Date Night in Durham! March 23, 2009

For our anniversary, Chris got tickets for us to see Fiddler on the Roof in Durham at the new Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC).   I don’t get to Durham often enough considering how many good places to eat (and great people!) there are there.   The city has created this amazing American Tobacco Historical District project right in downtown,  featuring places to eat, the Durham Bulls stadium, WUNC studios, and now the DPAC.  Its really quite amazing.

We started off the night by checking out Toast, a “paninoteca” in downtown Durham.   It was amazing!  Small, bistro style, with all kinds of wild panini, bruscetta, and crostini options  (warm goat cheese, local honey ancracked pepper anyone?) .   Not expensive either, so go check it out.

The musical was amazing.  I loved all the songs, and the star, Topol, was amazing.  Dpac has comfy seats and great sound.  All the ushers were really super friendly too, which was nice.

Beyond that, I was not that impressed with Dpac.  At the intermission the line for the ladies room was, no joke, 75 people deep and cut into the line for the concessions.  There’s a design flaw!

In addition, there is the new light sculpture out in front of Dpac.   Created by Jaume Plensa, the renowned Spanish artist responsible for Chicago’s Centennial Park, it was originally destined for downtown Raleigh.  Raleigh city council didn’t want it so it was donated to Durham.  The main feature is a beam of light that shoots up in the air.  This feature, combined with the fact that the Dpac  building itself is a glass cube makes this a migratory bird death trap.

From American Bird Conservancy:  “The intrusion of light into migratory bird flyways poses added danger to an already perilous journey. The interior and exterior lights on tall buildings and bright uplights used for decorative illumination of monuments, government offices, parking garages , and other structures of all heights, emit light fields that can entrap birds. The birds are reluctant to fly from a well lit area to a dark one, particularly during periods of low cloud cover or inclement weather when views of the stars and moon, which serve as navigational aids, are obstructed. The birds circle repeatedly within the light field, and as more and more birds are drawn into the light, they collide with each other and the building, or fall to the ground from exhaustion. If they are not killed immediately by the collision, they are at risk for death from injuries they have incurred, predation on the ground, and collisions with windows during the following days.”

Its really too bad, because Durham so far has done such a nice job with the revitalization.  I am not sure that folks are going to be so thrilled about finding dead and dying birds everywhere.   Most discouraging is that there is a movement now to have the sculpture lit 365 days a year (currently it is only lit on show nights).   Hopefully this will get shot down.  At my job we have already written letters to the Durham City Council and the Durham paper about this (we did this before it was installed).  You know what would be really great, is if they could shut down this light sculpture during migration (like NYC and Toronto do with skyscraper lights).   A chance for conservation and education!

Final score?  Toast yes, Fiddler on the Roof yes, Dpac no.  This Friday we head back to Durham, to the Carolina Theatre to see the Gondoliers.  I am already wondering which of the fabulous Durham Restaurants we should eat at.   Cake, perhaps you can help us choose?

Nica Highlights March 15, 2009

Now that I have explained the how and why of the trip, here is a quick rundown of some of the highlights!    In total, we saw over 200 species of birds and 12 mammals and a handful of herps.

Day 1:

-3am wake up to get to the airport, painless flights to Managua.

-3 1/2 ride to Finca Esperanza Verde, located at 4000 feet.  Its so beautiful, with great views and amazing birds seen on our first short hike.

-We all go to bed early, I share a cabin with the 3 female students and Mariamar.  The beds are super comfortable and we sleep like logs.

-Best birds:  Yellow-throated Euphonia, Yellow-winged Tanager, Blue-crowned Motmot.

Day 2:

-Long morning hike on a finca trail over hill and dale, come back to the farm for lunch and relaxing, and then a hike through the coffee gowning area in the afternoon.  A night hike reveals a possum and some alarmingly large spiders.

-We see both 2 and three toed sloths on our hikes.

-Best birds: Bat Falcon, Violet Sabrewing, Rufus-winged Tanager

Day 3:

-Start banding!  We catch Wood Thrush, Black-headed Nightingale Thrush, and a Cocoa Woodcreeper among others.  I have done a lot of banding but this is the first time I hear Howler Monkeys while opening nets in the morning.

-Lunch today is a masa ball soup, and like all the food here at the finca is fabulous: rich broth overflowing with veggies and meat.  The vegetarians have their own meat free version and indeed they eat well the whole time we are in Nicaragua.

-After lunch Lynn gives a lecture about Tropical Ecology, and Pasqual, the coffee manager, explains how coffee is grown, harvested and roasted.

-At night Cesar, a local former Sandinista soldier,  gives us a great talk about the history of Nicaraguan government and Nica/US relations.  Suffice to say, the US has never been very nice to Nicaragua.  Its a very interesting, non biased talk.

-Best Birds: Slaty Antwren, Brown Parrots,  and I want to mention that every day we had many Swallow-tailed Kites soaring overhead.  I never get tired of those birds!

Day 4:

-Banding in the morning.  We catch a Bright-rumped Attila that I still bear scars from: a lovely feisty bird with a hooked bill that it repeatedly bites me with.   We also catch a Long-tailed Hermit (we can’t band hummers but record data about their health and status before release).

-We leave the finca for a field trip to “General Nestor’s land” a nearby finca at as lower elevation.  A creek with an amazing swimming hole runs through the middle, so we all swim and enjoy a great barbeque lunch.  After lunch we bird the lowlands.

-Its worth mentioning that the road into the General’s land is sort of like driving on the surface of the moon, if it was at a 45 degree angle. I have never been on a road like that before!

-Best birds: Common Tody Flycatcher, Turquoise-browed Motmot, Collared Trogon, Emerald Toucanet.

