Field Notes #14: Turning Points

Text by Matthew McGee

I recently finished the first field season of my PhD research, five long and incredible months in the montane rainforest of Anjanaharibe-Sud Special Reserve. I’ve written at excruciating length about some of the major events that changed the course of my field season: our encounter with illegal miners at the high elevations, my knee injury on the first day of data collection, and the emotionally cathartic journey I went on when I followed two white-fronted brown lemurs out of camp. Those are the obvious narrative milestones when telling the story of my field season, but in a way they obscure the broader truth: every single day felt like a turning point. Maybe it’s because everything was so new to me, but every day seemed to bring a new piece of information that changed the way I thought about my project. What follows is the story of one of those normal days in the field, the last day we conducted fieldwork at the 1260m field site (aka site 2).

Between two rocks with Matt McGee

The morning starts at 4:30AM when the soft beeping of my watch alarm gently wakes me from whatever malarone-fueled nightmare I was enjoying into the cold dark oblivion of my tent. The temperatures have gotten mercifully warmer since my first trip to site 2 in July, but I’ve grown weak and brittle in my old age, and so I spend the first 15 minutes of the day wriggling around my tent in my sleeping bag like a grub newly exposed to sunlight. Once I’ve finally unearthed myself, it’s time for my two favorite morning activities: trying to jam contacts in my eyes by the light of my headlamp followed by putting on the driest pair of damp pants I have left. It’s the little things that get your day started in the right headspace, you know?

Camp 2

The streambed portion of Transect Q

Around 5am, I stumble out of my tent with an armful of equipment, ready for breakfast. What could it be this morning?! Pettie, our cook, brings a covered bowl to the table. It’s…it’s...it’s rice! We also have leftover broth and masikita  from dinner and a large plate of crepes Pettie cooked at 3am. Half the team eats a few crepes with their tea while I shovel down two plates of rice like a true champion. By 5:20AM, the entire team is ready to go except for one annoyingly slow individual (it’s me). We’ll be working on Transect Q today, which starts on the trail near camp and pushes deep into the forest, seemingly getting wilder, denser, and more fantastical with every transect marker we pass. It’s the place in ASSR where I feel most connected to the natural world, like I’m on the verge of understanding something important if I just had a little more time. But what I have is today, and that will have to do.

We have three things left to do on our final day of surveys: bird counts and butterfly counts in the early-t0-mid morning, and veg surveys after that. Each transect is 1km long, with eight survey plots placed at each 125m interval, starting at 125m and ending at 1000m. We start our bird and butterfly counts at the 125m plot around 5:45AM. Nothing unusual jumps out bird-wise, just the typical assortment of Souimanga Sunbirds, Tylas Vangas, and Blue Couas, while most of the butterflies don’t seem to be awake yet. Everyone is in a good mood, and we take lots of photos as we continue the surveys, causing the quietest ruckus we can manage. We see a couple of Velvet Asities along the way, but the real highlight of the morning comes early: a striking Madagascar Pygmy Kingfisher at the 250m plot. I almost fall off the giant boulder I’m perched on trying to see it, which greatly amuses my team, who have somehow learned to call me HazMatt despite their otherwise limited grasp of the English language. What we don’t see are the rare and mysterious vanga species that we’ve continually been searching for, which is slightly disappointing given that it’s our last chance at this particular site. Where is my gosh-dang Helmet Vanga?! Shouldn’t climate change have driven it farther up the mountain by now?! We also see very few butterflies—I’ve started to suspect that I’m using a broken methodology, and now I think I need to seriously retool it for next field season.

ABC (always be counting)

The sun breaks through the clouds around 7:30am, but it’s raining by the time we start our final survey an hour later. I stubbornly try to wait it out before giving in and putting on my rain gear. The rain stops five minutes later. I chose this life. This was my decision.

Field science in action (making our veg stick for understory surveys)

We start veg surveys just after 9am. We’ve developed a system by now: Richelin and Lawi record all of the tree IDs and measurements, Niaina and Jao handle the understory and shrub layer densities, and I scribble down the canopy cover and ground cover, muttering to myself about moss and low strata plants. We’re back at camp by 1pm for a slightly delayed lunch of sardines and rice, and then Jao and I hoof it back to the beginning of Transect Q to get phone service. I also want to get a picture of a Red-Tailed Newtonia, a rare and understudied bird that I’ve seen a couple of times in that area. I fail. But I do confirm that the Red-Tailed Newtonia has taken a consort and she is acting quite nesty. A cursory google search on the 2G of signal I have tells me that this species may still lack basic nesting descriptions. I’m ready to spend the rest of the day nest searching, but it’s getting late and Jao seems ready to go back to camp, so I tell myself it can wait. We aren’t leaving until after lunch the next day, so we have the entire morning to nest search.

We eat a dinner of smoked shrimp and rice—the last dinner we’ll ever eat together, although no one realizes that yet. Heavy rain starts in the middle of the night, and it doesn’t stop until early the next afternoon. We never have a chance to find the nest. It’s a slightly defeated hike in the rain back to Camp Indri, but our mood improves as the sun emerges once again, and we’re looking forward to taking a car back to town the next day instead of desperately clinging to the sides of a motorcycle as the driver hurtles down the mountain. Jao and Lawi head back to their village that afternoon while the rest of us dry our wet clothes in the glorious sunshine. Another day and another session are done.

So what stuck with me after just another regular day? It was the second time I had tried butterfly counts in the early morning, after multiple attempts in the late morning and afternoon. My early findings suggested that it was the weather that mattered the most for butterfly sightings and not the time of day, which meant I would need to rethink how I conducted those surveys. I was also becoming more convinced that I needed to take longer survey trips during the next field season—just like my rudimentary attempts to speak Malagasy, I felt that something crucial was being lost in translation by moving so quickly, and that more time would bring deeper understanding.

ASSR in all its glory

But the Red-Tailed Newtonia was the major turning point. It taught me an old lesson in a new way, a lesson that’s true for all of fieldwork, but one I had never experienced so intensely as I did in the rainforest: when you have a chance to do something, when you see that opening, you take it immediately and you don't look back. You do not save it for tomorrow. Because tomorrow it's raining. Tomorrow you have to make datasheets. Tomorrow you hear a strange bird singing and it takes you 3 hours to find it. Tomorrow you can’t focus, because you know you’re missing something back home and loneliness clings to you like a leech. Tomorrow you can't walk. Tomorrow you can't eat. Today is the only guarantee you have.

I took that lesson to heart, and it changed the rest of my field season.