Quite literally, might I say. But first, a quick recap.
Literally the day after I told my parents that we hadn't managed to acquire some sort of pet here, we were adopted by a cat. He's actually been hanging around for about a month now, and would occasionally come and meow at the door, looking for handouts, which earned him the nickname "beggar cat". But he'd always been skittish, and was rarely reliably around, until that day when he decided he was okay with me petting him, rather than bolting if I so much as took a single step in his direction. Since he was hungry enough to be affectionate, I couldn't help but feel bad for him, and went out and bought some cat food. Within days, he was comfortable coming inside the house to eat and hang out, though anyone who wasn't me or Dan made him exceptionally nervous for a while. He's still getting over his fear of us, but now tends to sleep in the garage on top of our mist nets, and has been renamed Julius.
Food exploration continues here as well, as usual. It's incredible how many restaurants this island can support. I have to assume that they all are busy at dinner, because typically when Dan and I arrive for lunch, we're the only people in the restaurant besides the staff, with the two exceptions being the Taste of India buffet (decent, but made me miss Swagat even more) and lunch at FoodTalk, a brand new Filipino cafe that, for $3, will send you to a table with an entree, rice, and soup. I had chicken afritada, which is going to have to become something I will cook for some of you at home if you've never had it - essentially a stew of chicken, potatoes, and bell peppers, but the sauce is one of the few things I've ever eaten that is tomato-based that I actually liked. And then there is the always-popular Thursday Night Street Market, which I haven't been going to lately because I've usually had plenty of food around the house, but I went last night and got two steamed bao, a pile of Cantonese-style bok choy, a cup of ginataang halo-halo and a couple of puto for $3.25 - can't beat that! (And looking for vegetables for one of our vegetarian friends was pretty amusing - she walks up to a Filipino stand with some sort of stir-fried vegetable mix and asks if there's meat in it, and the response was "no meat, just pork!" We laughed. That's pretty standard Filipino food right there, pork in every dish.)
Beyond restaurants, there are always new local fruits and vegetables to try. Taro leaf and coconut soup is remarkably similar in taste to stuffed grape leaves - delicious! Starfruit here are so much more flavorful than they are on the mainland, and my new favorite local fruit is chico, also known as sapodilla, a round brown kiwi-sized fruit with the texture of a ripe bartlett pear but a flavor more like brown sugar. Our garden is always coming up with new surprises as well, and hopefully the banana plants will fruit soon.
Now, onto the main purpose of this post (besides being a general update, which I know I haven't done much of lately). There is a fantastic blog called Saipan Pictures, which is quite simply that, a collection of photos from all over the island, run by Eric Johnson, a local teacher who came to Saipan 14 years ago. The most intriguing page to me has always been Caves in Saipan, because there is only one marked cave here and that is Kalabera Cave, which is pretty neat but not particularly interesting beyond the 40-some foot ladder down into the darkness. Beyond that, you can't go anywhere, as the cave continues only as a vertical pit that requires some serious climbing gear to get into. So seeing the guy's photos had always been tantalizing, as I really wanted to go to some of those incredible places but had no idea where to find them. So I emailed him about them and asked if I could get directions to a few.
Quite coincidentally, the caves I had chosen to ask about were ones that he was planning on visiting with his family just that next day, and he invited us to come along. Being that we simply couldn't pass up that opportunity, we met up with Eric, his sister Jing, and his daughter Ting, at Last Command Post. They all piled into our truck, which has better clearance than his car, and he directed us to a site near the landfill where old bombs from the war are collected. Every few months, apparently, the bomb management crew blows up all of the old artillery shells and grenades and whatever else is found, and spectators are welcome to watch from the overlook at Suicide Cliff.
Just off the road to the bomb facility is a small winding trail that leads to several large limestone caves. Two, Beehive Cave and Honeycomb Cave, are right next to each other - Beehive looking like a fairly standard downward-sloping hole, whereas Honeycomb is a barely visible gap between the rocks that must be squeezed into.
We entered Beehive Cave first. Just like all of the other limestone here, the cave floor was extremely slick where it was damp, which was most places. Unlike any cave I've been in before, though, the inside of this cave (and Honeycomb as well) was hot, and completely still. At the bottom of Beehive, Eric estimated that we had gone down at least two hundred feet, which put us well below sea level, which probably accounts for the lack of air movement. The initial passageway is relatively narrow, but there are a series of slightly broader chambers, and eventually the cave opens up into a terminal large room. Like all caves here, this one is still littered with artifacts from Japanese soldiers during World War II, including cans and sake bottles and the soles of some old shoes.
