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!