Hello...

I will be moving things to the following blog:

http://www.aotbe.blogspot.com

many thanks!

Johan

In The End
I am sitting sipping coffee on the morning of my last day in Quito. The saga ends... 133 days in Ecuador and a whole load of data. Work in the second community of 'Cascabel 2' went relatively smoothly. The community of 2,000 ha is small compared to the almost 16,000 ha of Verde Sumaco and much closer to the town of Loreto, which is where the markets are. We worked fast and well, managing to finish our sampling in exactly 20 days. The only event was a dog-bit to Nick's leg. Luckily the bite was small and nothing more than scratch but the owners of the dog could not produce a vaccination card, which meant that we had to get Nick to the hospital to get a series of rabies vaccinations. We arrived at the small Health Center of Loreto on the night of that day but got told that we had to go to Coca to get the shots. I had spoken to the Epidemiologist of the province of Orellana a few weeks before about photographing some of the health issues related to Oil pollution as well as HIV and prostitution and called him to confirm that Nick could, in deed, get the shots in Coca. Otherwise we would have had to fly Nick to Quito which would have meant a delay of about a week. Luckily the Hospital in Coca had the vaccines and Nick braved a daily 3hr commute on the back of a truck for 7 days to get his shots (which by the way, go into the stomach). He managed to make it there and back for the sampling and we didn't loose a day. For that I am truly thankful ... "Chapeau". One of the things that struck be about the community of 'Cascabel 2' is that the noise of chainsaws was constant and when I asked how many people owned a chainsaw the answer I got was everybody.
After finishing our stint in 'Cascable 2', we spent a few days in Coca and travelled to Tena where I had been scheduled to give a talk. We spent a few days relaxing in Tena and then headed back to Coca to make our way into the Park. We had arranged to hire a canoe from Verde Sumaco and asked Raul (our incredibly hard working and motivated guide in Verde Sumaco) to come and work with us in the Park. We met as arranged via radio communication (this is a wonderful system - there's a local radio station in Coca which broadcasts to the surrounding area and if you want to send out a message to one of the communities you go to the station, pay $1 and ask them to relay the message - here's the part that is amazing - EVERYBODY in the 100 or so communities living in the area listen to the radio station) to meet in the community of San José de Payamino, where we would head up the river Payamino for a couple of hours and then go up the river Bigay to where the Park is. We had arranged for Eliberto, one of the local residents of Payamino and one of the 12 national park wardens to show us the way. On the way we saw the president of the community and I decided to stop and tell him that we were going to the Park. That was a bad mistake. The president was obviously drunk and didn't like it one bit that we were passing through the territory without permission. Now you might think fair enough it's their land, but here's the deal. First of all; we were on official park business and the community has no jurisdiction over the park - see the Ministry of the Environment. Waterways belong to the state and are thus free to navigate - the illegal part here would be to extract resources without permission - see dynamite fishing. Secondly, we were with Eliberto, one of the Park wardens and a resident of the community; why he had not told anyone we were coming is still a mistery to me. The park had a guard house on the communities territory, built with the agreement of the community and with the purpose of serving as an entry point to that area of the park. The reason for hiring a canoe was that the canoe of the park broke whilst we were in Verde Sumaco, which meant that whilst we where sampling in Verde Sumaco we needed a canoe and knowing that we were also going need a canoe to sample inside the park we decided to arrange current and future use of a canoe whilst we had the chance. I had been quoted $400 for a single trip on a canoe from Coca to Verde Sumaco (which I though was a ridiculous rip off and quite insulting really - a new canoe and a new motor would cost $4000 which would mean that a canoe and motor only had a lifetime of 10 trips). In the end we turned back - a decision which costed me a lot of money in gasoline, waisted food and broken promises to the guides plus the stay in the hotel in Coca, which is not cheap and ended up being a lot longer than I had hoped for. We ended up sorting things out with the people of park, who returned with us to the community to set things straight (I felt a little bit like I had been bullied and had to get my older brother). The important part here is that this could set a precedent, where the park itself needs to ask for permission to pass through the community to enter the park meaning that the community itself gets control of who enters the park and the park itself. In the end we had to hire the people from the community of Payamino to work with us and since we were short of time we had to work more intensely than we had done previously. But we finished sampling and I have to say that I leave Ecuador having fulfilled all the goals I has set out at the beginning of the field season. I am happy and ready to go home.

Various Notes:

It has been a while since my last post, which was just after the first part of the University of Manchester field course. The rest of the field course, which took place in the Community of San José de Payamino in the Ecuadorian Amazon went very very well. The group of students we had this year was very very motivated and I was given the all clear to head a small expedition into some more remote forest, which I think all the students enjoyed. 

Since then I have been running around like mad. I headed back to Quito after the field course finished and spent a night there getting Richard (my boss) to go through some last minute statistics with me. I then flew back to lovely Coca to conduct some follow up interviews and present some of the preliminary results of my study in the Communities I had visited last year and then headed up to Tena for a meeting with the National Park people and to lead a community based fern biodiversity monitoring workshop we organized with the German Development Service. 