Honeycomb is a very different cave, despite being right next to Beehive. It consists of several long passages, many of which are still unexplored. We didn't make it very far in, as while we were waiting for Eric to check out one tunnel to see if it was worth going down, he began to suffer from heatstroke - that's how bad these caves can get - so we all backed out and sat down and had some lunch instead. Apparently he's gone as far as an hour in, as has another caver here, but the difficulty then becomes managing not just the heatstroke but also the lack of oxygen that deep, as no air movement means it replenishes very slowly. However, even that far into the cave, he has found artifacts, meaning the soldiers who were there during the war had explored quite some distance themselves.
Japanese soldiers lived in these and other caves and hidden bunkers for up to sixteen months at the end of the war. Some of them died when American soldiers came through looking for survivors and the Japanese dared to peek out and see who was coming, but most of the rest died when the American strategy changed to using flamethrowers at the mouths of the caves, eating up all the oxygen within. The jungles of the northern end of the island are still full of reminders of the war to this day - old fragments of ceramics, Navy ammo bunkers, and even the occasional skeleton.
The rainy season here is beginning to make banding something of a challenge. Today marks the second occasion on which extensive rain and stormy weather meant we had to close our nets before we had a minimum number of hours in, meaning that we have to go back and finish up tomorrow. While closing nets, I had a brief conversation with a couple of tangantangan cutters who we've met before - and there is a job I do not envy, chopping down the spindly little trees to make trellises. It went a little like this:
"Caught in a shower, huh?" He was wearing a bright yellow poncho, and looked quite cheerful.
"Yeah, it's a little wet today." I, on the other hand, was lacking a poncho, and was soaked through.
"Any birds?"
"Just one. The weather's too bad to keep banding."
"Oh. Pretty rainy, will probably rain all day! At least not a typhoon."
Which made me laugh a little. "Yeah, that would be a problem."
"Typhoon? Nah, typhoon, no problem. I've got a worse problem," he says, grinning, and points to the truck that's piled high with tangantangan.
But hey, at least he seemed cheerful enough. Banding here is definitely different from banding in the Oregon coast range, though. There, Aaron and I were miles and miles from anyone else. Here, we have visitors ranging from local farmers and tangantangan harvesters, to lost hikers, to Korean tourists on their off-road monster truck adventures. It's a totally different atmosphere, that's for sure. I think I liked the feeling of being far from civilization better, but having such a variety of people around means there's always something interesting going on here.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Rain, rain, go away
The rainy season is officially upon us here in Saipan. Today has been gray and rainy all day, following this morning's thunderstorm, and today is in fact the first day in which we've had to close our banding site due to rain before we could get the required minimum of hours in, meaning we'll have to go back and finish up that site tomorrow. This is why we have a ten-day week with a four day weekend - we don't always get all four days off if the weather forces us to leave early on a banding day. I suspect there will be weeks in which we don't get any days off at all as the season progresses.
Things have been damper in general in the past couple weeks, leading to a very slight rebound in birds. We're still not catching very many, except at our busiest site where we have caught 20 birds the last two times we were there. I suspect it's the busiest because it is on the edge of two different habitats - half of the station is non-native tangantangan, the other half is native rainforest, and often, edges and boundaries and the like are highly diverse regions due to the variety of ecological niches to be exploited. Not just because there are two different habitats instead of one, but because the border itself becomes a prime area for generalist species to take advantage of a variety of food sources, as well as being a region of opportunities and fierce competition for plants. (You may not think of plants as fierce, but they are - time-lapse photography, among other techniques, shows us the fascinating war these plants wage on each other in a time scale we can appreciate.)
Bird Island, meanwhile, is busy enough for us to catch a variety of species, but simultaneously slow enough for me to take some good photos. So have a look at a Rufous Fantail, showing off their namesake; the same fantail being weighed (because really, how could I resist that photo?), and an adult male Micronesian Honeyeater, far more vibrant than the juveniles I've been posting photos of up until now.
For the first time in weeks, Dan and I had four days completely off at the end of our banding period, as we managed to finish our vegetation transects during the previous break. This meant we had time to do something in the morning, for once, and so we took the opportunity to take the ferry out to Managaha Island, the tiny coral islet on the edge of Garapan Lagoon where we previously banded nesting wedge-tailed shearwaters.
