Manjula goes blogging...

Aren’t ‘Rite in the Rain” notebooks just wonderful? Today, even in the heaviest downpour I can collect data calmly, safe in the knowledge that my sturdy, yellow book will not wimp out on me. But there was a time when I was ignorant of such sophistication and I doubt my shoe-string budget would have allowed such luxury….I was on my very first sea turtle project - I had been assigned to do sea turtle surveys in the remote Nicobar Islands. I had just finished surveying some of the smaller islands and was catching a boat back to my base in Great Nicobar. When we set out in our small, open, wooden boat, the ocean was calm and the rain came down like a curtain. Steadily, the gentle swells grew larger and very soon we were riding up the crest of big waves and cautiously surfing down the other side. The boatman and his crew were a very merry lot - chewing beetlenut and chatting amongst themselves, they were completely unalarmed by the ocean’s sinister behavior. Needless to say, I did not feel quite as jolly. It was a great relief when they decided to stop in a calm bay for lunch. With my spirits revived after a delicious chicken curry cooked by the Nicobarese, I set out to explore the beach. Although I had previously surveyed most of that island, this stretch had remained unsurveyed because of logistical difficulties. So, I was very excited when I found the beach pockmarked with leatherback nests. I reached into my bag for my low-budget, regular notebook and pen and found everything completely soaking in rainwater - the paper was too wet to write on and the pen was dysfunctional. As I despaired, the boatman started rounding us up to head back to the boat. How could I leave this beach without getting my data??? My panic button was switched on - I tore off some big Scaevola leaves from bushes nearby, broke off some thorns and sprinted up and down the beach scratching notes into the leaves with the thorns….few years later, I could still read my notes on those dried leaves…

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Imagine sharing your nesting beach with jaguars!

Imagine sharing your nesting beach with jaguars! This was one of the highlights of the seven months I spent in Tortuguero. It was thrilling to read in the sand where he had rested the previous night, where his tail had lain, how his tracks had changed from a steady walk to a run or a pounce. Ever so often a nesting green turtle would fall prey to his powerful jaws (Troëng 2000). Most green turtles were flipped over on to their carapace with their heads torn off and loosely attached to the body by some skin. Sometimes the turtles were immediately dragged off into the vegetation with blood, eggs (shelled and unshelled) and body parts scattered along the path. On other days, the turtle was just left on the beach or dragged later, usually by the hind flipper, into the vegetation. With all the time I was spending on the beach and crawling in the vegetation to see where the jaguar had taken the turtle, an encounter with the beast was inevitable.

It was about 6.45 am, Luciano and I were walking down the beach, counting the number of nests and halfmoons from the previous night in each of my experimental plots. I was reading something in my notebook, when I heard Luciano say, "Oh shit Manjula! the jaguar!" Sure enough, at about 50m from us, sitting up near the vegetation, was a big, magnificent jaguar surveying the beach on either side! Wow!!! We went into an extreme emotional state - panic, excitement, disbelief -and walked backwards to the tide line with the thought of swimming into the ocean if necessary - incidentally, the ocean there is full of bull sharks and jaguars can swim too! A little later, the jaguar got up, swished his tail, and went back into the vegetation. That wasn’t the last we saw of him that day.

Same day, 10.40 am, we passed that section of beach again. I decided to check out the place where the jaguar had been sitting. I walked ahead along the vegetation and saw some very fresh tracks and then a dead turtle lying just inside the vegetation. As I was describing this aloud to Luciano, I suddenly noticed the jaguar sitting next to the turtle, less than 3m from me! Again, we went into an emotional spasm and ran down to the water. But we so much wanted another glimpse of this elusive, beautiful animal, so we crawled up the beach with stout sticks and some powerful pepper spray….we chickened out before we got too close to the vegetation and headed back to the field station to tell our story….

As far as I know, there is little documentation of jaguars attacking humans. In the few jaguar encounters on Tortuguero beach, the jaguar has never attempted an attack. In fact, one time when Luciano unknowingly stumbled on to a jaguar feeding on a turtle, the jaguar just stood up on the turtle and roared at him….

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It is late Sunday night and I am in my office trying to come up with a good story for my very first blog. Alas, my brain cells are soaking in binomial regressions, generalized linear models, overdispersion factors, and S-Plus functions - hmmm… not the best ingredients for a good blog story…. But as I put my data through all these mathematical contortions, my mind wanders back to the simple days of data collection on the black Tortuguero beach and to some of the people who helped me and who tried to help me…My field season did not start very auspiciously. My first field assistant who came all the way from England and showed great promise on paper left within 48 hours. Just one hot and humid Tortuguero day of sunburns and blisters did him in. He just couldn’t bear the thought of waking up every morning for the next seven months knowing that he had a 12-mile walk on soft, black sand and many, many hours of work in either intense heat or pouring rain ahead of him. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him that within a week he would be Superman - hadn’t he told me that he had spent two years in the army?? There was no stopping him - he returned to London hoping to get a job as a stockbroker and I have never heard from him since. Then came Jose from Tortuguero village - he is one of the most intelligent people I have worked with. Though he spoke only Spanish and I communicated through phrases composed of French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish (possibly Sanskrit too!) words glued together, he always knew what needed to be done and why it needed to be done. Jose, unfortunately, did not last long because he was caught poaching a turtle. Another local field assistant later, Luciano, a Brazilian student, volunteered to help me with data collection. It is not always easy to work for many months on someone else’s project, especially a very physically taxing project, with unwavering enthusiasm and an equal sense of responsibility and dedication, but Luciano surpassed all my expectations. He was a field assistant extraordinaire and I have great respect for him. Looking now at all the “rite in the rain” notebooks piled high on my table, I know I owe him so much for all the numbers that I am now putting through fancy statistics…

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)