Collaborating and Conserving Across Borders: PIT Tagging Workshop

What happens when you bring together researchers and conservationists from the U.S. and Mexico for six days in the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains of Nuevo Leon? You get an amazing, collaborative effort to save the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis)! I joined colleagues from Especies, Sociedad y Habitat A.C., Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Victoria, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Bat Conservation International, New Mexico State University, and Texas A&M for a six-day PIT tag training workshop in the Parque Nacional Cumbres de Monterrey. We gathered near an important roosting cave for the Mexican long-nosed bat, Infierno Cave, where the females gather every summer to give birth to their pups (babies).

The Best Part of Fieldwork? Cool Slow-motion Bat Videos!

When watching some of the videos I have collected so far this summer, it became obvious that identifying the specific species of the bats feeding on the agaves is no easy task. The videos are really cool to watch, but the resolution is not high enough to see the distinguishing features (e.g. tail membrane size/shape, length of nose, etc.) of the species well. (For a more complete description of how to identify the different species, see my previous blog post: “The Many Faces of Agave Visitors”). So, I figured out how to take zoomed, slow motion video clips while monitoring at night! I’m super excited about the results. The videos are a tad dark, since slow motion recording requires a lot more light than normal recording, but you can clearly see the bats and all their features! For example, you can see how the back legs look like a “V”, which means that the tail membrane is relatively small. This means the bat is not a Mexican long-tongued bat (Choeronycteris mexicana), which has a large tail membrane. These videos have allowed me to definitively confirm that they are Leptonycteris. Anecdotal evidence says that Mexican long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris nivalis) make a “whooshing” sound when flying, while Lesser long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) don’t. Since I did hear “whooshing” while the bats were flying around in the field, I’m pretty darn sure they’re Mexican long-nosed bats, the target species for my project. This is definitely an exciting finding! I hope you enjoy the videos below!

A Typical Day (and Night) in the Field

So you may be wondering just what exactly my fieldwork entails. Well, read on to find out!

First, a summary of what my project is about. I’m working with the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) in northeast Mexico (the states of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila). Every spring and fall, Mexican long-nosed bats migrate over 1000 km (600 miles) between their mating cave in central Mexico and their maternity caves in northeast Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. (A maternity cave is where the females give birth to and raise their pups.) During this migration, the bats feed on the nectar and pollen of agaves and cactus plants. However, in the northern portion of their range where I’m working, they feed solely on the nectar and pollen of agaves. People in the region also harvest and use agaves for a variety of purposes, including several beverages and food products, forage for livestock, and housing material. In order to help conserve the bats, I’m working in several rural communities throughout the region to understand how they are using agaves and if there may be opportunities in the future to promote “bat-friendly” agave harvest and management. I’m also trying to figure out what the bats need in terms of food (agave) resources when they are in the region in the summer.

The Many Faces of Agave Visitors

While my project focuses on nectar-feeding bats and agaves, there are MANY other animals that make use of and benefit from agaves, some of which I have caught on camera!

First off, there are insectivorous (insect-eating) bats that take advantage of all the nocturnal insects flying around the agave flowers and feeding from the nectar. Moths and beetles provide a smorgasboard to these insect-eating bats. I managed to get some infrared videos of one of these visitors in the desert scrub ecosystem of Coahuila. From the still-shot beloow, it looks like this visitor is a Pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus), a fairly common desert bat found in the western U.S. and much of Mexico. These bats are super cool because they typically glean prey off of surfaces, and even ambush large centipedes and scorpions on the ground!

Back in the Field!

This field season is off to a fast start! I’ve been back in Mexico for 4 ½ weeks now and it seems like just a couple weeks! I’ve been quite remiss in keeping up with my blog. This summer has been a lot more jam-packed than last summer, since this year I have funding to support my field work and have been able to rent my own field truck, and therefore get into the field a lot more. This year my work is being supported by a Rufford Foundation Grant, a Phoenix Zoo Conservation Fund Grant, an Idea Wild equipment grant, and the Kate Barlow Award from the Bat Conservation Trust. Without these groups this work would not be possible!

While 4 ½ weeks is a lot to cover, I’d like to share a few highlights so far so you can get an idea of what life has been like during my third field season!