It was a bit of a wet day, but nothing we weren't prepared for, so while the tourists all ran down the dock and huddled under the nearest shelter, Dan and I headed off to the other side of the island to stake out a covered picnic table for ourselves on the relatively empty side. We spent the day walking around taking photos, snorkeling in the impressive coral reef that surrounds the island, and being chased by its many fish, which are accustomed to snorkelers providing handouts of cooked rice, which I was happy to provide for them. Even if some of them are best seen at a distance only - triggerfish and others have painful dorsal spines, parrotfish have hard coral-crunching beaks that are just as good at crunching fingers, and needlefish have pointy faces which pose little danger to snorkelers, but are actually the source of more injuries to canoers than are sharks, as needlefish are related to flying fish and have a tendency to jump out of the water and accidentally spear unsuspecting boaters.
The true danger at Managaha during the wet season, though, are Charybdea jellyfish, close relatives of the deadly box jellyfish. Jellyfish blooms can't really be predicted but tend to occur during rainy periods, and for this reason, snorkeling was kept to a minimum. I myself was stung on the arm and then on the ankles when I turned around and took off in the other direction. The danger of these jellyfish, like the more painful box jellies, lies not only in their potent venom but also in the likelihood of said venom triggering anaphylactic shock, which results in drownings as the actual cause of death. Given that, I made sure to stick close to shore, and I'm glad I did as each subsequent time I went out into the water I saw at least one jellyfish. The trouble with these, too, is that the "bell" is fist-sized and translucent and easily lost among the other underwater sights, while their four tentacles trail almost invisibly behind them and can be up to three feet long. Hopefully next time we go out there, there won't be a jellyfish problem, but if it looks like a regular thing, I may have to get some protective swimming gear like we used in Australia.
Snorkeling within the shallower waters around Saipan is far less troublesome, although there isn't as much to see. But that doesn't mean the water is empty. After the disappointment that was the jellyfish-infested reef around Managaha, I snorkeled inside the reef by Bird Island the next day. The coral may not have been as impressive, but I saw quite the collection of fish and other unusual sea life. At low tide, several black-tipped reef sharks (small, harmless, and pretty cool) made their way inside the reef, where they swam back and forth in classic dorsal fin above water style, darting after fish that had been trapped in the shallow water. Farther out from the beach, I found schools of butterflyfish and angelfish, picassofish and parrotfish and the wonderfully-named humuhumunukunukuapua'a, a two-foot eel of some species or other, a lemon-yellow pufferfish the size of my hand and a black and blue-spotted one that was much smaller, and two giant clams sunk into the floor of the old reef, which closed up as I waved a hand over them. I wish I had some sort of reef fish identification guide, but I haven't been able to find one yet, unfortunately. Still, some of the more remarkable species, such as the juvenile emperor angelfish and the bicolored parrotfish, I'm usually able to remember enough about to look up on the internet later.
Before I go make lunch (apparently my Mexican-style champurrado, or chocolate rice pudding, wasn't filling enough), a few small things.
One, this may give you a better idea of what Garapan looks like from the street, rather than from a distance. In photos taken from far away, the hotels stand out the most, but the town itself is an array of dingy half-abandoned (and sometimes entirely abandoned) buildings, covered in signs sporting as many languages at once as the designers could cram in. It's a little bit like a pan-Asian ghost town in some places. Very strange, and makes for some very interesting wandering.
And then two, we had an earthquake yesterday! Earthquakes are quite common here apparently, but we've now had two within a week, as there was another on July 4th that was a little bit too far away to feel easily. This one was closer, though, and a 5.5, enough to knock a couple of things off a nearby table and shove my chair around a bit. This is likely related to the geological activity in the trench that caused the volcano to erupt a couple weeks ago. Thankfully, for all of the 8-10 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or greater that hit Saipan every year, not a one ever seems to trigger a tsunami - they all occur too far underwater and with not enough force, and I don't doubt that there are other factors as well. I wouldn't be surprised if we have another earthquake soon and possibly another eruption some time this summer, but we shall see.
Things have been damper in general in the past couple weeks, leading to a very slight rebound in birds. We're still not catching very many, except at our busiest site where we have caught 20 birds the last two times we were there. I suspect it's the busiest because it is on the edge of two different habitats - half of the station is non-native tangantangan, the other half is native rainforest, and often, edges and boundaries and the like are highly diverse regions due to the variety of ecological niches to be exploited. Not just because there are two different habitats instead of one, but because the border itself becomes a prime area for generalist species to take advantage of a variety of food sources, as well as being a region of opportunities and fierce competition for plants. (You may not think of plants as fierce, but they are - time-lapse photography, among other techniques, shows us the fascinating war these plants wage on each other in a time scale we can appreciate.)
