More on that in a second. First, some general around the island stuff: the flame trees, as mentioned before, are in full bloom, and are also dropping petals heavily. They remind me of the cherry trees we have back home in spring, except that instead of pretty white-pink petals that look like snow, the trees themselves and the ground below them are all deep red. The highest concentration of flame trees on the island is on the southern end, around the soccer fields and airport, making for a beautiful welcome upon a visitor's first arrival to the island - for the month of June, anyway. If anyone reading this has ever thought of visiting the island, come in June. It's dry (relatively), the breeze is cool, and the trees are beautiful.
I also have a couple photos of the Yellow Bittern we (sadly unsuccessfully) tried to help out last weekend. He was very cute.
Banding was slow again this week - up until the very last day, when at Laderan Tangke, we caught 20 birds! Or, I should say, I caught 20 birds. Dan caught none. He has terrible luck, evidently. Anyway, they were all Rufous Fantails and Bridled White-Eyes, so nothing terribly exciting, but it was a nice change to catch a reasonable number of birds. The reason was the storm that had come in the night before and sat on top of the island all day, keeping things cool and overcast and windy. The wind was a bit of a pain since bits of twigs and leaves and vines kept blowing into the nets, meaning every net run was almost entirely used to pick debris out of the nets as well as birds, but at least it wasn't a boring day.
So, as you probably recall, last weekend we attempted to get to Forbidden Island, but couldn't due to the water. Well, this Saturday (yesterday, for us) was a minus tide, with the afternoon low being six inches below sea level. Perfect for another try. We both stuck our flip-flops in our backpacks so as to make wading possible if we needed to, rather than getting our boots submerged in salt water and then having to hike up the island and then all the way back up in soggy, salty boots. A good decision, as it turns out, because even at low tide, there was still a couple inches of water over a few sections of the land bridge. We got our boots back on once we'd made it to the beach, because at that point, the hike was only half over - we now had to go back up to the same altitude we'd started at, but at a much steeper angle, on a very narrow trail that wound its way over sharp limestone at the bottom, and turned completely vertical by the end, accessible only because a knotted rope hung over the edge with which to pull yourself up. The hike, in pictorial format:
1. The hike starts at the top of the cliff, seen in the far upper right of this photo, and comes down a steep hillside, then an even steeper hillside, a couple sections of which are rocky walls that can either be detoured around or climbed straight down with the help of some ropes, which is actually pretty fun.
2. The land bridge (here as well as above) itself is slippery and rocky, but enjoyable as well - even in shallow water, there are interesting corals and bright blue fish, and wading feels nice, of course, when the water is always bathtub-warm.
3. Once across, some tricky boulder-hopping is required to get off of the beach, and all of those rocks are covered in razor-sharp ridges and folds, just like the coral they used to be. From there, it's straight up the side of the island on a steep, narrow path, until you pull yourself up onto the top with a rope for the last several feet.
4. Success! The view from the top, as seen in a few of the previous photos as well as this one, is pretty spectacular. And there are Brown Noddy chicks here! Unlike the Black Noddies which nest in trees, Brown Noddies don't build nests at all. Instead, they lay an egg on a bare spot on a cliff, like most other seabirds.
And now, your local food tidbit: earlier in the week, we harvested a huge bunch of saba bananas, which, like plantains, must be cooked to be eaten. Filipinos seem to regard these as the best of bananas, but for someone like myself who is far more used to the sweet Cavendish bananas, they take some getting used to. The most common preparation method is to boil or steam them in the skin, and then dip them in savory or sweet toppings, depending on what you feel like. I can eat them like that, but they still taste a little strange. Banana turon is also popular - essentially, sabas with brown sugar and sometimes other flavorings, wrapped in a lumpia wrapper (egg roll wrapper) and fried.
My current preferred method for eating sabas is either in a dessert soup like ginataang halo-halo (coconut milk, tapioca, saba, purple sweet potato, balls of sticky rice dough, and sugar) or for breakfast after slicing up very ripe sabas and boiling them in a sauce of milk, brown sugar, vanilla and cinnamon, and putting them on toast. I think I'll try baking some of them soon, though - I have an awful lot sitting on the counter right now.
We have two more days off, and then it will be back to work. Hopefully we get some good birds again soon!
