A Gringa in Mexico

A couple weeks ago after work in the evening Claudia came with me to walk through the “mercadito” (little market) in the main street outside the office. In mercaditos people set up little tents and sell merchandise, clothes, toys, trinkets, fruit, etc. They’re quite common here in Mexico, and I like it! Also, SO many people sell food out of their houses, in little stands on the street, or out of cars driving down the street. I love it! You’re never lacking for a snack or dinner, and there’s even a couple people who drive down the streets selling bread and pastries (like an ice cream truck does, complete with music). And they have ice cream trucks too, which I swear are playing a slightly faster-paced Jingle Bells…I wish the US had more street food vendors. At least in Athens (GA) there are hardly any…At the mercadito I bought a bright pink drink that had fresh strawberries and watermelon in the jug. It was eerily pink but it looked yummy because of the fresh fruit in it, but it ended up tasting like bubble gum. Definitely some artificial stuff in there!

 The eerily pink drink that I bought in the

mercadito and that tasted like bubble gum...

When I got home I walked to the supermarket (about an 8-minute walk from my house). There was a cute little store outside it with women’s clothes so I tried some stuff on. It’s hilarious because in Mexico many clothing stores (at least the “cheaper” ones on the street) have “one size fits all” clothing. You either squeeze yourself into the item (which is 90% of the time made with LOTS AND LOTS of Spandex) and like the way you look, or you don’t like the way you look/can’t squeeze into it. There’s not much in between. It sure simplifies the process of clothes shopping! In the supermarket there were a TON of people.

A Whole New Meaning to "Salada" Kristen

One more field expedition under my belt! Claudia, Isra, Ana, and I headed back to Rayones for two days this week to do their (ESHAC’s) community development project with the women in the community and my bat/agave work and first focus group session with the folks who harvest/use agaves.

We got a slightly later start than anticipated since Josefo’s and Claudia’s Chihuahua, Maggie, had her puppies that morning (my first time seeing such tiny pups!). Once we left the office we headed to a garden supply place for the remaining materials for Claudia and Isra’s organic gardening workshop in Rayones. Unfortunately the rain also arrived at the place about the same time we did, and since we were using the truck with an open cab we had to scramble to cover everything with a tarp, and in the process got SOAKED. At least it was a warm day…We also had to make makeshift windows for both the driver and passenger windows, since neither one rolls up. With the truck loaded to the brim and contact paper windows, we headed out into more rain on our couple hour journey to Rayones in the mountains. Speaking of traveling, I have noticed on our trips so far that my travel companions very rarely drink water. I’m constantly guzzling water to stay hydrated (and feel crappy if I don’t) but they seem to not need to drink a lot. I just don’t understand how!

Finally Settling In

I finally feel like I’m getting into the groove, after five weeks here. I did my fourth community leader interview yesterday in another community, and it went really well. I’m learning SO much about the communities and their uses of agaves, their harvesting, etc., and it’s FASCINATING. At a very preliminary run-through of my interviews so far, it seems like the following things seem to be coming into play within some or all of the communities:

• Migration (mostly of younger people) out of the communities to look for work elsewhere;
• Tourism in some communities and the selling of land/homes to city-dwellers who come to the mountains to buy/use a second "vacation" home;
• The key role that the government seems to play in providing resources for programs/projects in the communities, including some agave planting programs for erosion control;
• The importance of other livelihood activities (like livestock or corn, beans, apples, etc.) and the implications this has for the continuation (or not) of agave use;
• The fact that even if the harvesting of agaves for products is decreasing, the desire to plant agaves for erosion control seems to be a common theme among communities

I sometimes catch myself getting so interested in the intricacies of agave use and harvest in these communities that I temporarily “forget” about my overall goal of tying this all into bat conservation somehow. My ultimate goal is for my work to have relevance for conservation efforts for the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat (and other bats that pollinate agaves), and I need to sit down and think through how all my community work relates back to the bats and benefiting them...

Cocky the Cockroach (and Junior, and The Third)

Now for a little change of pace from my previous few blog posts…I have an unwanted visitor (or three or four) to my house in Monterrey. I first encountered this visitor when I was in my kitchen, and I turned and saw a GIANT cockroach sitting on the window curtain. He was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen, at least 3 ½ inches long, with antennae about four inches long. I reacted quickly and was able to push him back through the window (most of which don’t have screens) and shut the glass pane quickly. Phew!