Bird Island, meanwhile, is busy enough for us to catch a variety of species, but simultaneously slow enough for me to take some good photos. So have a look at a Rufous Fantail, showing off their namesake; the same fantail being weighed (because really, how could I resist that photo?), and an adult male Micronesian Honeyeater, far more vibrant than the juveniles I've been posting photos of up until now.
For the first time in weeks, Dan and I had four days completely off at the end of our banding period, as we managed to finish our vegetation transects during the previous break. This meant we had time to do something in the morning, for once, and so we took the opportunity to take the ferry out to Managaha Island, the tiny coral islet on the edge of Garapan Lagoon where we previously banded nesting wedge-tailed shearwaters.
It was a bit of a wet day, but nothing we weren't prepared for, so while the tourists all ran down the dock and huddled under the nearest shelter, Dan and I headed off to the other side of the island to stake out a covered picnic table for ourselves on the relatively empty side. We spent the day walking around taking photos, snorkeling in the impressive coral reef that surrounds the island, and being chased by its many fish, which are accustomed to snorkelers providing handouts of cooked rice, which I was happy to provide for them. Even if some of them are best seen at a distance only - triggerfish and others have painful dorsal spines, parrotfish have hard coral-crunching beaks that are just as good at crunching fingers, and needlefish have pointy faces which pose little danger to snorkelers, but are actually the source of more injuries to canoers than are sharks, as needlefish are related to flying fish and have a tendency to jump out of the water and accidentally spear unsuspecting boaters.
The true danger at Managaha during the wet season, though, are Charybdea jellyfish, close relatives of the deadly box jellyfish. Jellyfish blooms can't really be predicted but tend to occur during rainy periods, and for this reason, snorkeling was kept to a minimum. I myself was stung on the arm and then on the ankles when I turned around and took off in the other direction. The danger of these jellyfish, like the more painful box jellies, lies not only in their potent venom but also in the likelihood of said venom triggering anaphylactic shock, which results in drownings as the actual cause of death. Given that, I made sure to stick close to shore, and I'm glad I did as each subsequent time I went out into the water I saw at least one jellyfish. The trouble with these, too, is that the "bell" is fist-sized and translucent and easily lost among the other underwater sights, while their four tentacles trail almost invisibly behind them and can be up to three feet long. Hopefully next time we go out there, there won't be a jellyfish problem, but if it looks like a regular thing, I may have to get some protective swimming gear like we used in Australia.
Snorkeling within the shallower waters around Saipan is far less troublesome, although there isn't as much to see. But that doesn't mean the water is empty. After the disappointment that was the jellyfish-infested reef around Managaha, I snorkeled inside the reef by Bird Island the next day. The coral may not have been as impressive, but I saw quite the collection of fish and other unusual sea life. At low tide, several black-tipped reef sharks (small, harmless, and pretty cool) made their way inside the reef, where they swam back and forth in classic dorsal fin above water style, darting after fish that had been trapped in the shallow water. Farther out from the beach, I found schools of butterflyfish and angelfish, picassofish and parrotfish and the wonderfully-named humuhumunukunukuapua'a, a two-foot eel of some species or other, a lemon-yellow pufferfish the size of my hand and a black and blue-spotted one that was much smaller, and two giant clams sunk into the floor of the old reef, which closed up as I waved a hand over them. I wish I had some sort of reef fish identification guide, but I haven't been able to find one yet, unfortunately. Still, some of the more remarkable species, such as the juvenile emperor angelfish and the bicolored parrotfish, I'm usually able to remember enough about to look up on the internet later.
Before I go make lunch (apparently my Mexican-style champurrado, or chocolate rice pudding, wasn't filling enough), a few small things.
One, this may give you a better idea of what Garapan looks like from the street, rather than from a distance. In photos taken from far away, the hotels stand out the most, but the town itself is an array of dingy half-abandoned (and sometimes entirely abandoned) buildings, covered in signs sporting as many languages at once as the designers could cram in. It's a little bit like a pan-Asian ghost town in some places. Very strange, and makes for some very interesting wandering.
And then two, we had an earthquake yesterday! Earthquakes are quite common here apparently, but we've now had two within a week, as there was another on July 4th that was a little bit too far away to feel easily. This one was closer, though, and a 5.5, enough to knock a couple of things off a nearby table and shove my chair around a bit. This is likely related to the geological activity in the trench that caused the volcano to erupt a couple weeks ago. Thankfully, for all of the 8-10 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or greater that hit Saipan every year, not a one ever seems to trigger a tsunami - they all occur too far underwater and with not enough force, and I don't doubt that there are other factors as well. I wouldn't be surprised if we have another earthquake soon and possibly another eruption some time this summer, but we shall see.
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