Crazy Neighbor Package Debacle

So Tom sent me a little care package in early June, including several of my DVDs to keep me entertained in my down time here. Last year when he sent me a package it arrived within about 2 weeks. However, this year I am sadly still waiting for it to arrive, over a month later. Why the slowness? Well, apparently the Mexican federal mail can be quite slow (or things get lost (or stolen) easily) so apparently this year I got the slow end of the stick.

Complicating things is the fact that I gave Tom the wrong address. I told him a house number that is two houses down from mine. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. You just knock on that person’s door and explain the situation to them, and ask them to put the package outside your door if they receive it. But of course this couldn’t be a “normal” situation…

First Mexican Doctor Visit!

Last week I went to my first doctor here in Mexico! Luckily it wasn’t for anything serious (just some very itchy and spreading blisters/sores on my fingers and hands) but definitely something I needed to get checked out. This doctor has a consulting office, with the doctor by himself in a little office in a residential area (actually just about a 30 second walk from my house, conveniently for me). It was my first time experiencing what many immigrants or visitors to a foreign country probably feel when they go to the doctor in that country: I pretty much had no idea what he was telling me about my problem. Claudia came with me and she helped, but since the words he was telling me were words I had never heard before (like the blisters look like some kind of bite from some sort of insect/bug, but I’m not sure what…) it was really hard to understand exactly what caused my problem (a fly, a mite, a mosquito?). Luckily I understood what he told me I needed to do to get rid of them (with a little help from pantomiming). So I left not really understanding what the bites were from and just hoping that the ointments he prescribed me would work…Luckily after a week of using the ointments things seem to be clearing up. Let’s hope my last week here is uneventful in the illness/injury department and that I don’t need a return visit!

It's All About Timing

Another trip to the field, with two weeks left here in Mexico. This was another return visit to a community I went to a few weeks ago to interview the community leader. This time the goal was to do the focus groups with people who use agaves, as well as do a night of bat/agave camera monitoring. Unfortunately, as has been characteristic of this whole summer, things didn’t go quite according to plan. Temo, Ana, and I arrived in the evening and went back to the leader’s house to meet with him and get the focus groups going. However, I had not been able to contact him ahead of time, despite numerous texts and phone calls. There is no phone reception in the community, and while he had told us on our last visit that he is in Monterrey Thursdays and Fridays, I was still not able to get in touch with him during those days. So I was just hoping that he would remember that we had a visit scheduled for these days and that I wanted to do the focus groups. That didn’t work out so well...We couldn’t find him. So we went to the house of one of Temo’s friends who lives in the community, and she took us to meet with the leader’s dad, who is one of the few people in the community who harvests agaves and makes “mezcal”. Ana and I had a great almost two-hour conversation with him while Temo and his friend drove around the area looking for flowering agaves to monitor that night. We learned all about the history of mezcal making in the community, the process to make it, a medicinal use of mezcal (when mixed with sewing machine oil it’s apparently a great thing to put on cuts, burns, etc. to promote faster healing), and the best part: we got to try some! We got to try some of his very own mezcal, as well as some of his apple wine. Mmm, both so tasty! The mezcal was definitely a lot smokier than the “destilado” one of the other communities makes. That’s because the process he uses is a bit different: he collects agua miel from the agaves and ferments it in vats (like the other community does), but instead of distilling the fermented liquid (the pulque) to make the destilado, he cooks the agave pinas in earthen ovens, chops them up, and adds them to the vat of fermenting agua miel, and lets the mixture sit like that for a few days, and THEN distills the liquid. It’s amazing how everyone has their own process, and the results are definitely different!

The Summer of Dead Cars

Wow, this sure has been the summer of dying batteries and car problems! We (Isra, Ana, and I) got back yesterday from a 2-day trip back to the community we visited earlier this week, and boy was it a production trying to arrange the trip! It all started when I found out two days before leaving that the truck isn’t working (the battery had died last week, but I thought it had been fixed…). So then I had to find another mode of transportation. Isra’s car isn’t an option (since he was in an accident a few weeks ago and his car is still out of commission) so I asked Ana if we could go in her car. Luckily she said yes. However, around 8:00pm the night before our trip, she texted me saying that her husband’s car had stopped working and he needed to use her car the next day. That left me to scramble that night to figure out what to do. I settled on renting a car. Not ideal given my budget, but I really had to make this trip (I had already arranged it with the comisariado of the community), so I sucked it up and decided to rent a car for the two days. Luckily the community we were going to is located right off the major highway and no four-wheel drive is needed, so I could get the cheapest car available.