But then a few days later I was sitting in my living room and saw a dark shape moving in the middle of my kitchen floor. I went over and it was the giant cockroach again, this time flipped over on his back trying to right himself and scurry away. He REALLY creeped me out. I can deal with spiders, bees, wasps, snakes, mice, whatever, but for some reason the big cockroaches just creep me out. The weird thing is that I think they are kind of cute, and I know they can’t do any harm to you. I just can’t get over their size and how they are able to fly, but really erratically, and run really fast. Despite my horror at this giant cockroach being in my house (mere meters from my bedroom!) I just couldn’t bring myself to squash him. I’m usually not one to kill things in my house, although I have gotten desensitized to killing the smaller cockroaches that are very numerous in my house here (and when at home in the US I’m fine with others killing the bigger cockroaches, as long as I don’t have to see it). However, with Cocky (as Tom later called him) I think his bigger size prevented me from squashing him. I think it’s partially a squeamish thing (that would be a lot of guts to clean up!) but also somehow the bigger the thing is the more “sentient” it appears to me. Completely irrational, I know, but I just couldn’t kill him. Which left me with one choice: catch him and release him outside.

First Bat!

I just got back yesterday from another 2-day excursion into the field, this time to the north to Ejido Estanque de Norias, about a 2-and-a-half-hour drive from Monterrey (about 2 hours on the highway and another half hour or so on dirt roads to the community). This ejido is near Rosillo Cave (a suspected maternity cave for Mexican long-nosed bats), and I was there to do an interview with the comisariado (leader) and set up my infrared cameras to monitor agaves for bat feeding at night. Despite a HOT drive (in the upper 90s, with no AC in the truck) and the crazy driving here in Mexico, we arrived in one piece and met with the comisariado in the ejido’s “town hall” for our interview. This was my third leader interview, and overall it went well. I’m learning the ropes a bit more with this whole interviewing thing, although there was definitely room for improvement. I did feel like I did a better job of “tailoring” my questions to better follow up on things that he said, which in my previous two interviews I didn’t do very well (probably because I still wasn’t very familiar with the ordering of my questions or comfortable with “probing” more). However, I still need to get better at asking for clarifications. There were a couple times during this interview when I didn’t quite understand what he meant, and even after hearing the translation I was still confused or wanted more information, but didn’t ask for clarification. I think I was nervous about somehow offending him by seeming like his answers weren’t “good” answers, but I know in the future that’s something I need to work on.

Ecologist Goes to Washington Podcast Interview and Blog!

You may recall from one of my earlier blog posts (“PlayingCatchup”) that I went to D.C. for a few days in April to participate in the Biological and Ecological Sciences Coalition Congressional Visit Day to talk with members of Congress about the importance of federal funding for science. Well, after the awesome experience I wrote a blog post for the Ecological Society of America Blog, and I was also interviewed for the Ecologist Goes to Washington podcast that ESA hosts.

Here are the links if you're interested!

ESA Blog, "'Putting a face' on science funding, Lear reflects on congressional visits experience:

http://www.esa.org/esablog/research/putting-a-face-on-science-funding-lear-reflects-on-congressional-visits-experience

Ecologist Goes to Washington podcast interview: 

http://www.esa.org/egwash/putting-a-face-on-science-funding-lear-reflects-on-congressional-visits-experience

(To listen, scroll down below the photos of the other folks and below all the sharing icons, and you’ll see a little Audio MP3 button to click on.)

First Bat Monitoring: A Tale of Frozen Batteries and Beautiful Scenery

First infrared bat monitoring and agave survey: done! Earlier this week I traveled with Claudia, Temo, Gehu, and Isra to Tepozanes and El Refugio, two ejidos in southern Nuevo Leon about six hours south of Monterrey. This year ESHAC is doing a community-based project to develop community and individual organic gardens for produce and other useful plants in several communities in Nuevo Leon and Coahuila, and I am going along on most of their trips to do my own work with the communities (doing group discussions and individual interviews (household surveys) about agave uses and harvest) and with the bats and agaves (doing infrared camera monitoring of flowering agaves to measure bat foraging and doing agave surveys). 

While Tepozanes and El Refugio are not near current known roosting caves of Mexican long-nosed bats and are therefore not my “top” priority sites for my research, these locations are still worthwhile to visit and do my work, for several reasons. First, there are caves and mines in the area and historical records from the 1960s and later of Mexican long-nosed bats in these caves/mines. Second, these communities are in the southern part of the mountain range that Mexican long-nosed bats likely migrate through on their way to the known roosting caves farther north, and therefore working with communities in these areas (that have many agaves) to investigate the potential for “bat-friendly” management is worthwhile to pursue. Third, there is another species of bat that feeds on agaves (the Mexican long-tongued bat, Choeronycteris mexicana) that is found in the area and is listed as Threatened by the Mexican federal government and Near Threatened by the IUCN, so any conservation work for my target species (the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat) in this area will benefit this species too. Finally, given the limitations of my current funding and the logistics of traveling here (aka needing a field vehicle and needing to go with others and not by myself), at least for this year it is necessary for me to coordinate/coincide trips with ESHAC’s trips, and Tepozanes/El Refugio is one of their project sites this year.