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Double-fail, followed by cookery
I don't exactly have time to upload pictures right now - bedtime is in an hour and it will take me at least that long to upload and caption them - so you'll have to wait until later. In the meantime, hopefully this simple description will suffice.
As usual, our four days off went by quickly. This is largely because we are still doing vegetation transects in the mornings on our off days. Next week will be the end of it, though! I'm glad for that. What we have to do is survey the habitat at each of our banding sites by doing 50-meter transects at each net, stopping every five meters to note the canopy trees, their diameter at breast height - a standard forestry measurement defined as 1.4 meters off the ground - subcanopy, shrub, and ground coverage. Moving 50 meters through the rainforest is tricky. Having to do it ten separate times for each site is painful. Having to do it one hundred times, given that we have ten banding sites, would be utter madness, but thankfully not all of our sites are in the jungle, with all its thick vines and dense undergrowth. It still takes a very long time to do, though, and we'll be happy to have them done with.
Wednesday was dollar bread day - as is every Wednesday at Ebisuya, a fantastic Japanese bakery. I got my usual walnut rolls, and this time decided to try their donuts (dense and not overly sweet), and their "an pan French" - a French bread roll stuffed with sweet red bean filling. I might have to try and find some anko and make these myself. Dan got his usual blueberry cream cheese French roll, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Beyond that, we didn't do much Wednesday. It's always nice to take a break.
Thursday was fail-day number one, although fail was pretty much a given. We were going to hike Forbidden Island, but the two girls from the plant crew who are currently living with us brought me a juvenile Yellow Bittern, which they had picked up off the road by the airport. The bird was obviously not quite connecting with reality - he barely reacted to us at all, and was starved and extremely dehydrated. We set up a little cardboard box shelter for him in a cool area, and I gave him some gatorade - better for him than water as it contains sugar and electrolytes - but although he looked briefly more aware of his surroundings, he went downhill again after that, and died a couple of hours later. I hadn't really expected him to recover, but since they'd brought him to me, I figured I might as well give it a shot. Oh well. They named him Wallace, and hopefully the Fish and Wildlife department here will be able to send him to a natural history museum, either here or on Guam, so he can be used as a study specimen. Bitterns are common but very secretive, so I doubt that any museum here has very many of them in their collections.
Friday was fail-day number two. As caring for the bittern had pretty much taken up most of the afternoon, we decided to re-attempt the Forbidden Island hike - not just down to the beach as we did last time, but over the land bridge and up onto the island itself. Unfortunately upon reaching the beach, it was clear that even with low tide, the water just wasn't going to go quite low enough to let us cross to the island without getting pretty wet. But next Saturday there is a slight minus tide in the afternoon, so we'll give it another shot. I did find some pretty interesting shells, but as Forbidden Island is a marine conservation area, I decided leaving them in place was the best idea. Besides, I don't really need more shells, at this point.
Today, Saturday, we headed out early to hit up the Sabalu Farmer's Market down in Susupe. Saturday is the best day for the Market, undoubtedly - Tuesday is nice, and convenient for us since we don't have many Saturday mornings off but we're always available on Tuesday evenings, but Saturday has more participating farms, with a wider variety of produce. Which is excellent, as I was in a cooking mood! I got a daikon radish with a long lovely top, another kabocha squash (very similar to sugar pumpkin), two sweet potatoes, a bunch of Chinese celery (stronger flavored than European celery, with thin hollow stems - similar to wild celery), and two heads of some unidentifiable local variety of green lettuce.
I wilted the radish greens with salt and put them and some sliced daikon in white rice for lunch, which was pretty darn tasty, and then I made two loaves of French bread, and for dinner I marinated a tuna fillet in green curry and coconut milk, then steamed half in a banana leaf for a couple minutes, and pan-seared the other half as I usually would, for a comparison taste-test. And let me tell you, nothing makes tender delicious tuna like lightly steaming it in a banana leaf from the yard. That'll be how I cook most of my fish from now on, I think. I was going to make a salad with some of my new vegetables, but got full on tuna and rice, oops. So tomorrow will be a Chinese-style vegetable stew with the radish and pumpkin and celery and probably some eggplant. And I'm sure there will be salad at some point because I do have all that lettuce now.
