More on where food comes from

Last night was another late late night of filming in the desert followed by a beer with Talia to unwind. It wasn't until about 3:30 am that I finally drifted off, only to be awoke at 8 am by the woman who had been out with her husband collecting 3-toed jerboas for Talia's work. To make it worth it for them, I agreed to take 40 animals (males and females) so I could go through the females and maybe get a few more embryos. A few ended up being 2, but that puts the final embryo count for that species at 415. Pretty good numbers. Meanwhile, Talia and Sarah finished building the trackway constructed of reclaimed cardboard from the recycle center and filled the bottom with the sand we'd collected yesterday. I think they got some pretty good movies of the animals running along the track and sorted ones that are the most active and easy to get to do what we want.

Once we finished that part of the day's work, we went into town to meet the daughter of the couple collecting jerboas for us. She speaks reasonably good English and had sent me a text message the day before to see if we wanted to hang out. After we got ice cream, we wandered through the market and around town a bit and saw the most amazing thing. I don't know how many people will remember the Sarah Palin interview that was done right around Thanksgiving 2007 where she was standing in front of a guy dropping turkeys into funnels to have their heads chopped off and drained. Well, we saw the chicken equivalent. I looked over to see a pair of yellow bird legs flailing from a body that was head down in a metal funnel. Below the funnel was a bucket of partially congealed blood swarming with flies. Once the bird stopped kicking, the man pulled it out by its feet and dropped the animal into a giant wok full of nasty brown water set over hot coals. The hot water started to loosen the feathers and scales so they started to come off the body. He then took it out of the hot water and dropped it into a big metal drum that had ridged finger-like projections protruding into the barrel. He leaned down to flip a switch, and the drum started to rotate like a washing machine on the spin cycle. As he scooped more hot water into the contraption, the rubber projections caught the feathers and scales until all that was left was a completely naked chicken. He then turned off the motor, fished out the plucked chicken, and handed it over to his wife who gutted it on a makeshift table set up over a cage of live chickens and bagged it up for the person who had purchased the bird. While the whole experience was a bit morbidly fascinating, I think the strangest part was seeing the live chickens in the cage looking at the dangling head of their brethren who had gone before.

Every experience like this just reminds me of how detached we are from our food. We don't even know where our meat comes from. It arrives prepackaged in styrofoam and plastic wrap and could have been butchered days and days ago someplace far from the consumer. I once asked someone here why they don't buy meat from the supermarket, since I've seen packaged meat here also. The answer was that if you buy from the supermarket, it isn't fresh. If you buy from the person at the local market, the animal was killed that morning - or right there in front of you. Every day at this local market, there are 4-5 vendors selling fresh pork. If you arrive early in the morning, you can see the whole butchered carcass - organs, feet, and all - laid out on the table, often with the head on a motorcycle cart in the background. By the end of the day, nothing remains, and each vendor will stay until the last cut is purchased. Nothing is refrigerated which would probably gross people out back home. But it's also not bleached a fake red color or turning gray-green from being kept for too many days before being marked down to the budget meat price. Makes me want to find a local farm share when I get home and do this omnivore thing right.

And of course there's a hedgehog...in the car

We have been getting pretty good videos for the past few days, but it seems the animals have realized we aren't actually predators and have gone on strike. After the first night of filming, Talia was dissatisfied with the lighting and visibility of the animals, so we decided to get a few more lights and dust the jerboas with glitter to make them more reflective and easier to track. Yes, we bedazzled already adorable rodents. Each one got dropped in a plastic bag and exploded out in a poof of fabulousness. I have named one particularly good runner "Speedy Sparklepants". They are hilarious.

 

It's okay that these individuals gave up on running for us, because these 5-toed jerboas are actually not that hard to catch. They do freeze in the light better than the 3-toed ones, so we've actually been able to catch them along the road. The driver has an eagle eye for determining whether objects in the road are rocks or jerboas, and he navigates the car to help catch the animals in the high beams. Tonight Yang even caught two with his bare hands since we had given our few remaining unbroken nets back to the guy who is off catching 3-toed jerboas for us tonight. These jerboas are amazing runners, and Talia got pretty good infrared video of a chase and catch as one went zigzagging along the asphalt. I wish they would have the fear of an untimely demise like that when we're filming in a calibrated setup where she could actually track their movement and get useful data out of it.

 

As we were approaching the field station this evening, a football-sized trundling critter appeared along the very edge of the road. It wasn't moving very fast. Turns out it ordinarily doesn't have to. It was a hedgehog! We all jumped out of the car, and Yang still had on his work gloves, so he just scooped it up into the palms of both hands. The poor little guy immediately pulled his face and legs into a completely enclosed ball of spines. We stood around laughing and marveling at his coolness, and then Yang said "ok, I'm going to take it back to Urumqi tomorrow." He's returning for a day or two to take care of some things, and the folks in his lab seem to have decided that they can care for any small animal they can catch. The trouble is that we no longer had any empty cages in the car that could contain the guy. Yang was close to just dropping him in the trunk until we convinced him that was a really bad idea, so he jumped in the front seat instead. We were only just around the corner from the field station anyway, but the driver seemed quite concerned he would unball himself and get loose in the car, so he held a screwdriver at the ready and tapped the hedgehog a few times when it seemed he felt the coast was clear. He's now chilling in a cage in the lab. Probably a little annoyed that he was just trundling along, minding his own business…

 

We've also been having a great time immersing ourselves in the local Kazakh culture. Yesterday we had to head into Fukang to find glitter and a few more flashlights to illuminate the arena, so we made an afternoon of it. I now know the Chinese characters for camel, and I have to admit that I now understand the pictographic nature of the language – the characters luo tuo actually really do look like two camels. Yang asked if we wanted to try camel's milk, so we all had our eyes peeled for the characters for camel until we found a lower level shop selling camel's milk and camel yoghurt. This was such a huge traveler's no no – unpasteurized dairy products. But the local people were coming in a steady stream, it was all refrigerated, and I have a supply of antibiotics just in case. It was tasty. The yoghurt was a bit strange. Super tart and tasted very slightly carbonated with tiny chunks. The milk though was amazing. Thick rich whole milk with a slightly grassy flavor more like yak's milk. We bought a half liter and used it to make milk tea the next morning. Yummy. The same shop also sold fabric items: Kazakh wedding dresses, pillow forms, and various bits of bedding and decorations. Sarah and I spent a solid hour rifling through piles of gorgeous pieces with brightly colored floral patterns embroidered in a traditional Kazakh style. I found a wall hanging that's meant to go behind a bedframe or along the wall behind a sofa. It's going to be a gorgeous conversation piece in my future house some day.

