Vanessa's Journal

Dec. 14

Today at breakfast it became clear that we have a mystery on our hands. Lao Wang was up most of the night because of a persistent beeping sound. Lao Yang heard it but went back to sleep and  Lao Fan and I heard nothing whatsoever.  Which one of our one million pieces of equipment was making that sound? It could take forever to figure that out. Between the walkie-talkies, GPS equipment, GPS collar accessories, computers, phones, and other miscellaneous electronic gadgets, we are in over our heads in potential beeping culprits. The sound mysteriously disappeared once we all got up. I think Lao Wang is taking a nap in the other room as I write this. I feel bad for him.

Today I decided to again be in charge of the walkie-talkie and work on making a map of the trapping study area.  Maps are important first of all because they help orient you as a researcher in your study environment.  I think it will help us to see the traps visually to understand what we are up against here in trying to capture pandas. In the future, we could build on the base map by adding in locations where we have seen evidence of pandas to see how close we are to bringing them in. 

Maps are also important for data analysis.  An example would be analyzing the spatial relationship between one panda and another panda, or one panda and a key resource such as a river.  Maps help you interpret your data across space and this is important for conservation when key areas of resource value are often contested. 

We need to not only know what pandas are doing but where they are doing it.  Yesterday I sent out my field assistants with a small GPS unit. They work the same way that the GPS collars do. They have an antenna that communicates with satellites that are overhead orbiting the earth and the satellites tell it where its location is (latitude, longitude, altitude).  So my field assistants came back to me with coordinates detailing where each trap was located that I used to build a map. 

In the afternoon, I worked on an English translation assignment I was given by my boss in the Ecology Lab here.  This sort of thing comes with the territory of being someone who speaks and writes English as a first language spending time here over the long-term. I am happy to do it. Often times it is one of those tasks that does not require a huge amount of input on my part but could potentially be of great help to my colleagues here for getting the work that they publish out to the English-speaking audiences. 

At dinner, I got the cage report from my field assistants. They ran into two red pandas on the trail, likely a mom and her cub.  I am so jealous! I guess they ran away too fast to get a picture. They also suspect that a squirrel has been visiting one of the cages and its small size has prevented the cage from being activated to close. That’s about it.