Vanessa's Journal

Dec. 19

Today was my turn to go checking traps with Lao Fan.  We made record time - left at 8:35 a.m. and got back at 2:00 p.m! It was beautiful weather.  It was so sunny and I noticed much less snow than when I went out with Lao Yang earlier in the week.  Since it was a clear day, we could see the Four Sister’s mountain from Jianpengzi.  It was so breathtaking and was one of those “pinch me I must be dreaming of this” moments. 

We saw a lot of animal footprints again…all the same species from my first day with an addition of pheasant footprints.  In fact, we stumbled upon two pheasants at Jianpengzi.  It is always funny when that happens because the bamboo is so dense that you have no way of seeing them hiding in there.  They wait until you step right next to them and suddenly squawk really loud and flap their wings vigorously while flying away from you.  As it was such a contrast to our usual quiet hiking mode, they really startled us. 

We were surprised to find that the trap in Zhuangjinggou was closed when we got there (meaning…an animal was captured!).  I held my breath as I looked inside.  It must have been a funny sight to see Lao Fan and I standing next to each other peering intently into the cage and thinking “where is the animal?”  Apparently, a squirrel had set off the trap, but it was small enough to escape out of the holes in the trap door, so it successfully ran away.  However, it left behind incriminating footprints.  In fact, we found that another squirrel (or group of squirrels) had eaten nearly all of the meat at the Erdaoping.  I joked with Lao Fan that the squirrel must live up in the tree right next to the trap and just come down multiple times a day to snack.  What can you do?

When I got back I finished the Chinese version of my animal reintroduction presentation.  I will hand it off to have it proofread and see about when I should give the talk.

At night, the birthday party for Wei Liu was fun.  I got a musical candle that we couldn’t figure out how to turn off, so it just kept on singing “Happy Birthday” right through to the next morning.  That song is now in my head permanently.

We also had a group meeting to discuss the status of the trapping.  A concern that I have is that we seem to have adopted the “sit and wait” strategy of hunting.  That is, we are expecting the pandas to come up to the traps from a neighboring place called Hero Valley just as soon as it gets a little colder and the snow piles up some more.  So we are waiting for them to come to us (rather than going to them).  There are problems with going down to Hero Valley and setting up traps because that makes a lot of noise and it will surely scare them away.  It’s sort of a catch-22 because we want to put the traps as close to the pandas as we can, but if we do that then we will cause them to run away.  That’s where the ‘sit and wait’ strategy came from; we hope to have them walking into our traps without knowing we are there waiting for them. 

The problem with this is that we chose locations for traps based on where pandas were last year around late December.  But last year was much colder and had much more snow than this year.  So I think we started to doubt whether or not the pandas would move in the way we had anticipated.  Who’s to say that they might go a totally different direction either because of the weather or because of mere year-to-year variability in choice of habitats? And how long will we have to wait for them to come up here? What if it never snows enough? I’ve been losing sleep over this. 

We came up with the idea of having Lao Fan, Lao Yang, and Wei Liu go into Hero Valley for two days (starting the day after tomorrow) to find out how many pandas are over there and if they are in locations where it would make sense for them to be moving up into our trapping area soon.  If there is evidence of many pandas within a kilometer below where our Jianpengzi/ Yaopengzi traps are, we will continue to sit and wait.  We also hope that the presence of my team members in Hero Valley might disturb them enough to entice them to get a move on up to Wuyipeng a little earlier than maybe they would like. 

If my team does not find evidence of pandas in the areas where we thought they would be, we will be changing our strategy by setting up four new traps near an area called Fangzipeng, which is on the other side of Wuyipeng entirely.  During my team’s jaunt in Hero Valley, I will be up at Wuyipeng checking traps with Lao Wang as usual. 

After all of that, it was quite late.  I was very much ready for bed but had to make a phone call to my significant other. Today was our three-year anniversary.  Surreal to think it has been that long.  It’s amazing how modern technology can connect you to the other side of the world.  It was good to talk. I got caught up on the latest from MSU basketball -- apparently we are winning a lot.  Go MSU!