 

We set off this morning in search of cardboard pieces so that Talia can build a trackway to film the animals' movement up close on a sandy substrate, and after scavenging through the local recycling center, Sarah and Yang went off to the desert to bring back buckets of sand while Talia and I took care of a few things at the field station. They returned about an hour later, and Sarah bounced out of the car yelling "Hurry, they're going to take us to the horse races! Kazakh horse races!" So we all piled into the car and drove a  few minutes south of 222 and out into an open field full of people, cars, trailers, and motorcycles. There were several hundred Kazakh people excitedly watching the horses race past on the bare dusty earth. The story I got was that a wealthy Kazakh man in the area arranged the races in celebration of his son or daughter's wedding. The Kazakh horses are a bit smaller than horses we're familiar with, and they were ridden bareback by young men/older boys. The track is 5 kilometers around, and they have to run the track in 6 laps, so it's more of a race for endurance than speed. These poor horses had worked up a lather by the time we arrived since they were on the last lap. I'm not sure who won, because I was too distracted by all of the men trying very enthusiastically to communicate with us. As soon as we arrived, so many curious pairs of eyes focused on us. Two big burly guys kept wanting to pose for photos with us, and a whole family asked me to take their picture. Super warm and friendly people which made the whole experience just as much about the folks watching the race as it was about the race itself. And back to the topic of camels – apparently the top prize for the race was one camel. I wish I'd been able to race and win a camel.

Of course there are chickens...

We just got back from the desert about a half hour ago, at 2:30 am, after a pretty successful evening. We went earlier in the day to build a fenced off enclosure where we could run the animals in front of Talia's infrared cameras. As we were getting into the car, I said to the girls "I'm not expecting anything, but I'm curious to see if the driver decides to pitch in at any point since he seems really interested in what we're doing." I didn't expect it because we're just paying the guy to drive, not to help with the field work. But he quickly surprised me by heading straight up the sand dune with us and then helping Talia to construct the fenced area while Sarah and I set traps to see what we might catch this evening (6 more gerbils for anyone who is keeping count). By the time we returned to where they were working, they had all of the stakes in the ground and the netting in place and were wiring the last side. Pretty good teamwork with some charades and basic Chinese.

The driver was concerned about leaving our things in the desert and wanted to call someone to come keep watch while we went back into town for dinner, but we convinced him that no one would bother any of it. Plus he stopped as we were leaving and asked some folks who were collecting medicinal plants in the desert to just keep an eye out for as long as they would be there. It was getting dark soon anyway, so I wasn't too worried about more people coming along. After dinner, we rallied again and headed back to our study location to get some animals moving. The Chinese man who had been catching animals for us came along, and we sent him and Yang off to do some catching and bring a few more of the 5-toed jerboas. They weren't even gone long before they returned with five animals. I think they really are pretty easy to catch. They jump around a lot more than the 3-toed ones, but they seem to startle in the light better.

So we got all of the lights and cameras set up and got animals into the enclosure one by one, starting with one of the gerbils. He just kind of went bonkers everywhere and kept trying to climb the netted walls of the enclosure.  His galloping run looks pretty awesome on the high speed video. The 3-toed guys just sort of hop about and don't seem bothered by much, but the 5-toed ones are a lot more active. Toward the end, once we got all of the lights in the right positions and figured out how to get good video, the last one we used was hoppy all over the place.  Really good study animal, so he got a star in hopes he'll continue to perform well.

After about three hours of running around, we decided it was good for a first trial and packed up shop to head back. As we were loading things back into the research building at the field station, I noticed there were two boxes in the middle of the entry way floor that were about the size of old TV boxes. And they were making noises.  Clearly something alive was inside. I was surprised, because I thought we were the only ones working on animals here. Everyone we've talked to is doing work on soil or plants. So we flicked on the lights and cautiously approached to discover that each box contained about 10 live chickens. Sarah and I busted out laughing. She pulled out her iphone and started documenting a short video. She's been pretty good about narrating videos of what we've been seeing and doing. I think it's the delirium of the late hour combined with the fact that there were two boxes of chickens in the research building, but we just kept laughing between blank-faced statements of "Of course there are chickens. Why wouldn't there be?"

So I'm back, it's 3 am, I'm showered, and I know that every mole or skin tag on my body really is a mole or a skin tag. That had to be determined before I could sleep well tonight. I've blogged about this in past years - the drawback to the awesomeness of camels in the desert is that there are also camel ticks in the desert. And they're disgusting. I've seen a half dozen or so, including one I pulled off my leg before it had managed to latch on for a meal. That was before I got smart and tucked my pants into my socks. They drop out of the shrubs and follow you through the desert, so  you have to keep moving to keep them off. That's tough when you're in a fixed position next to a camera for an extended period of time. Sarah flicked one off her leg earlier in the day and pulled another off of the back of Talia's shirt. She thought they were spiders because they have weirdly long spindly legs, but nope. They're definitely ticks. And we have another week of experiences that are starting to give me signs of delusional parasitosis.

Baby Camels!!!

Now the real adventures begin. We arrived at the field station on Sunday and met with The Fixer on Monday afternoon to discuss arranging a driver for the next week or so. We explained to him what the goals are, where we'd like to go, the time of day/night, duration of the trip, and asked for a price estimate before we go to negotiate with the drivers. There are a bunch of drivers at the market, so I figured we'd just go that way and see who gives us the best price. He started to go on about how it's complicated to say how much it will cost because of variables like the time, road conditions, etc. I just wanted a ballpark for price per kilometer or price per hour so I'd know what to expect and where to start. Somewhere in these negotiations, a driver pulled up - a friend of The Fixer who he wanted us to hire. At some point in the "it's complicated" negotiations that a Chinese student (Yang) was trying to help me with, Sarah interrupted and took over negotiating for me. The whole game changed. She got them to understand that it doesn't have to be complicated because they already know all of the variables. She also got them to agree to an estimate for the first day with room for each side to negotiate if either I or the driver don't think the price is fair. The Chinese student seemed a little astonished that this worked so well, and it validated the argument I'd been making about her value to the institute - she managed to help reach an agreement far more quickly than if we'd done things in a more Chinese way while leaving room for flexibility. This was probably only possible though because I've cultivated a reputation for honesty.