Okay, before I go to bed (and before this turns into a cooking blog), I will say that I got a mid-sized bamboo steamer at Feng Hua Store in San Jose (San Jose, Saipan, not California - there is quite a difference) for $4. Feng Hua Store is one of several little Chinese junk shops that sell everything from clothing to kitchenware to used electronics, and a number of other miscellaneous items. I had originally intended to use the steamer to make dim sum for dinner, and asked the woman at the counter if she knew of a good Chinese grocery store on the island that would have dim sum ingredients. She thought for a moment, then turned to an older man who evidently didn't speak English at all, and they had a conversation in Cantonese for a minute or so, and then she turned back to me and said "We don't sell that here." Really? Eventually I managed to get across that I was looking for a place that did, and she kind of smiled and shrugged and said "Next building, maybe?" It turned out that yes, the next building over had a grocery store that, despite its rather generic name (San Jose Mart), was some sort of hybrid Chinese/Korean grocery store, and I did manage to find my dim sum ingredients. So now I can make Lo Mai Gai, the lotus leaf-wrapped sticky rice with chicken and shrimp and Chinese sausage inside. Only I'll use banana leaves instead, as the flavor is similar to lotus.
Okay, well, I had best get to sleep - banding resumes tomorrow, after all. Tomorrow is also Father's Day here, so happy Father's Day in advance!
Belated edit: Oh goodness, I almost forgot to mention. When I was putting away dishes after dinner, I reached for the cutting board only to find a mourning gecko on it. Mourning geckos are native, or at the very least, they've been here for a very long time, and I hadn't actually seen one yet. Rather than the dull tans and greens of the Pacific house geckos, Mourning geckos are dark brown with black and tan markings that are more reminiscent of a rattlesnake than a lizard. These geckos are parthenogenetic, meaning there are no males, only females, and the eggs they lay contain clones of the mother. Very cool!
As usual, our four days off went by quickly. This is largely because we are still doing vegetation transects in the mornings on our off days. Next week will be the end of it, though! I'm glad for that. What we have to do is survey the habitat at each of our banding sites by doing 50-meter transects at each net, stopping every five meters to note the canopy trees, their diameter at breast height - a standard forestry measurement defined as 1.4 meters off the ground - subcanopy, shrub, and ground coverage. Moving 50 meters through the rainforest is tricky. Having to do it ten separate times for each site is painful. Having to do it one hundred times, given that we have ten banding sites, would be utter madness, but thankfully not all of our sites are in the jungle, with all its thick vines and dense undergrowth. It still takes a very long time to do, though, and we'll be happy to have them done with.
Wednesday was dollar bread day - as is every Wednesday at Ebisuya, a fantastic Japanese bakery. I got my usual walnut rolls, and this time decided to try their donuts (dense and not overly sweet), and their "an pan French" - a French bread roll stuffed with sweet red bean filling. I might have to try and find some anko and make these myself. Dan got his usual blueberry cream cheese French roll, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Beyond that, we didn't do much Wednesday. It's always nice to take a break.
Thursday was fail-day number one, although fail was pretty much a given. We were going to hike Forbidden Island, but the two girls from the plant crew who are currently living with us brought me a juvenile Yellow Bittern, which they had picked up off the road by the airport. The bird was obviously not quite connecting with reality - he barely reacted to us at all, and was starved and extremely dehydrated. We set up a little cardboard box shelter for him in a cool area, and I gave him some gatorade - better for him than water as it contains sugar and electrolytes - but although he looked briefly more aware of his surroundings, he went downhill again after that, and died a couple of hours later. I hadn't really expected him to recover, but since they'd brought him to me, I figured I might as well give it a shot. Oh well. They named him Wallace, and hopefully the Fish and Wildlife department here will be able to send him to a natural history museum, either here or on Guam, so he can be used as a study specimen. Bitterns are common but very secretive, so I doubt that any museum here has very many of them in their collections.
Friday was fail-day number two. As caring for the bittern had pretty much taken up most of the afternoon, we decided to re-attempt the Forbidden Island hike - not just down to the beach as we did last time, but over the land bridge and up onto the island itself. Unfortunately upon reaching the beach, it was clear that even with low tide, the water just wasn't going to go quite low enough to let us cross to the island without getting pretty wet. But next Saturday there is a slight minus tide in the afternoon, so we'll give it another shot. I did find some pretty interesting shells, but as Forbidden Island is a marine conservation area, I decided leaving them in place was the best idea. Besides, I don't really need more shells, at this point.