The workshop went better than I could have expected, despite the logistical difficulties logistics of trying to organize a research project with 20 people. I also organized the logistics of my research internship with the GTZ, which started on the first of September. In late August I headed back to Quito to give a seminar at the FLACSO. 

On the 23rd I picked up Nick, my new field assistant and after 3 days of intense shopping in Quito we flew back to Coca to head to Verde Sumaco, where we spent 27 days sampling ferns, frogs and beetles and conducting household interviews to get an idea of how the community works. The community is four and a half hours up the river Paushi Yacu. We worked fast and very well with the help of Raúl Shiguango, our guide and also the help of the two park wardens. We also ended up camping in some remote forest for a week, which was an interesting experience in itself and a relief from the 3 AM wake up calls from both the community of roosters living under our hut and the generator at the neighbors house. 

The site we camped at was our plan B. Plan A was a small hut a further 4 hours upstream along a very small river called the Puru Yacu. The water was so low that we spent a good few hours digging trenches and removing stones and gravel to be able to pull and push the canoe up the river.  After about 3 hours we decided that the location was too remote and the river to low to be able to pull someone out in case of an emergency. Instead we camped half an hour upstream from the community and the hiked to the sites where planned to sample. The distance was not very far but the terrain very though and it usually took us 45 min. to walk 1.5 km. 

We are now back in Coca and were supposed to head to the new community today, but due to technical difficulties, we will not head out until tuesday next week. It gives us a few more days to sort out all our gear and relax before some more very heavy fieldwork.

Pristimantis ockendeni & Pristimantis variabilis

Back in Ecuador

Time flies (yes, we all know that but the more - or longer it flies, the more things end up on the "to-do-list"). There's is quite of things I have been meaning to post and have found no time to do so. Unfortunately posts end up being like the ubiquitous desk drawer which ends up with all the random bits of stuff that a) don't seem to rightly fit anywhere else or b) have been forcefully stuffed in there during a hurried attempt to bring the chaos on the desk under temporary control.

Firstly and perhaps most importantly: I am now back in Ecuador.
Breakfast of Champions: Courtesy of AirFrance

I arrived two weeks ago and the months prior to this latest round self-imposed exile have gone from busy to absolutely insane. The item at the top of my list was to find a field assistant. This was highly successful since a) I now have an assistant and b) we received over 60 applications for the position. It was interesting going through the whole selection process but this time from the other side. The first couple of days in Quito were spent trying to sort out my research permits and going through the visa application ordeal (I spent the last two days in Manchester trying to get a CRB -Criminal Records Background Check done, as well as getting a medical certificate from the University Health and Safety people in case they asked for them). Usually it feels like being told that all your teeth need root canal treatment but this time it went smoothly and I was only asked to provide one extra set of photocopies of some documents that I had with me. I was able to pop down to the conveniently located photocopying and laminating stall outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then jump the queue.

I will hopefully be working alongside the German Development Agency, which will be very interesting since it provides a link between the sometimes theoretically centered world of academia and the 'on the ground' development community. It might also provide some extra funding to add to the postgraduate research grant I was recently awarded before coming out here.

The schedule for the next couple of weeks looks pretty busy. We have just come back from Bellavista, a small cloud forest reserve to the west of Quito which is the first step of the University of Manchester Tropical Ecology and Biodiversity Field Course. The idea of the course is to introduce second year Life Sciences students to the Biodiversity Hotspot that is Ecuador, give them a taste of some of the research techniques used in the field and expose them to some of the current research issues related to conservation and sustainability. Tomorrow we head out to Coca, our entry point to the Amazon Basin. It is one of my favourite places in Ecuador. Coca's entire economy relies on the Oil Industry and it is not exactly what you would associate with the word picturesque but it has the character that imagine the old Yukon to have had.



The Students during an exercise measuring Fern-Biodiversity

Moths and various miscellaneous insects to a white sheet and a light

Taking a closer look

One of the hawk-moths (Sphingidae) on the sheet

Miscellanous

Well... I have been back in Manchester for more than a month now. March came and went relatively uneventfully, except for the week of for my birthday when Misty and I went skiing with some friends of ours in Switzerland. The whole affair was a cathartic experience after months of stress. Being at home has been fantastic after all the coming and going and I am now slowly getting ready to organize my second field season which starts in July, it feels like I have only just got back. I have analyzed most of the data from last years field season and filled my head with new statistical techniques which has been painful but great. I think the effort has been worthwhile and I am currently trying to prepare some of it for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. I am also looking out for a new field assistant. Nathan, who accompanied me on last years adventures is still recovering from his treatment of leishmaniasis and unfortunately won't be coming with me. The treatment is quite hardcore pretty and basically consists of a daily blast of antimonials, which are heavy-metals. He will be missed but I'll post an advert soon, so if you are interested - look out!