So off we went to explore the desert. We visited the location I'd gone to a few weeks ago along the oil highway where I'd seen lots of tracks and where we'd been told there are lots of 3-toed jerboas. One of the things Talia wants to do is to take soil compaction measurements using a penetrometer.  It's not as dirty as it sounds. It's basically a hand held tool that measures the amount of force it takes to press a small foot into the ground by a set amount. She's been taking readings in all of the different locations and at the top and bottom of sand dunes and samples of the earth so that she can better understand the environment with which the jerboa feet are interacting as they bound along.

We had planned to visit another location last night, but we got distracted instead by camels. It's just one of those times when you sacrifice a little bit of work for an amazing experience.  A Kazakh family with a house by the roadside had about a half dozen baby goats that had lost their moms, so that was pretty cute to begin with. But then we rounded the corner of the house and walked over to where there were three mamma camels with their babies. Soooooooo painfully cute.  They even have little baby humps. But a baby camel is no small fry. Each of these little guys was probably no more than a couple weeks old but already stood at about my shoulder. The mamma camels were a bit unpredictable, and I kept expecting to get clocked by a giant head suspended on a long neck. At one point, one of the gals started to walk toward me, but they each have a rope tied to one foot, so she accidentally stepped on the rope and managed to hobble herself. Good for me, because I think she had more than "hello" in mind.

This morning we went to make up for the lost hours last night and visited a couple of other jerboa capture sites. More camels! We had to wait for a whole herd at a camel crossing before we could continue on the road to a flat dry field where the 5-toed jerboas are supposedly prevalent. So once we had the lay of the land, we returned to the field station where everyone else too an afternoon siesta, and I got a little work done before we set out to lay some traps in a field near here.  We will probably only catch sand rats (gerbils/jirds), but since Talia wants to compared with bipedal and quadrupedal rodents, those are still useful.

After dinner this evening, we set out once more to a place where we were told there are both 5 and 3-toed jerboas. I walked along the top of the dune with my headlamp sweeping slowly in each direction and managed to see about a dozen 3-toed jerboas. Mostly though I just got good at spotting spiders since their eyes also glow in the light, but they're much smaller than rodent eyes and kind of green in color. The jerboas are really quick though, so about all I got to appreciate was their escape maneuvering as their eyes bounced off into the distance. Fortunately my companions are a little quicker and managed to net a jerboa and a sand rat before we left that area. The driver was super helpful also. He stayed with the car, but every once in awhile he would flick on the headlights and change position so he could highlight animals for us. I think he finds this whole adventure to be funny and fun at the same time. 

On our way out of the desert, along a dirt road, we saw a whole bunch more 3-toed jerboas, and Yang eagerly hopped out to chase them down. I think he wore himself out, but he was successful and caught another two jerboas before we left the desert. We then stopped at a place where there were supposed to be 5-toed jerboas but didn't see any until we were leaving along a paved road and caught sight of them in the headlights of the car hopping down the road. The driver passed the first once by before realizing we wanted to stop and try to catch it, so he threw the car into reverse. I remember saying "it'll be either gone or squished" not really expecting the latter until we once again passed it and saw the poor thing lying in the road. The good thing is that he didn't feel anything for long, but I can't understand why he didn't hop out of the way. Fortunately we caught two more alive also along the road, so Talia now has some research subjects for her filming.

A horse is a horse of course of course...

Unless it's a Prezwalski's horse!

The embryo collections came to completion on Wednesday, and now we are
on to Phase II. We returned to Urumqi on Thursday so I could give a
talk at Xinjiang Normal University and we could pick up Talia at the
airport on Friday. Sarah and I decided to take the public bus back to
the city since we weren't carrying much and were feeling adventurous.
That involves taking a local bus for about 50 cents from 222 to Fukang
and then the long distance bus from Fukang to Urumqi for about $2. By
the way, in past years I thought the town near the field station and
the city 20 minutes away were both Fukang. I always called one Fukang
town and the other Fukang city. But this year I finally learned that
the agricultural community here near the field station is "Regiment
222". There is a long back history that I will leave you to explore
and question for yourself.

Upon returning to Urumqi, Sarah and I met up with our friend from one
of the labs here who is delightful. She spent a couple of years in
Reno as a postdoc, so she's familiar with American culture and
personalities. Sarah wanted to introduce me to Pizza Hut in China,
which is a fancy date destination. We did a sampling of the menu and
stayed until close – cackling so much we probably interfered with a
few romantic evenings. It started because I had been waiting on the
bus while Sarah went to the market in 222 to get water and yogurt for
the trip. To entertain myself, I was looking up the word for "wrench"
that I had learned from a student at the field station when I wanted
to take the regulator off our CO2 tank. Chinese is made up of a lot of
compound words, so the word for wrench is ban (to pull) shou
(manually). I have a dictionary on my phone that gives the meaning for
each character and other compound words that use that character, so I
accidentally discovered another compound word using the character shou
that has a sexual meaning. I had shared this discovery with Sarah who
not so innocently brought it up to our friend in the way of "I learned
a new word", and she intentionally pronounced it with the incorrect
tone so that our friend would puzzle it together to figure out what
she was asking. Her face exploded in shock, and she laughed. So that
started a whole conversation about the worst words in English and
Chinese, and I realized that learning a bad word as an adult doesn't
give it the same meaning. She could throw around some of the worst
words in English as though she was saying "table" and "chair", but
when we asked her to tell us bad words in Chinese it was like we were
asking her to stab her own hand. Likewise, we could toss around those
words playfully in Chinese, but there is no visceral meaning. It's as
if you have to have had your mother threatening to wash your mouth out
with soap to really feel the wrongness of a word.

