Salada Kristen

My first taste of mezcal!

Well it’s been a little while since I’ve posted; sorry for that. The past couple weeks have been full of changes due to weather, logistics, etc. A couple weeks ago we were supposed to visit Infierno Cave (translated as “Hell’s Cave”), the only known maternity cave of Greater long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris nivalis) (where the females have and raise their pups) in Mexico, but we ended up not being able to go because of the rain. The cave is located in the Parque Nacional Cumbres de Monterrey in the mountains south of the city, and with the rain the steep dirt roads were too dangerous to drive on. We ended up staying in the office to get the materials together for our community training program in Sabinas, Coahuila the following week, in which we were going to train about 10 members of the Sabinas community and the Protected Area managers on how to do bat monitoring in the area, including using mist nets, acoustic detectors, and GIS (Geographic Information Systems). That ended up getting pushed back a week and then ultimately cancelled, but we (Josefo, Temo, Gehu, and I) still went up to Sabinas last week to mist net for bats in the Don Martín Protected Area along the riparian (river) corridor.

Cultural Thoughts

I had a good day today walking around the downtown of the city for the second time. For some reason today several people, both men and women, started chatting with me out of the blue. I felt like I had a sign on my forehead or something! But it was great to practice Spanish, and amazingly I understood them and conversed pretty well. I figured I could share a few of my observations about the culture here, as well as some of my thoughts on things:

1. Apparently Monterrey is the industrial city of Mexico, and therefore isn’t huge with tourists. Since I got here (3 weeks ago) I’ve only seen a handful of non-Mexicans.
2. On the train and subway, it’s customary to give up your seat for the following people: pregnant women, women with small children, elderly people, and handicapped people/people with injuries. They have signs inside the trains/subways showing this. While it’s not explicitly stated on the signs, it’s also customary for men to give up their seat to any

Merry Christmas to Me!

After a day looking through
literature at the university.

I’ve spent the past three days at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey meeting professors who work with agaves or bats, collecting literature on agaves, and doing a training course for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), led by Josefo. I spent two days in the Department of Ecology looking through the many books, magazines, and theses that Dr. Glafiro José Alanís Flores and Dr. Marcela González Álvarez have in their offices to find literature about agaves. Dr. Flores is an ethnobotanist who studies the sustainable management of plant communities, the uses of plants by people in arid and semi-arid areas, and urban forestry. Dr. Álvarez is a botanist who studies the agaves of northeast Mexico. When Josefo and I visited the university last week they graciously welcomed me to Mexico and the university and were very open to a collaboration with me and UGA. They offered access to their offices to look through their materials, desk space in the lab to work as I read through things, and access to the copy machine. Dr. Álvarez even gave me a gift of a book she and Dr. Flores co-authored on the uses of agaves in Nuevo León. It felt like Christmas! Most of the materials I have found are in Spanish, but I can read Spanish fairly well. However, I made sure to make lots of copies (well, photos to turn into PDFs) so that I can fully read and digest them later. 

I found so much good information! I learned that agaves are the only plants in Mexico that people use in their entirety, including the leaves (for fiber, rope, clothing, material to build houses, and fodder for livestock), the stalk (which is grilled for food), the sugar/sap (which is consumed as agua miel or the fermented pulque, or turned into mezcal or tequila), the spines (for needles), and the roots

Welcome to Mexico!

About to land in Monterrey!

Welcome to my new blog about my PhD research adventures in Mexico! I’m starting this blog while I am in Mexico for my first summer of field work, but I hope to continue the blog past this summer to follow my future field seasons and other research-related things such as attending conferences and developments of my research. So far I’ve been in Mexico for two and a half weeks (out of a total of six); sorry for not getting around to writing this blog sooner but I hope this first post will get everyone caught up! (A little disclaimer about the photos/margins: I tried to make the margins around the photos consistent and even, but for some reason Blogger would not accept my changes, so please forgive the poor formatting. I will work on fixing the problem in future posts, but Blogger apparently is stubbornly resistant to accepting changes to the format, so we'll see.)

Before I get any further though, I’d like to thank the University of Georgia Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute and the Graduate School for providing funding for this first summer of my PhD work. Without their assistance coming here would have been much, much harder. Their support is invaluable for my first summer of work as I establish contacts in-country and further develop my research questions. Thank you!

I guess some background would be good to start off with: Last August (2014) I started my PhD in the University of Georgia’s Integrative Conservation program (with my home department of the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources). As its