Day 5:

-Last day of banding.  We band all day, and at this point the students are really getting the hang of handling birds, putting the band on and recording data.

-At night the finca has a fiesta for us; a local band comes to play and we dance around the bonfire for hours.  The full moon makes the night so lovely and bright, a very special time.

-Best birds: Pale-billed Woodpecker, Chesnut-headed Oropendula

Day 6:

-We leave the finca (sadly) and head to Selva Negra, another private preserve. We search here for Three-wattled Bellbird and Resplendent Quetzal but are dissapointed.  The very windy conditions make birding more difficult, but we stumble upon huge flocks of neotropical warblers as well as an army ant swarm that has attracted the attention of woodcreepers and Grey-headed Tanagers, among others.

-After a long ride back to the lowlands, we go to Las Isletas, an archipelago of tiny islands created when Mombacho Volcano erupted millions of years ago.  On an sunset boat ride through the canals, we spot almost 40 bird species.

-At night we stay in the pretty town of Granada, in a hotel right on the main square.

-Best birds:  Limpkin! Bare-throated Tiger Heron, Northern Jacana and White-necked Puffbird.

Day 7:

-In the morning we explore Domatila Private Preserve, the largest Dry Tropical Forest Preserve in the country owned by the amazing Dona Maria Jose.  The forest is amazing, and so different from where we have been.  We get a prehensile tailed Porcupine snoozing in a tree, as well as one of my nemasis birds, the Green Kingfisher.

-After a delicious lunch and nap at the Domatila, we head up to Mombacho National Park.  This high elevation cloudforest is amazing!  Trees covered with epiphites, orchids, and bromiliads.

-The road up to the top is extremely steep: here in the US mountain roads tend to hug the contors, but in this park the road goes straight to the top.  We ride up in huge former military troop transport vehicles.

-Best birds:  Mountain Elania, Purple-throated Mountain Gem, Black-headed Trogon, Ferruginous Pygmy-owl and did I mention that I finally got my nemasis bird, the Green Kingfisher?

Day 8:

-We go to Montibelli Private Reserve and spend the day birding.  Its another habitat type, similar in elevation to the finca but a little less humid.  I like the veranda, where you can sit and see all kinds of birds.

-In the heat of the day we go to Masaya Volcano, which is actively spewing out all kinds of fumes.   We do not see the parrots that live in the inside of the crater, but there are tons of black vultures around which cause us to speculate that they come from the volcano instead of being born in nests.

-The rooms at Montibelli are so nice, its like staying in a treehouse! The food is amazing, too.

-Best birds: Long-tailed Manakin, Collared Aracari, Canivet’s Emerald.

Day 9:

-Another 3am wake up to catch our flights back to the states

FOR PHOTOS, GO HERE

Nicaragua!! March 15, 2009

I just returned from a week in Nicaragua, helping lead an EcoQuest Travel trip for Guilford College.  It was amazing!  I wanted to share a few things about it.

The focus of this trip is birds, bird banding (where we catch songbirds in mist nets, give them a USFWS ankle bracelet and then release), and shade grown coffee.  EcoQuest offers the trip to various educational groups (Currently, NC State and Guilford College alternate years along with a few other schools) as a sort of spring break alternative.  The first 4 days are spent living on at Finca Esperanza Verde, a shade grown coffee farm banding birds and then rest of the trip is spent exploring habitats around Nicaragua and learning about (and seeing) the flora and fauna.

Our group consisted of 6 students and Lynn Moseley (“La Profesora”) from Guilford,  Juanita, an NC Audubon board member and proponent of Nicaraguan ornithology, Darren and Julie from the Rouge River Bird Observatory in Michigan, and trip leaders Curis, Mariamar, and Dave (owner and zoologist of EcoQuest Travel), and myself, leader-in-training.

The bird banding part of this trip is really neat, and really important.   Coffee can be grown in two ways: in an open field like any crop (“sun coffee”) and in the shade under a canopy of trees.  Shade grown coffee allows the native vegetation to stay which is home to many species of birds, both neotropical species that breed in the US but winter in the tropics as well as residents.  When you grow sun coffee and you remove the canopy, there is no habitat for birds.  In addition, sun coffee tends to be treated with pesticides and contributes to erosion (one of the reasons Honduras had such terrible landslides when Hurricane Mitch went through).  There is tons of information on the web about the benefits of shade grown coffee, so I won’t regurgitate it here but instead send you over to the Seattle Audubon Site, one of the biggest proponents of shade grown coffee.

Finca Esperanza Verde has a direct NC connection, and not just with the Kentucky Warblers, Black-throated Green Warblers, Wood Thrushes and many other species that spend summers here and winters there.  The coffee from this farm is bought and roasted exclusively by Counter Culture Coffee in Durham NC.  In addition, the nearest town to the finca is San Ramon, which is a sister city to Durham.  The finca and sister city relationship has put the coffee profits into San Ramon in many ways, from being able to pay its harvesters a good wage to building schools and improving city infrastructure.

The reason why we band birds here is twofold. For one thing, there are many holes in known habits of wintering neotropical migrants.  This project, through the capture/recapture of birds gives us some baseline data about the birds (we had a Louisiana Waterthrush recaptured in the same net as the original capture 4 years apart!) as well as giving the finca information about its resident birds.

And another thing about the NC budget March 3, 2009

Well, maybe more about the state of the news in NC.  There is a HUGE article about how the Governor pulled $50 million from the NC Education Lottery Reserve Fund and all this politician complaining about how its a breach of public trust.  How come there were NO articles or fuss raised about how she pulled $100 million from the clean water management trust fund last week?  Or $50 million from the public school textbook fund or the $100 million from the public school capital trust fund, also pulled last week?

We have our fuss priorites messed up.  The clean water management trust fun money grab was the one that really made me mad.