Work on the farm

Whoever thought of the environmental volunteer program I joined was a genius. On the one hand, you had the real conservationists who have dedicated their lives to studying and protecting the environment and mother nature and on the other hand you had people who wanted to volunteer and experience this way of life and in their own little way contribute to the effort. So the real conservationists who do this thing day in and day out get a little tired of tracking animals, checking traps, counting birds and washing scat (animal crap for us normal people) so guess what happens. Here comes someone like me who for the next week will do all of that and be happy about it too, well except maybe the scat washing. Sure we ask silly questions along the way, and ask them to pose for pictures but we pull our weight a bit and do all the dirty stuff they don't want to do so it's a great symbiotic relationship. The researchers get donations, free manpower and free publicity when people like me blog about the experience and the volunteers get to go waist deep in lake water, bait and check traps, hold down the occasional animal and generally live the life of a conservationist for a week. It's genius.

So what exactly did we have to do? Different things for different projects. One day we're driving out to the different fresh water and salinas lakes to install water level indicators and the next we are going up river only to let the current bring us back to our starting point all the while counting birds. We also took a mammal census both by foot and on horseback which meant we had to go through a trail and count all the kinds of mammals we saw along the way and collect any scat we came across. Probably the most exciting work we had was when we went out to check traps. for the small rodents and mammals project the excitement was just checking if the small shoe box sized traps had anything in them. If they did, the researchers would take it home, sometimes they would just measure it, take a blood sample and then release it back into the wild. Other times they would . . . . kill it to study it's internal organs and stomach content etc. Needless to say I stayed away when that happened.

More exciting than small rodents were the peccary that we had to track. Peccary are basically wild pigs or baboy damo in Filipino lingo. Doesn't sound exciting considering there were panthers in the area but without these animals there would be no panthers. Yes, the peccary is the favorite lunch item of the panther and so if their population goes, then so does our lovely panther. Tracking them was only part of it though, the real exciting part was catching them in cages. We would then have to tranquilize them, pull them out of the cage and do the whole blood sampling and measuring thing on the spot. Thank God we didn't have to kill any of them. My trip there was also timely because they were testing out a new trap which would coral a whole family group of peccary into a clearing and trap them. The researcher wasn't sure it was going to work but it was a resounding success. We must have caught 6-9 in one go which unfortunately meant the rest of the day was spend tranquilizing them, measuring them and eventually setting them free. Of course us volunteers did all the heavy lifting, dragging, measuring, recording while the researcher did the more delicate stuff like drawing blood. For the most part though she was our supervisor and you know what, we wouldn't have it any other way. For us, the dirtier and smellier we got, the more we felt like real conservationists. It's a good feeling of course having a nice farm shower to go back to helped a lot too.