Moving to the Cabins

For the last month, the Island Scrub-jay crew lived in the UC Reserve Field Station in the “Central Valley” of the island. We each had our own room but we shared bathrooms, kitchen, dining, and “living room” space with all Field Station residents. For the first week, it was pretty much just the three of us (we have a crew of five now, but start dates have been staggered). We spent most of our post-field hours (from about 2-9pm) cooking,playing cribbage, Pocket Farkel, Therapy (a psychology board game— weird, I know); and reading by the fire. Those days it was chilly by 3pm and we came in from the field wet and slightly numb around the extremities, so the wood fire was a wonderful bonus to the communal area. The Field Station kitchen has four refrigerators as well as a walk-in fridge; two gas stoves, ample counter space, and large mouse-proof storage shelves. This was all ours! We got used to the silence and limited company (which I mean in the positive sense—I love spending more time with less people rather than the other way around). It was a week of reunion, as Colin and Michelle and I had worked together at PRBO Conservation Science (formerly the Point Reyes Bird Observatory) as banding interns in the winter of ’08-’09 for 3-5 months (again, staggered start dates).

My room at the Field Station

The Field Station, capable of housing around 30 people, hosts a wide variety of groups. After that first week of comfortable solitude, we all of a sudden shared a kitchen with a group of 16 college students from UCSC and their 3 professors. We later had a small group of Park Service Firefighters from Whiskeytown, CA, up near Redding. They managed burn piles and felled trees to decrease wildfire fuel around the Main Ranch and Field Station. They were fun to have around for about two weeks. We also had a researcher, her two sons (ages 9 and 14), and her field assistant. They were great to have around as well. We learned a lot from Kathryn, who has been studying endangered plants out here for many years. Her sons were mature and intelligent for their ages, and entirely enjoyable to share the table with. We also overlapped with a school group from Green Mountain College in Vermont and an assortment of random researchers (one of disease transmission in Abalone, one who was inventorying mosses, a few who were studying Bishop Pines, and Larry the Manzanita guy). While these people all had a diverse variety of knowledge and experience to share with us, we were relieved when we got to move out of the Station and into The Nature Conservancy (TNC) cabins.

The Negra Modelo female, right before we banded her YBB/AY

Now, I share a cabin with Sinead and Courtney, and Michelle and Colin have the master bedroom. There is a well-equipped kitchen cabin, a shower cabin with a laundry machine, and a sophisticated outhouse. We have a dartboard, a porch and a deck; a laundry line, an outdoor grill, and we are right on plot, so on Field Station days we just walk out the front door and we are working! Two pairs of jays visit us on our back deck: The Stupak Pair (Hillary Clinton and Bart Stupak—as I may have mentioned before, Bill Clinton died last summer, so Hillary needed a new mate. Stupak’s old female, BYY/AP is now part of the new Reagan Pair), and the Castro Pair. Castro (we call him by his last name and her by her first, Dalia) looks for stray peanuts all the time and provides valuable entertaining observations.

The view from our deck, as the Sunday storm cleared on Monday.

After the storm, see how much the water has dropped in two days!