On Friday morning, I was picked up and delivered to Xinjiang Normal
University to give a talk in the biological sciences department on
invitation from my hosts at the arrival banquet. They are all really
friendly and enthusiastic to have me here. After my talk and tour of
the natural history museum (great teaching resources), we walked
across from the campus to a restaurant for another lunch time banquet.
This was more informal than the baijiu fest from the first night, but
again the fish hit the table and bottles of pijiu (beer) were opened.
Speeches all around. The dean of the college of life sciences couldn't
make it to my talk but made an effort to come for lunch even though
she was only able to join for the last half. She said she likes me. I
joked that it's because she knows I can drink well. She's great. We
talked a little about careers as women, and I asked about the numbers
of women who start careers in biology at the masters level compared to
the number of women who achieve full professorship. The Normal
universities are teacher's schools, so there is a slightly higher
percentage at her institution, but it still hovers around 20% even
though greater than 50% start out at the lower levels. I knew what the
answer would be but asked "Why?" anyway. Of course she said, "Because
they want to devote their time to family." I asked if she thought it
would ever be possible in China for men and women to both contribute
equally to caring for the family so that both could have fulfilling
careers if they want, and she said "No" (even though she later said
that she is married and has a son, and her husband is very supportive
which is what allowed her to reach the position of dean). One of the
young men on the faculty who is recently married loudly protested and
started arguing with her that yes, men will take on a more equal role
and support their wives. I didn't understand the rest of the argument
since it was all in Chinese, but a young woman across the table from
me who is a new professor and has a 15 month old son of her own just
stared at me with amazement at what I'd started. I just gave a little
grin and a wink to let her know I knew exactly what had happened and
watched the debate unfold.

Later that evening, Talia arrived from Boston, and I managed to
successfully retrieve her from the airport even though I hadn't
written down any of her flight info, didn't know her airline, and
didn't know what terminal she was flying into. Thank goodness for
small airports. I'm terrible about doing things like this. We kept her
up the first night and planned outings for Saturday to get her over
the jetlag. Sarah knew of a vegan restaurant she wanted us to try
since Talia is vegetarian, and Xinjiang is the Chinese equivalent of
Texas. We had several of the common Chinese dishes, except that
everything that looked and tasted a lot like meat had no animal
components at all. Really interesting. We then met up with my Uygur
friend to go south to where I've lived before, because I wanted to
show Talia all my favorite places and let her and Sarah get to know my
dear friend. We got out of the cab, and it was an immediate sensory
overload. The food vendors were starting to set up their carts in the
area of the night market, so we wound our way through the rows of
tumeric dusted roast chickens, sheep's heads, and mounds of glass
noodles. Talia and Sarah decided to get some sort of frighteningly
fake sweet beverage because it was a shooting fountain of neon orange.
We darted into a Uygur medicine shop where a man read our health
histories in our pulses. I think he was a bit of a quack though – I've
done this before and felt like the guy who saw me was at least paying
attention to my skin tone and the health of my fingernails. This guy
seemed a little cocky, barely looked at me, and his major comment was
that I don't absorb enough nutrition from my food. Not a startling
discovery.

The narrow side streets are bustling with foot traffic, so we inserted
ourselves in the river and wandered about watching as all the locals
did their evening shopping. The tourist markets were all closing, but
they mostly sell a bunch of kitschy things that aren't made in this
area anyway. It's far more fun to roam the streets with the guys
selling t-shirts and shoes shouting "Besh quai, besh quai, besh
quai!!!" which means 5 RMB in Uygur. I made one guy laugh by joining
in his call and smiling to let him know I wasn't making fun of him. We
found ourselves passing a halal butcher right after they had
decapitated a lamb. It hadn't yet been eviscerated, but the pelt lay
in a pile on the ground, the head and feet were no more, and it was
hanging by a wire cable threaded through the Achilles' tendons over a
bucket of fresh blood. Had we only passed by 10 minutes earlier, we
would have gained a new appreciation for where our food comes from.

Wandering these streets again with my friend brought back a flood of
memories from past years, as he and I reminisced shops we'd been to,
funny things we'd seen, dinners we'd had. It was nice to share
memories and tell Sarah and Talia our stories while watching them
write stories of their own. And I keep learning more and more about
Islam and life in this part of the world that hurts my heart and brain
to think about how little we as Americans really know about this great
big world past our borders. After yet another fantastic meal, the
three of us girls left my friend behind since that neighborhood is his
home and hopped back into a taxi to return north to the institute.
Once we got to the hotel, I kept Talia up another hour sharing my
experiences and observations of the ethnic culture clashes of this
region, and right as we were drifting off to sleep at a quarter to 2
am, I got a text message to my Chinese cell phone. It was a professor
at the institute who wanted to be the one to bring us back to the
field station asking what time he should meet us. Seriously. He sent
me a message at 2 am. Sarah had warned me about this. The phone
culture is strange. They can call or text at any time from anywhere,
and it's all okay. So I replied politely, said I was going to sleep,
and turned off my phone.

This morning after some lengthy discussions and slight political
issues, we arranged for him to pick us up since he really wanted to
take us to the Prezwalski's horse breeding center. That was worth the
2 am text message and ensuing drama. And worth braving the dust storm.
Somehow overnight the temperature dropped about 40 degrees, and the
winds came howling in from Russia. If I wasn't Russian before, I am
now on the inside and out. I feel like my eyeballs, my skin, and the
insides of my nose and ears are coated with the dust carried from the
winds of the north. But it was worth almost being lifted off my feet
to see these amazing horses. Apparently before the breeding center
started in 1985, there were only about 2,000 Prezwalski's horses in
the wild. They are a species of wild horse that is native to Xinjiang,
Inner Mongolia, and Mongolia (Inner Mongolia is a province of China.
Mongolia is a country.) The breeding center started with 18 horses and
now has a population of about 400. They have been reintroducing many
of the captive bred horses into the wild, and have managed to have a
real positive impact on the population of this species. They are truly
wild horses. They are smaller than what you think of as a horse and
look more like a donkey or a mule with a short mane and short flat
tail. They still have most of their thick winter coat, and the younger
horses look like they are wearing leg warmers. And they are mean! They
get really grumpy and fight with each other. They have to be kept in
families of one male and about 5-6 breeding females. Even the females
will fight with each other. When one gets irritable, she backs her
rump into another and just keeps pushing and pushing until the other
gets annoyed. Then they separate just enough to get a good kick it.
But it isn't just a kick. It's an ears back, teeth bared, two-footed
bucking kick. Sarah kept making noise to spook and separate them, but
that's just what they do. They're really truly wild horses.