Nathan's Leishmaniasis

I have been approaching galleries and the Manchester Museum to see whether they are potentially interested in my project. I went for a portfolio review at the Impressions Gallery with the current exhibiting artist Margareta Kern who is a showing a series of images entitled Clothes for Living and Dying. I am not always a big fan of this portfolio reviews because most of the time people just stare at you blankly, say thank you very much but this is not our cup of tea. Overall the review went well and they were quite encouraging. They were quite interested in the idea of incorporating data into an exhibition and made me think about the kinds of questions that I was asking and how I was going to use photography to answer them. I am not always a big fan of a lot of conceptual art because I find that in many cases the concept gets lost in the delivery of the end product. I believe that if your concept doesn't translate to the viewer then the point of having a fantastic and solid conceptual framework is lost. Transpose this to science: -if you fail to explain your research to others you have failed to contribute to the collective intelligence. The crux of the problem being that many scientists have a hard time and are incapable of explaining complex concepts to the public or to people from other scientific backgrounds. In photography (and medium format photography in particular) this often leads of to a series of beautiful photographs with (as far as my limited understanding of the analysis is concerned) little depth - sadly,  the concept of 'style' seems to vanish and many series end up looking very similar. Disclaimer: I could be missing the point entirely, which wouldn't really surprise me. I am a scientist in training, not a successful photographer, or editor or curator - so my opinion is one with no influence and no  particular intent. My plan is to develop some of my ideas further and then see where that takes me.

From the series 'Clothes for Living and Dying' by Margareta Kern

When thinking about how to incorporate data into photography I was reminded about a piece on biofuels with some photographs by Rob Clarke that was published in October 2007 in National Geographic. In September 2008 there was another interesting piece on soil by Jim Richardson. I really like both of them because they manage to put a scientific twist on photography in the field. Rob Clarke took some wonderful shoots of crops growing in a field in and isolating an individual plant with a white background. Jim Richardson dug a trench and photographed the soil in such a way that you get the impression that he has actually dissected it. He adds the human element by incorporating the people using the land (and soil) in the photographs (they are perched above the trench). 

Lisa Corewyn posted this a comment on the blog (and I thank her for doing so)  but think it will get more exposure as post than as a comment (this is the full link to it). It is self explanatory. Except for expressing my condolences any comment of mine is superfluous: 

Coca - Payamino - Coca
I arrived in Coca on wednesday afternoon. The first thing that I saw was big tankers on the street, filling up the water tanks of houses. Coca is officially in a state of emergency. Every day at 6.30 am tankers supplied by OCP, fill up with water from the river Payamino and then make the rounds of the city. Here´s the irony, the tankers that supply water usually transport oil. Drinking water is being supplied by Coca Cola and paid by OCP - corporate to the core. Luckily, the authorities gave warning of the spill in time and virtually nobody has fallen sick. When I spoke the mayoress today, she said... "luckily we knew how to react, this happened last year too so we have some previous experience". Yesterday we visited the community of Huataracu, which is about one an hour away and on the banks of the rio Coca, we were not able to speak to anyone. Not only is the community vast but they have also agreed to let the Petrobras set up shop and most of it is actually behind the checkpoint, which we were of course not allowed to pass. We went down to the river bank to have a look and although you can not see large chunks of crude oil it is obvious that the river is in bad shape. It is covered by a thin layer of oil and since the river has been going up and down because of heavy rains the banks are covered in a thin sheen. Ali, Sumiko (two volunteers currently working in San Jose de Payamino) and I accompanied the mayoress on a trip upstream with the OCP engineer in charge of the clean up in this area (there more than a 2ookm of river that have been affected by the spill) and it was interesting to see how the discussion between the two, since one was down playing the impact of the spill while the other was criticising the slow response and the lack of personel (apparently 50 people are working on the clean up operation, but it we saw less than of half of that actively on the river). Most of the operation was centered on filtering the oil off the water with specifically designed foam filters which are stretched out on the surface of the river, but speaking to the engineer it will take months (perhaps a year) for the whole remediation to be completed. Quite a scary thought

















Clean up operation on the banks of the Rio Coca
















9000 bottles of Dasani (Coca-Cola) await distribution in the Navy Headquarters in Coca

The visit to Payamino was relatively uneventful. I saw and spoke to Lucio and a couple of other people and Ali and Sumiko seem to be doing as well as they can with the resources they have and support they are getting. On the way back we stopped to see a Puma cub (Puma concolor), which had been caught by the people in Payamino and given to the settler community of Campo Alegre as a tourist attraction. One of my ideas for my book project is to look at the illegal pet trade. This being a blatant example of it. This afternoon we visited someone who kept a "tigrillo" (Leopardus tigrinus) in their back yard with the chickens. It was good getting the contact of the mayoress, since I was able to tell her about my idea of the book. Next time I come to Coca I will try and show them a proposal and see whether they can help me with some contacts.
















Puma in Campo Alegre
















Tigrillo in a chicken coop, El Coca