Wildlife abounds, but jerboas?

If you want to see what life is like without the EPA, come to a large city in northern China in the winter. There was still some snow on the ground when I arrived since they'd just had a heavy fall a few days previous, but by now what is left of the snow is indistinguishable from the road since everything is black.  It was raining yesterday, and the black on everything is so thick that it's difficult to tell if that's how the water falls from the sky.  And all along the sides of the road lies the detritus of lost items and litter that lay buried for the last few months. I know there is always some stuff left behind after the snows in Boston, but this is different.  It's like the piled high snow bank is just replaced with a smaller but no less impressive trash bank. It's a sight to behold.

But we are now up to clean air and brown brown brown as far as the eye can see.  Spring has not yet sprung here, and while it's not so cold anymore, it's clearly still on the crest of warming up. We arrived at Fukang in the late afternoon and were greeted by the woman who has run this place for as many years as I know.  She's not the director but rather the caretaker - dorm mom and keeper of the keys.  She remembered me from before and seemed overjoyed that I was back. But I am apparently too skinny.  This is common in China - the topic of weight is never off limits, and I have had people let me know if they think I have gained or lost weight. Then she went on telling my companions about how she and I have always been able to talk to each other even though we don't speak a word of the other's language.  She's so vocal and expressive, and I've always been able to tell from her gestures and the tone of her voice exactly what she was trying to tell me - whether we were fixing my toilet or finding a way for me to do laundry. And I know quickly if she's happy or annoyed. So it's good to see her again.

And the cook is the same.  He was busy tossing a mound of food in a giant wok set over a blazing propane fire when I walked in for dinner, so I just stood behind watching the food and sweat fly.  The caretaker walked in behind him and must have asked if he saw who was back, because he turned around with a look of utter shock on his face and said "You!" in English. He couldn't seem to get over staring at me (and also saying I'm thinner) and invited me to sit next to him among some of the other students at dinner.  His English isn't very good, but he tries really hard.  I asked about his cat. "Mou?" I asked, because he had a new kitten the last time I was here. "Died" was his blunt answer.  Poor kitty.

This morning after a breakfast of fermented tofu on steamed buns, rice and boiled peanut soup, spicy strands of seaweed, and a plate of mixed onion, peppers, and tomato in vinegar, we headed off in the jeep in search of the right kind of desert for jerboas.  I knew one of the places where we'd trapped animals with snap traps before, so we went up the highway to some of those dunes and walked around for a bit looking for tracks.  It rained last night, so where we could see tracks they were too dampened down by the rain to tell if they were jerboa or gerbil.  There are a lot of gerbils around here.  Nasty critters.  So we decided to go back to the jeep and loaded up with 50 traps, peanut butter, and a bag of oats to walk along a trail and set live traps for the night. Every 20 steps I scooped some bait into the trap with a stick and set it, and at every 5th trap we placed a flag to mark the line so they wouldn't get lost.  I hope they don't get trampled by goats or stolen by herders since those are borrowed and will be expensive to replace.  But fingers crossed we have more than gerbils by morning.  The driver said there was no reason to mark where we started since he's sure to remember.  I took note of the surroundings just in case.  Road marker 535 between the radio tower and the big blue sign - past the third herd of camels on the left. Love camels.

On the way back to the field station, we stopped by a yurt on the side of the road to see if we could persuade people to do some catching for us tonight.  It was an older Kazakh couple who were crouched over a goat in a pen as we walked up.  They must have thought we were an obnoxious group of tourists since while I was just pleasantly smiling and doing my best to put them at ease, my colleagues were eagerly snapping photographs. It was something to see though - the woman was in a red/orange/pink brocade jacket with coordinating scarf over her head, and she and her husband where holding a goat down on the ground so her two newborn kids could nurse.  The poor little things couldn't have been more than a day old and still had recently dried bits of afterbirth attached to their fur and incompletely resolved umbilical cords.  One was stronger than the other and kept pushing his sibling away.  Neither could get firmly up on all four feet and kept stumbling forward on their ankles before toppling flat on the ground.  I hope they make it but they seem so vulnerable and stand only maybe 10 inches from the ground. It's a tough life out here. 

We asked about jerboas in the area, and the woman said she thought she knew what we were talking about and had a dead one.  She led us over near the remains of a fire where it seems the animal had been attracted to the light and was killed.  Gerbil. Stupid stupid gerbil.  So we thanked her and drove on to the local forestry station since I knew we had hired a family to catch for us before who work at one of the forestry stations.  The men at this station knew the animals, said yes we are in the right place, they are further into the desert, and there is a family at the field station further away who we should talk to.  I have a good feeling these are the people we hired before, and we are headed there tomorrow to investigate and negotiate. Fingers crossed...