The rest of the drive was fascinating. All along the mountains is
mining country, so there are great big holes in the earth surrounded
by digging equipment. And even though it isn't a major oil field like
what we wandered into up north, there are pumpjacks dotting the
landscape. In addition to that, it's a major industrial zone, so one
after another we passed by some sort of manufacturing/mining/power
station/etc type of location. The air was thickly brown with the dust,
but not just from the dust. All around are mounds of coal piled high,
and the dust from the coal gets picked up in the wind right along with
the barren earth and sand. So it's no wonder when I scratch my face,
the underside of my nails is black. In fact, I have been writing this
while waiting for my hot water heater to warm up. I think that ought
to be done by now, so I'm going to shower my nasty self and get to
bed.

Hazards of field work

Let's start off this list with Pee. In. My. Face.

The Chinese collector folks brought a big cage with a *ridiculous* number of 5-toed jerboas this morning. They are apparently far more plentiful and easier to catch. Unfortunately, they are more plentiful than in the area they went yesterday where they brought me 3/5 that were pregnant with nice stages, but this time I wound up with only 6/55 with anything useful. Most were either just about to give birth or already had. So I think what makes the biggest difference is the local population size (the probability of them having met a mate early in the season). When they change to a new location to make more money, it affects my harvest rate. Bummer. But further validation of my base rate plus "perfect embryo bonus" pay structure, so I can now convince them to go back to the other place even though it's a little more difficult.

Anyway, back to the hazards. There were a lot of males in this batch, because it is much harder to distinguish male from female in this species. Since I am only paying for the females, I had to check and sort each one. By much harder, I mean that in both species the junk is all internal. With the 3-toed jerboas, you can tell without too much difficulty by the anogenital distance (further apart in males than in females). That's much smaller in the males of this species. So with these guys the best way to tell is to press down on either side to make the business bits pop out. I've done this also with the 3-toed guys and met with no great peril other than an attempted bite of my well-protected hands. So I was inspecting one of the animals who turned out to be male, out popped his penis...and a very thin but highly pressurized fountain of urine sprayed across my chin and thankfully (barely) missed my mouth. This happened a couple of times (second time across my shoulder since I quickly learned to aim away from my face). There was also the one that launched herself out of my hand and quickly scurried under the fume hood. The guy who had delivered the animals though this was all the most hilarious show.

Up to this point I had thought it was bad enough that I have to swat away the mosquitoes while dissecting if we're working into the evening. And all along I've had to maintain my ninja-like skills of crushing the errant flea who tries to make an escape for a warmer body. Add to that the mental health burden of feeling like an executioner each day going through more and more animals. I keep telling myself that this will set up the next 2-3 years of my career, and if I were to spread this out over that amount of time, it would be no different from the number of mouse dissections I do. But it's much more challenging when it's compressed into two weeks of work.

Perils of language

Anyone who has known me for awhile probably knows that I really really despise carrots. Yes, I know. I am a freak. No one hates carrots. In my whole life I think I've met one other person with the palate I have...

Sarah and I decided to skip lunch at the field station and go for jiao zi (boiled dumplings, my favorite food in China) at a shop we walked past a few days before. While we were there, an older pair with their young grandson came in. I say "pair" rather than couple because it was the maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather of the little boy - very cute. He took a quick liking to me after I tickled and taunted his neck a bit. As part of our play, his grandfather started pointing to items on an illustrated poster on the wall of food laid out on a table. I think he was trying to teach the kid and me at the same time since I'd made a joke earlier about how my Chinese language skills are about equivalent to this 18 month old child. There are two carrots on the poster, so I pointed as if to ask "what is this?" They told me the word for carrot, so I pointed to myself and said "Mei yo hong luo bo " thinking I was essentially just negating the carrot and getting my point across. I saw Sarah's face go rigid since she knew what I was trying to say. The incredibly sweet and enthusiastic woman who owns the shop waited for a moment and then disappeared into the kitchen with Sarah in close pursuit. Apparently what I actually said was "don't have carrot" so the woman was excited to introduce me to this new exotic food. Sarah tried to explain, but the woman insisted "No, she said she doesn't *have* carrots". So she cut a (thankfully) thin slice of an enormous carrot and brought it over to me to try. As I said, I'll eat anything that's not an insect, so I smiled graciously and hid my distaste. But I did learn that lesson. Maybe she really knew what I meant but figured this would be the best way to fix the phrase in my head.

Yesterday on return to the field station from our day of adventures in this small town, we ran into a group of five middle school girls who we have spoken with a couple of times now - including the one very enthusiastic hugger. They were really excited to see us and practice English again, and they asked if they could come to the field station to see where we work. Since there were only 5 of them this time rather than 50 as before, I said "sure, why not". I love seeing the faces of young kids, girls especially, when they discover how cool science really is. So we took them to the lab and showed them some of the live animals we still had from earlier in the day. They were completely fascinated by the one white jerboa we had in a small cage. They're usually sandy brown with white bellies, but the folks catching for us brought us one male that was all white with black eyes. The interesting thing is that he said he knew something was different as soon as they shined the light in his eyes, because the regular jerboa's eyes shine yellow, but this one shined red even though his eyes are black. In the thousand or so jerboas that I've seen around here, this is only the second white one I've come across, and the last was of the 5-toed species while this was a 3-toed one. I took a little snip of an ear for DNA, and we wanted to set him free along with all of the females that were obviously pregnant with embryos too old for my needs. So we got the girls to each take a trap and help us carry them to the end of the road. The four older girls were brave and excited, but there was one little one probably about 7-8 years old who seemed a little bit terrified of the scurrying going on inside her trap. But she put on a brave face and followed along. We got to the end of the road, and I set each one loose. At first there was a lot of squealing - especially when one would hop up onto a girl's shoe. But within about 5 minutes they were each doing the gentle one-finger head pet, and one girl even stole my glove away from me so she could try to catch them on her own. I love seeing that transition from fear to fascination.