Into the Realm of Social Science I Go!

Well, I’ve officially taken the plunge into doing social science field research! A few days ago I completed my first two key informant interviews with two ‘comisariados’ (leaders) of two of the ejidos I’m working with for my project. And man has it been a tough learning experience! I feel like none of the classes I have taken on social science methods/field work, no matter how much we talked about doing interviews, etc., has fully prepared me for all of this. The one thing that my classes definitely prepared me for was the feeling of exhaustion that I felt after doing my first interview, and the feeling that I simultaneously completely failed and learned a lot.

During the first interview I decided to try to ask the questions in Spanish (I had written them out in both English and Spanish) but I was really nervous and I ended up fumbling a lot with easy words and getting flustered overall. The interview got started off with some basic questions (“How long have you been the leader of the community”, “How many people live in the community?”, etc.) but then I asked a question about community wealth “criteria” and how people in the community can tell if someone is wealthy, which kind of caused some confusion. After that I felt even less like I knew what I was doing and continued to fumble along to the end of the interview.

The Balancing Act (aka Struggles of an Interdisciplinary PhD)

I’ve been working on my methodology for the social component of my research (which is, in a nutshell, working in local communities to understand their harvest of agaves and how bat conservation efforts could potentially be incorporated) and I feel like I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I’ve taken several classes in anthropology and geography on qualitative methods (e.g. interviewing, focus groups, questionnaire surveys, etc.) but I feel that all my in-class training hasn’t truly prepared me for the real world. For example, I’ll be writing something about a method I’m proposing to use, like interviews, and realize I don’t really understand why I’m proposing to use that method or why I’m proposing to ask a certain question. Or I get to a point where I feel like I have an idea of what’s going on in my own mind, and then I get sidetracked with more information and more possibilities of methods to use or questions to ask. I’m finding it hard to keep myself narrowed down, I think because I don’t truly understand how “much” I’m supposed to be doing for a dissertation, how much is too much or not enough, etc. It all seems so interconnected and everything seems important to know and ask about!

I’m also struggling with the tug-of-war between “theory” and “real-world application”. I feel that my research and my interests are much more applied (I want to understand community management and harvest of agaves not so much to inform anthropological theory but to understand how bat conservation efforts could be incorporated), but since I’m doing a PhD my research also must be based in theory. I’m having a hard time balancing these two different components of my research, and understanding how to integrate the two in a way that will pass for a PhD will still having application to conservation efforts in the real world.

The Language Hamster Wheel

It's Day 9 of my 9 week stay in Mexico. I've been working all week in the office of the non-profit conservation organization I'm collaborating with (Especies, Sociedad y Habitat, A.C. (ESHAC)) to put  together my methods for my research with the bats and the local communities. I'll be doing two main things this summer for my PhD work: doing ecological monitoring of bat foraging (feeding) at agave plants at night using an infrared camera system and doing anthropological work with local communities in Nuevo Leon and Coahuila to understand their harvest and management of agaves (or magueyes as they are commonly known in Mexico) and the implications for bat conservation (and how bat conservation efforts could potentially be incorporated in the communities). I’ll be visiting two communities this Thursday and Friday to talk with the leaders about my project and after that will be going on a lot more field outings, but for right now I’m still preparing!

I’ve noticed some interesting similarities and differences between my language abilities this year versus last year. Last year during my first few days I felt pretty confident and felt like I did a pretty good job of communicating (probably because I brushed up on grammar before I arrived), but I couldn’t understand many people hardly at all since they talk so fast to my untrained ear. Then I started to feel like my speaking skills were diminishing, and about midway through my six weeks here I

Playing Catchup

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been an entire year since last May when I was heading off to Mexico for the first time! I just got back to Monterrey on Sunday (6 days ago) for my second field season for my PhD. I’ll fill you in on that in a bit, but first there are a couple things I've been wanting to blog about but with prepping for Mexico, finishing classes, etc. just didn't get around to.

First up: back in April I participated in the first meeting of the new-binational Nivalis Conservation Network, a group of researchers, non-profit organizations, and government agencies from both the US and Mexico dedicated to the conservation of the Mexican long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis), the species that I am focusing on for my PhD dissertation. The group was formed back in October 2015 during the North American Symposium on Bat Research, and as one of the founding members I helped plan and coordinate the Austin meeting in April. 18 people attended the meeting, covering the entire migratory range of the species from central Mexico to the southwest US, from places such as Bat Conservation International, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and several US and Mexican universities. We spent two jam-packed days working together to identify the current state of knowledge of the species and the research, conservation, and education priorities in each of the main regions of the migratory range (central Mexico, northeast Mexico and Texas, and Arizona and New Mexico). Since the Mexican long-nosed bat is a long-distance migrator (with the females and some males migrating over 1000 km between the mating sites in the south and the breeding caves in the north), the conservation of the species requires a coordinated effort among actors in both the US and Mexico. This meeting was the beginning of that, and I’m really looking forward to continuing to be a part of this group through my dissertation research and beyond. And I have to take a minute to recognize Bat Conservation International for their support of my research through a BCI Small Grant. Without their funding support I would not have been able to return to Mexico this summer to continue my work from last year. So THANK YOU to BCI!