Today, Saturday, we headed out early to hit up the Sabalu Farmer's Market down in Susupe. Saturday is the best day for the Market, undoubtedly - Tuesday is nice, and convenient for us since we don't have many Saturday mornings off but we're always available on Tuesday evenings, but Saturday has more participating farms, with a wider variety of produce. Which is excellent, as I was in a cooking mood! I got a daikon radish with a long lovely top, another kabocha squash (very similar to sugar pumpkin), two sweet potatoes, a bunch of Chinese celery (stronger flavored than European celery, with thin hollow stems - similar to wild celery), and two heads of some unidentifiable local variety of green lettuce.
I wilted the radish greens with salt and put them and some sliced daikon in white rice for lunch, which was pretty darn tasty, and then I made two loaves of French bread, and for dinner I marinated a tuna fillet in green curry and coconut milk, then steamed half in a banana leaf for a couple minutes, and pan-seared the other half as I usually would, for a comparison taste-test. And let me tell you, nothing makes tender delicious tuna like lightly steaming it in a banana leaf from the yard. That'll be how I cook most of my fish from now on, I think. I was going to make a salad with some of my new vegetables, but got full on tuna and rice, oops. So tomorrow will be a Chinese-style vegetable stew with the radish and pumpkin and celery and probably some eggplant. And I'm sure there will be salad at some point because I do have all that lettuce now.
Okay, before I go to bed (and before this turns into a cooking blog), I will say that I got a mid-sized bamboo steamer at Feng Hua Store in San Jose (San Jose, Saipan, not California - there is quite a difference) for $4. Feng Hua Store is one of several little Chinese junk shops that sell everything from clothing to kitchenware to used electronics, and a number of other miscellaneous items. I had originally intended to use the steamer to make dim sum for dinner, and asked the woman at the counter if she knew of a good Chinese grocery store on the island that would have dim sum ingredients. She thought for a moment, then turned to an older man who evidently didn't speak English at all, and they had a conversation in Cantonese for a minute or so, and then she turned back to me and said "We don't sell that here." Really? Eventually I managed to get across that I was looking for a place that did, and she kind of smiled and shrugged and said "Next building, maybe?" It turned out that yes, the next building over had a grocery store that, despite its rather generic name (San Jose Mart), was some sort of hybrid Chinese/Korean grocery store, and I did manage to find my dim sum ingredients. So now I can make Lo Mai Gai, the lotus leaf-wrapped sticky rice with chicken and shrimp and Chinese sausage inside. Only I'll use banana leaves instead, as the flavor is similar to lotus.
Okay, well, I had best get to sleep - banding resumes tomorrow, after all. Tomorrow is also Father's Day here, so happy Father's Day in advance!
Belated edit: Oh goodness, I almost forgot to mention. When I was putting away dishes after dinner, I reached for the cutting board only to find a mourning gecko on it. Mourning geckos are native, or at the very least, they've been here for a very long time, and I hadn't actually seen one yet. Rather than the dull tans and greens of the Pacific house geckos, Mourning geckos are dark brown with black and tan markings that are more reminiscent of a rattlesnake than a lizard. These geckos are parthenogenetic, meaning there are no males, only females, and the eggs they lay contain clones of the mother. Very cool!
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Meanwhile, somewhere in the Pacific...
My goodness, how has it been three weeks since I wrote here? When you're on a ten-day week, and busy for much of it, time slips right by. Well, I can't possibly recap everything that's happened, but here are some highlights:
We went out to Managaha Island one evening with Marilyn and Randy, the archaeologists/bird rehabbers, to go check on the Wedge-tailed Shearwater colony that nests there every summer. Shearwaters are basically nocturnal duck-sized albatrosses (how cool is that?) which nest in coastal burrows. Marilyn and Randy keep track of every nest on the island, and band every bird they can that comes through simply by going through at night and picking the birds up off the ground while they congregate or pulling them out of their burrows for a few minutes. So we got to go and round up some shearwaters and band them, and I wish I could have taken photos, but crawling around in old Japanese bunkers on my belly to grab seabirds really isn't a very good situation to put my camera in. There are probably around fifty burrows on Managaha right now, though that's a rough estimate based on how much running around we did, and come August the eggs will likely have hatched, at which point we'll go back out to band the nestlings, which will be even more fun.
