblivion, but sometimes several meters down. Risk is like that a lot, I find. In the end, despite my fears of bears attacking and then learning about the arbitrary and sometimes temperamental nature of bull bison, the greatest risk of working at Yellowstone was traffic accidents. I think I had more and closer close calls driving than anything else. Who knows though, I've only been there once and there are lots of snakes and wasps. Hopefully there won't be any accidents. Knock on wood.

Return of the Face Spider!

Sorry, it's not a very good quality video. Can you see the face?

How much longer am I going to stay employed? (In which Kevin whines)

I am really bad at this job.  Take a look:

Each line represents the direction from which I perceive a radio collar signal to be coming from.  I've taken them at different points in the study area, represented on this map by the numbered squares.  Supposedly, these lines should intersect, because the radio signals should be coming from the same place, but they don't.  At all.  Radio-tracking is hard here.  Unlike Yellowstone, which was mostly open valley with a couple annoying hills, Turtle Island is just mountains and ravines.  Radio signals bend and bounce around and off mountain walls, reflect off water, and do all sorts of weird stuff that physics tells them to do.

I have to try to figure out where the signal is coming from, if there is one.  I do this by pointing an antenna and listening to a speaker playing the signal that the antenna picks up.  The signal strength is evident in the volume of the beeps from the speaker.  So I wave the antenna around, trying to figure out when I hear the loudest beep.  This isn't easy.  In addition to multiple peaks in volume from signal reflection off things, the signals here don't seem to be consistent and fade in and out, so sometimes I can't tell if I'm moving through a loud area, or the signal is just getting louder.  I feel pretty hopeless right now.  I didn't think I was very good at radio-tracking in Yellowstone.  Even less so right here.  At least the scenery is nice.

Wanna see a big spider?

Bam!  The "Face" Spider.  The back looks like a human face.  The lighting wasn't good enough to capture it though.  They spin giant webs across the trails here.  Supposedly, one bite will hurt for several hours and that's it, but fortunately they're not very ornery.

How am I still online ?

I'm jacking the Turtle Island Visitor Center internet!  They just use it to monitor weather buoys.  I've got a blog to update!

There's been a lot happening lately, and I've got it all mixed up right now, but at the moment one theme running through my head is TV.  There's no TV here, but that's not what this post is about.  It's just that my job lately has been involved in TV somehow.

First there's this guy, who apparently used to be the host of a pretty well-known nature show in Taiwan.  His name is A-Hong, and a lot of tourists recognize him when we're walking around the island.  His show does re-runs on Fridays and Saturdays on twenty-six and the Hakka channel.  I did not know this when I first met him, I just thought he was a crazy tracker guy.  He was the one who discovered that there are bats on this island, while he was doing a project radio-tracking snakes.

On my first night on the island, we went out to catch the last bat to be radio-tagged.  I was watching the mist net when he came back from somewhere, holding an umbrella snake by its tail.  Umbrella snakes are Taiwan's most poisonous snakes, and he saw two of them down the trail, so he brought one back to show me.  How cool of him to do so.  I wasn't sure whether to feel frightened or grateful.  He put the snake in between us and we watched it for a while, and he picked it up and put it  back down a couple times, explaining that the snake, although the most poisonous, isn't particularly aggressive and doesn't necessarily release its poison in a bite.  It isn't a viper, so it doesn't have long fangs or a triangular head.  Then he got distracted by something and went off, still holding the snake by the tail, with his flashlight off.  That kind of scared me.  I would not multitask in the dark while holding such a snake by its tail.

It's kind of weird knowing that he's some kind of famous (at least in Taiwan) TV personality.  I just thought he was a dirty-minded nature guy who knew a lot about everything outside.  Other things I've seen him do is catch a bird with his bare hands, go spear fishing, and of course catch bats.  I seem to also be learning a lot of dirty Chinese from him too.

In addition to working with a TV star, I also have had a TV film crew follow me around for the last two days.  Not me specifically, but the project in general, although I am in a lot of footage, usually fumbling in the background.  I even explain how triangulation works.  It probably sounds pretty awful; they made me redo a part when I used the wrong word for "compass."  But I get to be on Taiwanese TV!  The show is called "Made in Taiwan," and it will be airing some time after October 17th, on a Sunday.  So if you have a chance to watch TV on Taiwan, tune in to the 中視 channel some time.

I must say, I don't really care for being on TV.  You have to do everything several times, so that you can be filmed from a different angle or do something exactly right.  Just walking down a path is pretty annoying when you have to do it three times.  And then when you're a TV star, you've got people yelling at you all the time about your show, and making assumptions about you based on it.  Who knew, television celebrity: a hazard of field biology.