And all is good with the couple who are collecting for us. It is interesting to see that the challenges we are going through together are solidifying this relationship. What started in the beginning as a big dramatic negotiation every day has morphed into an easy conversation as the trust builds. I think it helps that when we changed the pay structure we incorporated a "bonus" for each animal with embryos of a perfectly young stage for my work. This was to encourage them to keep collecting at locations with good embryos rather than moving on to places that might not be as useful. They bring the animals, we pay an initial fee, then the following day when they return we pay a little for each that was perfect the day before. They were skeptical at first, but after I have made good on my word for a couple of days they seem really happy and a lot warmer. They even brought their 26 year old daughter to meet us today so she could practice her English a little bit. And I have reached great success with the collections! 397 embryos of the 3-toed jerboas. Also, in past years the 5-toed ones haven't had embryos until well into June, but this year since the 3-toed ones seemed to breed so early, I took a chance and had them bring a few of the 5-toed ones this morning. 3/5 had embryos, so I am going to continue to hire them for a few more days to build up a stock of those ones for comparison. It's a bonus I wasn't expecting and rounds off everything really nicely.

Let's do the time warp...

I don't even know where the last 72 hours went. Well, I do. And it wasn't spent sleeping. Since I now have 2 groups of people collecting for me, that means twice the amount of work. The Kazakhs live about an hour away, so they prefer to bring the animals to me when they finish collecting which has routinely been somewhere around 2 or 2:30 am. Since I would like the embryos to be as young as possible, and I expect the Chinese collectors to arrive each morning with their bounty, that means the best approach is to just go ahead and power through all of the dissections in the middle of the night which has put me in bed somewhere between 4:30 and 5 am each day lately. Then by 8:30 or 9 am I have been woken up by *rap rap* two second pause *rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap* until I go scowling and growling to the door to greet the woman of the couple in charge of the Chinese jerboa collective. Each morning I demonstrate that it takes no more than one polite knock to get my attention, but she cheerfully squawks on and on about how I need to be up because it's light out and I'm missing breakfast. This is what's understood from my limited understanding of Chinese and a lot of hand gestures. So then I crawl out of my jammies and into my clothes and out the door to settle the payment and dissect the next batch of animals. I'm functioning on very little sleep and showering only once in 2-3 days. And that's my day sung in a round.

This particular morning was extremely tough. The Chinese folks brought me 45 females which is unbelievable. Except that I was feeling of their bellies as I sorted them, and I set aside 19 as too pregnant to be useful for me. I really want embryos from the first half of gestation and have a HUGE box back home of older embryos from previous collections that have hardly been touched. Plus, the whole reason I was excited about hiring this Chinese couple and had arranged a generous and motivating pay structure is because just 4 days ago they brought me animals that were either not pregnant or had very young embryos. Since then, they've been moving around to locations with more animals so they can make more money, but the problem is that animals in areas with a high local population also had a higher chance of encountering a mate soon after coming out of hibernation and therefore bred quickly. I was looking back on my notes from 3 years ago, and the pregnancy rate was closer to 60% with a majority of embryos at mid gestation as of about April 20th. The climate this year is very similar to that year, but this year I have a pregnancy rate near 95% and a much more advanced stages of development at this time on the calendar. So I think there's been a recent population boom that's affecting my numbers. In summary, field work in developmental biology is really hard.

So I wasn't very happy about the fact that half of the animals I'm paying for are useless to me, so we discussed in more details what my research needs are and what I'm looking for in the animals. I explained how to tell when the females are really too pregnant and asked them to try to find areas with a lower population so they'd be more useful to me. I know it sounds like I'm asking them to make their work more difficult, but I explained that if they keep bringing me animals with old embryos, I won't have a need to hire them anymore. The husband seemed to really understand and was patiently listening and wanting to learn more so they could bring me what I need. He seems to have a good business mind. His wife, on the other hand, went ballistic that I was changing the terms on her since all she seems to see are the finances. She's always the one to take and count the money and has previously been the negotiator while her husband quietly stood by. Where it got really awkward was when the man got angry that she was interrupting, getting greedy, and didn't seem to understand that they needed to be flexible to keep my business. After her persistent arguing, he lost patience and got really physical with her. He kept shoving her out the door, yelling at her, and seemed to really want to hit her. I was extremely uncomfortable and so far out of my cultural comfort zone. So I was grateful when the man and I came to a professional understanding we could agree upon and settled on a new pay structure that still fairly compensates them while adjusting for my needs. In truth, they're making about 2000 RMB per day split among 8 people in a place where the average day of wages is only about 100 RMB (equivalent to about $15), so I'm already paying better than the going labor rate.

The good thing is that as awkward and painful as negotiations in China can be, once a deal is made it's amazing to see how quickly a person's whole persona will change. I've seen this especially in the woman before when she's been the one negotiating with me. They all have the most pained expression and loudly beg and plead and complain that it's so hard and I'm so cheap, and surely I can afford to pay more. But then as soon as a deal is made, they are all cheerful and friendly. We ran into the woman again this afternoon in the market, and I was nervous about seeing her after the difficulty of the morning. She was talking to some friends when we walked up, and Sarah wanted to say hello and delicately express our concern for her. She didn't come right out as say "I'm sorry your husband is an ahole" so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends, but she said "we were concerned for you", and the woman stopped us from saying more. She seemed really touched and said don't worry, that's not our problem. She said she can tell we are good people, and she is happy doing business with us. She kept grasping my hands and even let Sarah give her a hug. So I think all is well in terms of our relationship. And given the spunk and vigor of this small but fiery woman, I have a feeling she holds her own with her husband as well and it was just a case of him needing to be in charge of the situation. I hope so at least.

MetaBlocking

I just had a hilarious discovery. We were watching the Neverending Story this afternoon (after watching the Truman Show last night. As a side note I think it's funny that Sarah and I just sort of randomly picked two social commentary movies that are so so American. It felt just a little awkward wondering what my Chinese colleagues were thinking about the Big Brother and thought manipulation aspects of the Truman Show or the death of imagination theme of the Neverending Story).

