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.