Return of the Roach

This past weekend, I was just thinking how I hadn’t seen the big cockroaches in awhile (not even outside on the building walls at night), and that it has been really nice not to have to deal with them. I spoke too soon...

They’re BAAACK!!! On a night like any other, I wandered up the stairs half-asleep to hit the hay, and there he was. The big cockroach. On the steps between me and my bedroom. He was looking right in my direction, so I didn’t want to walk up the stairs and risk spooking him (aka risk him flying at me). So I got a big Tupperware container and threw it at him, hoping it would land over him and trap him. Unfortunately, all it did was the thing I didn’t want to happen: he spooked and flew haphazardly directly at me. I scrambled down the stairs and he landed on the bottom one. He was kind of close to the door so I thought maybe I could use the broom to push him out. When I tried that, he ran quickly across the living room floor, and somehow I managed to throw the Tupperware and this time trap him. I was tired and wanted to go to bed, so he got to sleep in the Tupperware that night.

Destilado and Seedlings and Quiotes, Oh My!

I spent my 4^th of July in the ejido in Coahuila that I first visited this summer to do an interview with the comisariado (leader), this time to do my first focus groups. However, I ended up doing a sort of impromptu interview and ejido tour with the comisariado and the man in charge of their new agave program, as well going with them to visit another nearby ejido that is participating in the new agave program. Not exactly what I had planned, but during our over two-hour conversation I learned a lot about the agave program. They have received funding from the Mexican federal government to plant agaves for making agua miel and “destilado” (basically mezcal that can’t be called “mezcal” given that the state of Coahuila is not within the Denomination of Origin for mezcal and therefore producers in this state are not legally allowed to sell their distilled agave product as “mezcal”). Through this program they recently built a new distillery for making the destilado. There are several other ejidos in the area that also harvest agaves and bring them to this distillery to make the product. They will be exporting their product to other countries, including the US. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any available to try, but I hope I’ll be able to buy a bottle once they start selling!

 The first bottle of "destilado" made as part of the 

ejido's new agave program. They will be sending it

to a university laboratory to have the contents tested

so they can establish a standard for their product.

Cultural and Linguistics Adjustments

Thought it was time to share some of my more recent thoughts on the language and culture barrier!

There have been quite a few times when I have not known a phrase or common expression, and therefore end up sounding weird. For example, when getting up from the dinner table to go to the bathroom recently, I realized that I didn’t know how to say “Be right back”, so I ended up saying “I will return”. Weird, right?

I can’t multitask and still listen to people (or half-listen) like I can in English. Like in English I can half-watch TV and half-listen (and understand) conversations around me. Here I can’t do that. I have to give it (listening/understanding) my FULL attention, and even then I often still get lost. It sucks when I’m not listening to a conversation (from either being lost in the conversation, from mental exhaustion, or from thinking about something else) and I hear my name in the conversation. Suddenly all eyes turn to me or someone laughs, and I have no idea how to respond or what to say since I don’t know why they said my name. I usually default to saying “Yes” or “No” and laughing hesitantly, which has gotten me a reputation for always saying “No” to certain people in our group, and “Yes” to others. It’s now a joke among us, with more than a little bit of truth to it...

Bats and Kristen Feeding on Agave Nectar!

More success in the bat department! Last weekend Gehu, his friend Cynthia, and I headed back to Ejido Estanque de Norias and the area near Rosillo Cave (a suspected maternity cave for the Mexican long-nosed bat where females give birth to their pups) for another night of bat/agave monitoring with the infrared cameras. Last visit we only saw one bat briefly fly by one of the two focal agaves, and I’m not sure whether it was checking out the flowers to feed from or if it was swooping by to pick of the insects that swarm near the flowers. However, this time I saw several bats visit the flowers of one focal agave, with no doubt that they were feeding on the nectar! There were at least two individual bats and probably over 40 visits to the flowers of the focal agave in the “best” patch in the area (that is, the patch with the highest density of flowering agaves). I have to go back through the recording to confirm the number of visits and to try to identify the species of bat (it could be either the Mexican long-nosed bat, or the Mexican long-tongued bat, which is listed as Threatened by the Mexican federal government), but either way these bats are in need of conservation efforts so this is good information. I’m beyond thrilled that I finally saw some definite visits to the agaves, and in the way that I expected (with more visits at the focal agave in the “best” patch than at the focal agave in the “worst” patch).

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.