Anyway, that's not the hilarious discovery. During the Neverending Story I was thinking "hmmm, I wonder what happened to the kid who played Atreyu?" I always wonder that about really good child actors who had a major role in one big movie and then sort of disappeared. So I went to look him up on IMDB when Sarah said "no, you can't". Seriously?!?! IMDB is blocked in China. Why? I don't see any reputable news stories on the subject, but there are speculations ranging from the listing of movies that paint China in a less than favorable light (documentaries about Tibet) to the fear of user generated content (forums, comments, etc). So I started looking up more and found that the Wikipedia site "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China" is itself blocked in China. How very meta of them to block the page with the list of blocked pages.

Yes, I know I shouldn't be playing with the censors again just in case the last time the internet went down was more than a coincidence (apparently it had something to do with an unpaid bill and the long holiday weekend interfering with the ability to rectify the situation.) But I just can't help it. My curiosity gets the better of me sometimes.

UPDATE: directly through google blogger since I realized I have a very easy way around the firewall. I knew you could get past the chinese firewall through a VPN client. Everyone here does it. The firewall restrictions aren't effective for people who know what they're doing. But I didn't want to trust some shady third party VPN client (many of them you have to pay for), so I figured it was no big deal to live with the restrictions for a couple of months. Until today when I realized that HARVARD has a VPN client. It's intended for access to files when not on campus, but it can also be used for secure remote web browsing. So HA!! Take that, China. I now have unrestricted web access. Although I could still deal with it for a few more weeks, the great benefit now is that I can watch Netflix movies since netflix now thinks that my computer is in Boston! Well, and besides. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't like to be told I can't do something. Even if I don't *really* want to...

Mobbed again

The field station is right next to a middle school, and I was "attacked" with enthusiasm last time I was here while out for a run one day. Well, it happened again.  Friday evening after school, the kids were all out on the road sweeping and burning piles of trash along the sidewalks (yes, children here do actually have to do chores at school). The first time we walked past I just got a lot of nervous stares, but by the time we walked back around some of the boys were poking and making fun of each other (as boys do) while the girls were giggling and clearly trying to build up the courage to speak. There were a few meek "hello"s and then the path in front of me was blocked by a gaggle of giggling girls. One particularly bold young lady walked right up to me and said "hello, how are you? What is your name?" in eager but stuttering English. I replied and then she nervously asked "Can I hug you?" Of course, so I gave her a hug while all of the other girls squealed, and another stepped up for her hug as well.  The boys were all hanging out around the perimeter looking bored and uninterested and saying "we need to go". I stuck around and chatted with the girls for a little while, mainly the one very outspoken one, and they wanted to know where I stay.  As last year, I told them but also said I spend a lot of time walking around the town and they are welcome to come say hello anytime they see me. I'm hesitant to encourage a bunch of kids to descend upon the field station to disturb my and everyone else's work.

Also, yesterday Sarah arrived. Sarah is an American working at the Chinese Academy, and she and I have hit it off well.  We decided it would be fun for her to spend some time out here seeing what some of the scientists at her institute do for their research and also learning some grant writing skills with me so she can better help edit some of the science she sees come her way. The group of us went for another walk yesterday, and just as we were about to set off to explore a temple-like new construction at the end of a bare stretch of dirt nothingness, two little girls on a bicycle teetered by and quickly turned around when they saw me - the huggy girl from the day before. She was so excited to see me again and said she had a gift for me. She was off to her piano lessons and wanted me to come so she could play a song for me. Of course! So we postponed one adventure and traded for another to go listen to her play a few tunes in a room full of keyboards. She had also drawn a picture for me. I think it's actually a picture *of* me. It's a very Asian-style cartoon girl with a white face (the rest of the body is colored in skin toned) round eyes, and red hair. She said she'd drawn it for me the night before hoping to see me again. So sweet. Her teacher ushered the kids to their keyboards, which was our cue to leave, but we arranged to meet her and her friends again later in a nearby park.

Meanwhile, we went back over to the mysterious temple-looking building, but all entrances were bricked up so it wasn't too exciting. But right behind it was a talk bank of dirt with a front end loader perched on top, and I made some comment about how it looked like it could be the perimeter wall of a landfill. Just a passing comment. Sarah said "Now I'm curious!" and bounded off to scramble up the steep slope and shouted "It's a cemetery!" So we all scrambled over the bank and down to a road on the other side to wander through the cemetery.  I love cemeteries in different places, because they're all so different depending on the local customs and culture.  Apparently most people in China now are cremated. But this was a regular cemetery with mounds of dirt at least 3 feet high or concrete tombs over graves of people whose family was clearly a little more well off.  A lot of the sites had a second marker immediately in front of the family marker and oddly completely blocking its view. The front marker was placed by the government in cases where the person died while at work. There were a lot of those markers which makes you wonder what goes/went on around here. And since it was recently the Tomb Sweeping festival, several of the gravesites had rotting fruit, remnants of small fires and fireworks, and fake flowers strewn about. We heard faint music from a small radio or cell phone and looked up to see an old man who we first thought was perhaps visiting someone...until we saw the grain sack in his hand. He seemed to be wandering about sort of aimlessly yet pointedly avoiding us, so I think he was going about picking over the gravesites for items that might still be edible or useful.

At this point we were running late for our play date so headed back to the park to meet the young girl and her friends.  They all had notebooks they wanted us to sign, so we each wrote a nice message and left our email addresses. I felt like I was signing a yearbook ;) The very confident and outspoken girl stumbled over asking me what animals I like, and when it wasn't clear I understood she asked "kangaroos?" I chuckled and said "Yes, kangaroos are very cool." We chatted a bit more about her school, and I worked with her and her friends on pronounciation - Thursday, Birthday, Thirteen, Thirty. Words that are really hard to say for Asian students learning English. All of this is on video, so that ought to be entertaining where I'm trying to encourage her to get her tongue out from behind her teeth. At one point she got all excited and said to my friends in Chinese that it was the first time she met someone from Australia. They corrected her and said, "No, American". She suddenly got all embarrassed and excited at the same time. Such a confusing little bundle of emotions. Apparently she'd misunderstood me the day before, thought I was Australian, and then went home that night to read everything she could find about Australia so she could talk to me and not embarrass herself. Explains the question about kangaroos. Oops. She also keeps calling me "big sister" (a common greeting of respect in more rural areas of China), and I keep thinking she's going to hyperventilate from enthusiasm for trying to find the right words to communicate with me. She's fun to talk to, super cute, and who knows...someday in 10 years when she's finished college and her English improves, I may get a random fluent email from my new little friend.