 

Thousands (up to 1 million in peak summer months) of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) emerge from under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, TX. These bats are GREAT for controlling pests that harm some of our major agricultural crops, including corn, cotton, soybeans, and pecans.

 

After an exhilarating bat emergence! 

Thoughts on the Language Barrier: Anxiety and Opportunity

As I was reading an article on participatory action research (which entails getting multiple "stakeholders" involved in the research design and process) I had a thought that I've had several times before when thinking about my own research: this kind of participatory approach to my research would be great, but I feel a disappointing hesitation with actually implementing it, not because I don't think it's important or would be a good thing to do, but because of my lack of fluency in Spanish. I realized that if I was working with communities and farmers in the US I would be much more "comfortable" with doing this kind of participatory research, but because I am not fluent in Spanish I to be honest am somewhat "scared" of taking on that kind of approach. I've caught myself feeling this way several times, and in moments of stress I half wish I was working in the US for my research. It's strange because I think I feel an extra "pressure" to learn the language and be fluent because I am somewhat conversant in Spanish. If I was working in a country where I knew nothing of the language, I don't think I'd feel as much internal pressure to be completely fluent and "perform well". Despite all these moments of doubt, I know this whole experience will make me that much stronger, and I'll come out of it with a much better handle on speaking Spanish and with conversing and working with people in Spanish-speaking countries. Now it’s time to buckle back down and really practice!

Exciting News: ESA Graduate Student Policy Award!

I have some exciting news to share! I found out on Friday that I received a 2016 Ecological Society of America Graduate Student Policy Award! The award is a great opportunity to get more involved with the science-policy interface, and to learn how I can apply my own research and career to help inform policy decisions.

As part of the award, I will join a small group of other graduate students in Washington, D.C. in April to participate in the Biological and Ecological Science Coalition Congressional Visits Day, an annual event that brings scientists from many fields to the Capitol to highlight the need for federal support of science. We will receive hands-on training in science communication and policy, and will meet with Congressional representatives to discuss the importance of federal investments in the biological sciences.

I’m really excited about this opportunity and will keep you posted on how it all goes!

New Year, New Updates

Wow, I’ve been a bit remiss in keeping up with my blog! Well, it’s a new year and time for an update on my progress with my PhD program. This past semester has definitely been a busy one, and time to put all my research ideas into action (or not, depending on feasibility and funding…). This semester has also been an extremely important one in terms of professional development activities. Here are a few of the highlights:

First off, my research project is developing, although it’s still contingent upon funding from grants I’ve applied for. I have encountered feasibility issues with studying Mexican long-nosed bats (for example, they are just under the weight limit to attach GPS units for tracking to foraging areas; they can fly long distances from the roosting cave (up to 20-30 miles) to forage every night, making radio tracking them difficult; and the large entrances of their roosting caves in my study area make mist-netting them difficult) so have had to adjust my plans a bit. The ultimate goal of my work is still to identify areas of agaves where the bats forage so we can work with communities and agave farmers in those areas to develop bat-friendly agave management programs. However, now instead of directly tracking the bats to see where they are foraging, I plan to use infrared cameras set up in agave fields near communities to determine if the bats are using those agaves and how much they are visiting them. I also plan to conduct agave pollination studies to determine how much pollination services the bats are providing to the communities. Finally, I will be conducting interviews and focus groups with the communities and farmers to determine their willingness to adopt “bat-friendly” agave management practices and how to implement these practices. At least that’s the plan for now!

One of the best and most exciting things this semester was attending the North American Society for Bat Research Symposium in Monterey, CA. I hadn’t been to a NASBR meeting since the Costa Rica International Bat Research Conference/NASBR in 2013, and man was it good to attend again! I presented my proposed PhD research and got a lot of good feedback and ideas to pursue. Perhaps the most exciting activity was being part of the first meeting of a new working group for the Mexican long-nosed bat. The group is comprised of researchers (including myself), Bat Conservation International staff, and government department staff. As part of the group I will be helping to revise the Recovery Plan for the species and identify conservation priorities. We are planning to meet again to really get things going this April in Austin, TX. 

Finally, I am working on several publications, a few as collaborations that grew out of attending the International Association of Landscape Ecology meeting and the Ecological Society of America meeting, and one that stems from a paper I wrote for a class last year. I’m really excited to be working on these, and hopefully they’ll be accepted!

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.