I know I talk a lot about the cool wildlife here on Saipan, and sometimes go into some of the plants as well, and even the history of the island (and expect a little more of that in a few paragraphs). But bear with me for a second while I talk about geology, a subject that is pretty dry for most people. The geology of Saipan is pretty remarkable, as it turns out. Saipan, like the rest of the Marianas, has a volcano at its core, but Mt. Tapochao is long-dormant. The subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Philippine Sea Plate created the Mariana Trench, and along the western side of the rift, volcanoes such as Mt. Tapochao rose up from the sea floor, beginning around 50 million years ago and continuing until around 38 million years ago (meanwhile, the more northern islands are much younger, and some, such as the seamount just south of Sarigan, are still growing and erupting, as we all heard last week). Those volcanoes soon became hosts to a wide variety of corals, which built a reef, and then the island, reef and volcano and all, was uplifted several times over the millennia due to the same tectonic interactions that created it in the first place, eventually leaving an island made of eroded coral terraces around a volcanic core. This means there are a lot of very sharp limestone rocks here! But the landscape is pretty dramatic, and it's unusual to go up to places like the top of Suicide Cliff and know that you're standing on a section of ancient uplifted fossilized coral reef. The current reef shelf is only about a foot underwater most of the time, if that, and so I suspect someday the ridge that the islands are on will uplift again, and Saipan will nearly double in size.
A little bit of a banding update - we're catching fewer and fewer birds as the drought continues, with a maximum of 11 this week at a site that should be catching closer to 30 or 40. We've caught some rarities, though - a Mariana Fruit Dove, another one of Saipan's fine critically endangered species, rarely captured as they typically hang out in the canopy; and a Yellow Bittern, a bird that is not in and of itself rare, being found throughout the Pacific and East Asia, but typically only one is caught per year here as they usually hang out in the reeds at Lake Susupe or fly over the banding sites, but don't usually go in the forested areas our nets are in. For those of you curious about how we weigh our birds, this honeyeater will demonstrate. We weigh every bird we catch to get an idea of their condition, and to do so we place the bird in a tube, place the tube on the scale, and then subtract the weight of the tube after the bird is released.
And now it's history time. A little-publicized fact about Saipan is that from 1949 to 1962, the entire northern half of the island was blocked off for use by the CIA. The story at the time was that it was for use as a Navy training base, but in truth, the CIA turned what is now Capitol Hill into a base for monitoring communications in East Asia - Vietnam and China in particular - as well as training their espionage agents. In 1951, the CIA brought several rural Tibetans to Saipan to train them in tactics that would help fight China, and in the early 1960s, a radar station was set up on Laderan Tangke which still stands today, providing for some creepy Cold War explorations in the many abandoned buildings at the site. CIA offices and other buildings still litter the Capitol Hill region as well, and while many are occupied for use as government buildings, others remain as empty as they were in 1962 when the CIA left the islands.
All right, I have a feeling nobody will ever read all of this, but if you made it to the bottom without skimming, well done! If you've been following the island's power problems, we made it through last weekend without any outages because they were able to come up with enough money to stall the situation off, but the CNMI government now owes the utility company $1.2 million by Friday because they haven't paid the bill in four months and the utility company has run out of money to buy fuel from Mobil, and so the governor has declared a state of emergency which will supposedly allow him to reallocate funds from other areas of the budget. Apparently, the last time this happened was just last fall, so this isn't anything new for Saipan. So once again, I know last weekend was a false alarm, but I may be out of contact this coming weekend instead. Or perhaps I won't. We just don't know.
Due to the long break between updates, I have a lot of photos that haven't been linked here but which can be found at my Flickr set as usual, so go ahead and look through them when you have a moment.