Inspiring Chinese Entrepreneurship

This whole thing is almost getting away from me but in a really really good way. A few days ago, The Fixer brought a Chinese man who said he can collect any animal we want. He enthusiastically bragged about his great skill and refused to take a net (fisherman's landing net - round hoop on a long pole - essential jerboa catching gear). He did take one headlamp and said he would purchase another but insisted he could catch the animals with his hand (demonstrating this in the universal body language of "cacha!" So awesome, I said go to it, and I'll look forward to seeing you tomorrow.  So the next day he and his rather outspoken wife show up with 5 animals but they weren't sure of the sexes. Since I'm only paying for the females, I checked and confirmed that 4 were in face female and counted out the appropriate amount of money for 4 animals. The woman was not pleased. She pleaded and whined and complained that it was sooooo hard to catch these 4 animals. (What ever happened to "cacha!"?) They were up all night collecting and fell off the motorcycle. (Though I later found out they only collected an hour or two). And she said The Fixer told her I was paying a higher price. I basically said, I know it's hard and handed over a net to the sheepish guy. I'm sorry you were promised more money, but that wasn't a promise I made. After 20 minutes of earnest pleading, her whole mood perked up when she happily took the money I had to offer (after suggesting a more progressive payscale), and cheerfully took off on the back of her husband's motorcycle. I'm sure she was just trying to pry more money out of me.

Fastforward two days. Today they came with 11 animals, and 9 were female. Again, I count out the appropriate amount of money, and she gets all upset because again The Fixer told her I was paying more. I said (through translation) if he promised you more, then he's responsible for the difference. I am the one with the money, so all negotiations have to go through me. They want to hire more people to help. I'm all for that since they seem to be hunting at a good site with lower pregnancy rates and younger embryos. So I told her (again through translation) that I would pay a higher price for the next 3 days to encourage them to hire people and let them get better at catching. Then after 3 days I would return to the original price for the first 10 animals, a bit more for the next 10, a bit more for 10 after that. Encouraging them to keep working at it. It's a full moon right now which makes it really tough to sneak up on a quick bouncy animal with better eyesight than us. She seemed okay with that but wanted to be sure this was *my* agreement, so she turned to me, grabbed my arm, and with earnest enthusiasm said in chinese "50 each for the next 3 days, then 40 for 10, 50 for 11+..." I do know my chinese numbers, so I was able to repeat what she was saying and convince her that we are indeed now on the same page. So hooray, more people to collect.

So then the Kazakhs showed up with their bounty from the night before. I also explained to them that the animals they were bringing me are pregnant with babies that are too old (I release anything where I can feel lumps in the belly, but I'm still paying for useless animals). He said maybe it's just because the ones that are really pregnant are slow and easier to catch. Ha! But I also explained that they seemed healthier and better fed that the ones the other folks were bringing which indicates to me that they are in an area with more vegetation and the animals have recovered more quickly from hibernation. So he said they would try a few different sites over the next few days to see if they hit a place with younger embryos. At the end of these negotiations he had a rather long chat with my colleague who then turned to me and explained that he wants a guide book. This is the older Kazakh man who made the original deal with me. He saw the field guide to the animals of Xinjiang that one of the students here has, and he is interested in learning about the animals he sees. He's also apparently the only one of this group of people who can read and write in Chinese (their second language), and thinks it could be useful to teach some of the younger men. I'm all for advancing education, so now I'm really excited about the next time I head back to Urumqi. I'm going to hit up the bookstore with a couple of the students and find a really nice and well-illustrated guide to the animals and maybe also another book or two that he might find interesting. They're being so helpful. Granted they're getting paid really well for these collections already, but they're such good partners in this endeavor that I'm happy to do some extra little thing to help.

A minor inconvenience

It's been a few days since I updated, because on Monday we returned to
the field station to discover that the internet is still down. I can't
help but wonder if it's entirely coincidental that I was testing the
boundaries of censorship just before it went down last Thursday. Oops.
Won't do that again. Although I'm pretty sure I did it before and that
this was perhaps the same result...

Otherwise all is well. The Kazakh family is unbelievable. They have
been catching more than 20 females each night although almost every
one of them died the first two nights. So now they're bringing the
animals to me each night after they finish the collection which was
about 1 am the first night and 2 am last night. I am becoming one with
my nocturnal animals. The unfortunate thing (besides my lack of sleep)
is that these guys are much more agressive than the animals in my
colony back home, and especially pissed off and active at night after
being trapped in a small cage. Thank good for my gloves with leather
fingertips. They try desperately to take their vengance on my and
instead get a mouthful of leather. Perhaps it still makes them feel
good to think they're punishing me.

Many of the embryos are too old for my analyses, but the pregnancy
rate is almost 100% this year so I'm still getting a lot of embryos of
the stages I want. 25 litters so far, to be precise. Which is more
than 60-70 embryos for two night's work. At this rate I'll have a
bumper crop in no time and perhaps be finished a bit early. Definitely
in time to switch gears for phase 2 of the biomechanics work when the
grad student working with me arrives from Boston in a couple of weeks.

Not sure what happened this year though. The climate is no different
from when I've been here before.The temperatures are tracking the
same. There's hardly any vegetation yet, and the trees haven't budded.
But the jerboas have all clearly fed well and are breeding at least
1-2 weeks earlier than before. Maybe there are annual cycles I'm not
aware of. A professor at the Academy of Sciences told me that about
once in 5-7 years there are almost no jerboas. Maybe this is the
opposing peak of that valley.

In any case, I can't complain. Given the difficulty of this work and
all of the many many factors that are out of my control, I have to say
I am pretty pleased. Fingers crossed this run of good luck continues.