6:30am and the alarm clock sound, time to work. Generally researches wake up at 5am approx. To start their investigation project, but since today was my first day, Wendy was very nice and gave me some extra sleep time. We took breakfast in the station and then went to the Jungle for field work. Before going into the wild, I needed to have some materials or utensils with me: Big Rubber Boots, Compass, Walkie-Talkie, binoculars, long sleeved shirt and pants, two bandanas, map of the whole station, sharpie marker and a back pack with your lunch and any other material you could use (field stools, flash light, rain coat). The final adventure starts!
Peru is the 2nd country with the greatest species diversity, Colombia is first on the list and Ecuador is 4th. In the Yasuni region, were I am doing my field work there are approx. 100,000 species of insects, 400 species of fish, 120 species of reptiles, 200 species of mammals and 600 species of birds. Back to field work now. Today we were going to spot Pipra-Pipra (white crowned manakins) leks. Leks are an assemblage of adult males that defend territory and display for females to gain access to reproduction. In Pirpa-Pipra’s there can be from 4 male Manakins to 11 male Manakins in a lek. Females are very picky and select males very carefully thus usually only a few males get access to reproduction (high reproductive skew). Male white Crowned Manakins are very territorial, meaning that each male aggressively defends an area of the lek from other individuals of the same species. Aggressive interactions are not always seen at the leks because a dominance hierarchy has already been established. If a new male wants to venture into a territory, the male from that territory will take him out. | |
In TBS there are two 100 hectare plots, Puma and Harpia. There are Pipra-Pipras in both plots but we would be working just in Harpia plot this time. In order to get to the plot we walked about 40 minutes through a trail. Once we got the plot, we had to go 800m north to start our investigation since there’s a lek there. Pipra-Pipras are small birds, they weigh about 12 grams, you may imagine that spotting one in the middle of the amazon is really complicated. In order to do so, you must be quiet and wait for it to make its advertisement song. The functions of their song is to defend their territory and attract females. They also have a whistle that’s used for short distance communication, once the female is in his territory; while whistling they also do a courtship dance which is unique to the species but some “steps” (or dance moves) are shared withother Manakin species. We finally heard an advertisement song and started to track the Pipra-Pipra. Out of the trail and into the wild, surrounded by multiple insects, trees and plants we finally found our first individual. My first reaction when I saw the white crown Manakin was great, it was a small, cute bird, I knew it was a male since it had a black body and a white head (females are green) and it kept on doing its advertisement song. We tried to see with our binoculars if the Manakin had its colored and aluminum bands that has a unique code that researchers use to differentiate and count each bird. This one did have its bands (Aluminum and Green on its left and Orange andBlue on its right). Now that we know that this male is defending that specific territory, we can check if he did the same the previous field season or not. Since he is already banded we have all his informationand we don’t need to worry about capturing it. We could keep on searching for other Pirpa-Pirpas. By the end of the day we found five white crowned Manakins, 3 banned and 2 unbanned. Five may sound as a small number, but it is actually a lot for one day, as I said before, spotting them is complicated because they are small, have very small legs (which make hard to be able to see the bands) and the forest is very dense. Now that we knew that there were two unbanned individuals we needed to catch them in order to band them and get their information (e.g., weight, body measurements, etc) for the investigation project. This would be a task for the following days, today it was time to rest because it had been a tiring first day and tomorrow would be even harder.