We went out to Managaha Island one evening with Marilyn and Randy, the archaeologists/bird rehabbers, to go check on the Wedge-tailed Shearwater colony that nests there every summer. Shearwaters are basically nocturnal duck-sized albatrosses (how cool is that?) which nest in coastal burrows. Marilyn and Randy keep track of every nest on the island, and band every bird they can that comes through simply by going through at night and picking the birds up off the ground while they congregate or pulling them out of their burrows for a few minutes. So we got to go and round up some shearwaters and band them, and I wish I could have taken photos, but crawling around in old Japanese bunkers on my belly to grab seabirds really isn't a very good situation to put my camera in. There are probably around fifty burrows on Managaha right now, though that's a rough estimate based on how much running around we did, and come August the eggs will likely have hatched, at which point we'll go back out to band the nestlings, which will be even more fun.
I know I talk a lot about the cool wildlife here on Saipan, and sometimes go into some of the plants as well, and even the history of the island (and expect a little more of that in a few paragraphs). But bear with me for a second while I talk about geology, a subject that is pretty dry for most people. The geology of Saipan is pretty remarkable, as it turns out. Saipan, like the rest of the Marianas, has a volcano at its core, but Mt. Tapochao is long-dormant. The subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Philippine Sea Plate created the Mariana Trench, and along the western side of the rift, volcanoes such as Mt. Tapochao rose up from the sea floor, beginning around 50 million years ago and continuing until around 38 million years ago (meanwhile, the more northern islands are much younger, and some, such as the seamount just south of Sarigan, are still growing and erupting, as we all heard last week). Those volcanoes soon became hosts to a wide variety of corals, which built a reef, and then the island, reef and volcano and all, was uplifted several times over the millennia due to the same tectonic interactions that created it in the first place, eventually leaving an island made of eroded coral terraces around a volcanic core. This means there are a lot of very sharp limestone rocks here! But the landscape is pretty dramatic, and it's unusual to go up to places like the top of Suicide Cliff and know that you're standing on a section of ancient uplifted fossilized coral reef. The current reef shelf is only about a foot underwater most of the time, if that, and so I suspect someday the ridge that the islands are on will uplift again, and Saipan will nearly double in size.
A little bit of a banding update - we're catching fewer and fewer birds as the drought continues, with a maximum of 11 this week at a site that should be catching closer to 30 or 40. We've caught some rarities, though - a Mariana Fruit Dove, another one of Saipan's fine critically endangered species, rarely captured as they typically hang out in the canopy; and a Yellow Bittern, a bird that is not in and of itself rare, being found throughout the Pacific and East Asia, but typically only one is caught per year here as they usually hang out in the reeds at Lake Susupe or fly over the banding sites, but don't usually go in the forested areas our nets are in. For those of you curious about how we weigh our birds, this honeyeater will demonstrate. We weigh every bird we catch to get an idea of their condition, and to do so we place the bird in a tube, place the tube on the scale, and then subtract the weight of the tube after the bird is released.
And now it's history time. A little-publicized fact about Saipan is that from 1949 to 1962, the entire northern half of the island was blocked off for use by the CIA. The story at the time was that it was for use as a Navy training base, but in truth, the CIA turned what is now Capitol Hill into a base for monitoring communications in East Asia - Vietnam and China in particular - as well as training their espionage agents. In 1951, the CIA brought several rural Tibetans to Saipan to train them in tactics that would help fight China, and in the early 1960s, a radar station was set up on Laderan Tangke which still stands today, providing for some creepy Cold War explorations in the many abandoned buildings at the site. CIA offices and other buildings still litter the Capitol Hill region as well, and while many are occupied for use as government buildings, others remain as empty as they were in 1962 when the CIA left the islands.
All right, I have a feeling nobody will ever read all of this, but if you made it to the bottom without skimming, well done! If you've been following the island's power problems, we made it through last weekend without any outages because they were able to come up with enough money to stall the situation off, but the CNMI government now owes the utility company $1.2 million by Friday because they haven't paid the bill in four months and the utility company has run out of money to buy fuel from Mobil, and so the governor has declared a state of emergency which will supposedly allow him to reallocate funds from other areas of the budget. Apparently, the last time this happened was just last fall, so this isn't anything new for Saipan. So once again, I know last weekend was a false alarm, but I may be out of contact this coming weekend instead. Or perhaps I won't. We just don't know.
Due to the long break between updates, I have a lot of photos that haven't been linked here but which can be found at my Flickr set as usual, so go ahead and look through them when you have a moment.
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