Leaving again

I'm off again to Turtle Island tomorrow (Friday). Supposedly, there may be another typhoon coming, but we'll see. This time, I'm supposed to stay 11 days, 6 of which will be by myself. I hope I'm ready! I hope I have enough food. And I hope that, seeing that I am unable to communicate proficiently and thus protest my case, the island workers don't kick me out of the facilities and force me to live in the barracks with the soldiers. "The oven."

Here's something I probably won't have on Turtle Island:

Delicious mangoes, the size of a baby's head. The flesh so creamy, dense and smooth, and meltingly soft and incredibly sweet. Not a single fiber to get stuck between your teeth.

I've recently re-discovered how delicious Taiwan mangos are. Sorry about the baby head analogy; I really can't think of anything else about that size right now. They weigh about the same too. Just kidding, how would I know? I've never bothered to weigh a mango.

Local Fauna

One of the workers saw a pangolin on the side of the road on the way up to the office so she caught it to show to the Americans. I got to see it today. He's the nicest wild animal I've ever met, and certainly very brave for one that can roll itself into a scaly armored ball. When we let him out of his cardboard box, he just started exploring everywhere. He wasn't scared at all. We practically had to roll him up ourselves:

The pangolin's scales are made of keratin, the same material as fingernails. It's the only animal that has this adaptation. Pangolins have a long tongue for eating ants, but they're more closely related to the order carnivora than to anteaters and armadillos. Males have a musk gland like a skunk, but this one was nice enough not to use it on us. Apparently pangolins are good problem solvers too, according to wikipedia.

She will let the pangolin free tomorrow. He has to get out from under the shelf he hid beneath first, though.

Food at the zoo

Outside the window of my "office," there's a papaya tree laden with green papayas and one golden ripe one. The rest of the ripe papayas are sitting in the kitchen counter waiting for consumption. Despite the heat and humidity, it's nice to be working in a subtropical clime.

Right now, everyone is scurrying around attending to this tortoise seminar that the zoo's Conservation and Animal Rescue Center is holding. Some American and one Australian tortoise advocates have arrived and are being led around, much to their amusement. Taiwanese politeness just seems superfluous to Western eyes. In my experience, too. I'm considered a foreigner here too, and I've had someone bow to me after I helped them with their powerpoint. Bow more than once, actually. And I'm like, "What?" Stop that. It would be a lot more fun and a lot less awkward if they just treated me like how they treat each other. Maybe it was just that one girl. Maybe just liked bowing.

They ordered Pizza Hut for the foreign guests, I guess to give them a taste of home in a foreign land. Except Taiwanese Pizza Hut bears little resemblance to American pizza, what with its mayonaise, seafood and sesame seeds. Take a look:

This is a seafood flavor pizza, apparently popular in Japan. It's streaked with mayonaise and is kind of sweet

Look, this one has hotdogs with mustard! Two American classics rolled into one!

The crust is pretty weird too. Why go through extra work to create little fingers of bread filled with cheese? People here must appreciate crust more than Americans do (see above, hotdog crusts).

So pizza here is pretty different, and that's all I have to say about that.

Why am I still here?

Because of a typhoon, that's why. We tried to get to the island again yesterday, and it was the same deal as the day before, sans the pudgy businessman/spy. After we unloaded again and left, we got word that the island is closed for tourist visits due to waves from a storm way out in the ocean. "Tourists," I guess, includes us although they apparently won't let us stay in the tourist lodgings and instead give us a place that's "like an oven."
We then went to the zoo where I met my employer and I got the radio receiver to fiddle with, along with the user manual (which was in English; they decided I was the best person to read it) and some articles. I also found out that when I do go to the island, it would be for two to three weeks at a time. I sure hope I can get internet there.
So we are grounded for the time being, and now I sit in the meeting room as my temporary office, with not much for me to do except read the articles. My butt hurts from sitting all morning, but hopefully I will be able to buy a bicycle this afternoon and I can be freeeeeeeee. No pictures today because I'm in an office. Or meeting room.

What am I doing here?

Is what I find myself asking (myself) a lot lately. And sometimes other people ask me that too. So I started this blog, so that I can know, and you can know.

Yesterday, I participated in an abortive expedition to Turtle Island, off the coast of northeastern Taiwan. It is apparently very beautiful. However, I never got to step foot on it because the waves were too big to land. I could only gaze at its dark jade peaks sloping out of the haze, and as we got closer, the waves crashing on its craggy coast. Yea I guess it was beautiful. We went with a coast guard boat, apparently to pick up some people in orange jumpsuits. When we couldn't land, the captain told them to swim. They wouldn't swim. We wouldn't swim. So they didn't get on and we didn't get off. We did somehow pick up a man with a laptop from another dock. Business man? On a 1 sq. mile island? Secret agent? He was kind of pudgy. Maybe that makes a less suspicious spy.

I will let you know what exactly I am doing on this island (Turtle Island) when I find out myself. It has something to do with tracking bats.

Here is a view of Turtle Island from the air.