Some catching up

It's been a crazy couple of days, or I would have updated sooner. We started banding on Wednesday, and so between that and getting to know the area and the sites we missed out on banding at, and a million other little things to do, we've been pretty busy. But I'll attempt to recap.

Tuesday night we did indeed go to the Tuesday Night Market, which is one of the three weekly local farmer's markets. The other two are on Thursday night and Saturday morning. For a dollar, you can get pretty much anything - huge bunches of long beans, eggplants, kangkong (a local leaf vegetable similar to spinach), bok choy, and so many other fruits and vegetables. There is a shrimp seller, who has aquaria of live shrimp to buy, a Chamorro-run meat stand, which has the best barbecued chicken I've ever had as well as an array of soups and breads and tamales and things I don't even remember the name of, and Fong's, the Filipino equivalent of a dim sum stand with both savory and dessert items. It's a fun destination for Tuesday night dinner as well as an inexpensive way to get a lot of locally-grown produce.

Wednesday morning we split up, with Caroline and Daniel banding at one site and myself and Nathan at another, a high altitude savanna with a few stands of Japanese ironwood pines. Unfortunately I had forgotten to bring my camera's memory card (it was in my laptop here still) so I don't have pictures, but I'll remedy that this coming week.

Thursday we banded at Bird Island, a site on the north end of the island. Our banding station is on Saipan proper, and not on the island itself, which is off-limits and hosts a colony of nesting Brown Noddies. The north side of Saipan seems to contain the most noticeable remnants of the war, aside from the tanks in Tank Bay farther south. Suicide and Bonzai cliffs have their terrible stories, and are pockmarked with bullet holes due to having been used for target practice. There is a long row of Japanese concrete bunkers along the road, now mostly overgrown with vegetation. And of course, unexploded ordinance can be found readily in the woods - there are three we have to step around while doing net runs, and they're likely completely safe by now as the tropics does a good job of destroying anything left in it for long, but we're careful anyway. We caught quite the variety of birds here, including a Collared Dove, and a pair of Collared Kingfishers, which have filled in for raptors here in the CNMI. Rather than catch fish, they sit on high perches or on powerlines and then stoop down to catch lizards, shrews, and small birds. In that way, they're more similar to kookaburras than the Belted Kingfishers back home.

For lunch, we went to the buffet at Spicy Thai, which is the best Thai restaurant on the island, apparently. It certainly lives up to its name. While it's not the same as Pacific Breeze back in Tigard, it's quite delicious, and is now only the second place I've ever seen the broth and vegetable soup that accompanies the chicken at Khao Man Gai. Spicy Thai is down on the south end of the island, which is where the garment factories used to be. The area used to be filled with people; now, only a couple years after companies such as the Gap and Calvin Klein, among many others, were removed from the island, it's something of a ghost town, with only a few buildings still inhabited. A fascinating interview on PRI's The World can be found here, discussing the effects of the sweatshops and their sudden disappearance - well worth a read or listen.

After the restaurant, we went back out into the field to look at another banding site so that Daniel and I will know where to go next week. After running a few additional errands, we were all very thirsty and ready for some coconut water by the time we got back to the house. As it turns out, young green coconuts are full of coconut water, which eventually becomes the nut meat. In its watery stage, however, the liquid is fat-free and contains an electrolytic balance so similar to human blood that in undeveloped countries it has actually been used intravenously (and quite successfully!) as an alternative to medical saline. It's also sweet and very delicious, unlike later on, and all we have to do is grab one from a nearby tree and hack into it with a machete until the coconut is just barely open enough to jam a straw into it. I can already tell, it's something I'll miss a lot when I head back to the mainland.

Yesterday we banded at another site, where among many other birds, we caught this Rufous Fantail. These very pretty little birds are the most commonly captured species at every site, and so I'm sure I'll get some better pictures later. Afterward we came back and got ready for Caroline and Nathan's going-away party, which was a potluck for all of us and their friends at Fish and Wildlife and the couple who run a project on Managaha on wedge-tailed shearwaters. It turned out to be a massive feast, with green papaya salad, calamansi lemonade, puto (little steamed rice flour cakes) and seared mahi mahi and poke mahi mahi provided by us, and with the guests bringing pizza, baked vegetables, Suriname cherries, quinoa salad, brownies, and tuba - a coconut water alcohol that is suprisingly delicious. We stayed up late (for us - about 11 pm) and a good time was had by all.