What a picture is worth

Malampaya Sound, Palawan, Philippines

“When am I going to see photos of you water-skiing on dolphins?!  All you ever send me are photos of poverty-stricken third-world nations!” exclaimed my exasperated, never politically-correct father at dinner one night.  Though my research focus is on dolphin conservation in tropical countries, most of my actual fieldwork is conducted in fishing communities.  So, the photo albums that I bombard my family with largely comprise pictures of relatively undeveloped fishing villages.  As delicately stated by my father, these photos do depict poverty, and they’re certainly not stunning tropical ocean vistas.  However, I love those photographs; I enjoy documenting aspects of life in these village, where I find an honest, raw kind of beauty.

Photographs can provide a powerful glimpse into the world of small-scale fishing communities, useful beyond serving as a fond memento of your fieldwork days.  With a little effort, photographic documentation can be used as a valuable tool for research and outreach to the public.

Building fish traps while children look on - Malampaya Sound, Palawan, Philippines

Documentation for Research:  Taking photographs is a common method incorporated into small-scale fisheries research.  Documenting the types of homes, available infrastructure (e.g., electric wires, water sources, schools), and habitat provide context for interpreting other data collected.  Photographs of fishing gear, boats, catch, and vending of the catch can supplement written descriptions of fishing and market practices.  Such documentation is often included in “transect walks” through fishing communities.

Even unstructured photographs have value.  I’d say that photographs can capture much of the intangible nature of each site.  Personally, I’ve found that I feel a difference in ambiance from site to site, and though I am unable to identify all of the factors behind that feeling, I take plenty of photographs and notes to allow me to think more on those vague impressions at a later date.  Because photographs can capture much that is “intangible”, they can collect data that are outside the scope of your specific research objectives.

Additionally, given the diverse nature of small-scale fishing communities, photographs can be an excellent tool for across-site comparisons.

Shade for repairing nets - Pulupandan, Negros Occidental, Philippines

Outreach:   Because research and management of small-scale fisheries are a priority for marine conservation, improving public awareness and understanding of these communities is important.  Showcasing the often-tough socioeconomic conditions of these communities, for example, can demonstrate the need for including the human element in conservation actions in cases where human livelihoods are dependent on marine resource exploitation.

Posters and presentations (and websites) about small-scale fisheries become more relatable and salient to audiences with the inclusion of eye-catching and vivid photographs to demonstrate context and key points.

Examples:  We are already using some of our favorite photographs provided by AFRN members on our website (special thanks to Ted Groves).  See these links to BBC News for examples of photographs documenting small-scale fisheries.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-17404466

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10205321

Kurantay fishing boat - Malampaya Sound, Palawan, Philippines

Realizing the potential value of high-quality photographs for both communicating our research and for our own use in studying fishing communities, we are hoping to increase our communal collection of photographs from AFRN members.  Our goal is to develop an extensive library of photos from sites around the world, to be used (with proper credit) in research and public presentations.  Even if structured photographic documentation is not a part of your research protocol, snapshots of fishing practices, catch, and everyday life at your field sites can contribute to a greater understanding of these communities and their interactions with the marine environment.  (Be sure to get permission to take photographs from your potential subjects!)

(Apologies for the relative dearth of photos on this blog about photos…internet connection not so great today!)

Today’s Dolphin Sighting, Bigfoot, and Mitch Hedberg

“I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographers fault.” – Mitch Hedberg.

The bottom two dolphins exhibit the "blurry" phenotype.

This was a tough one – wind, rain, big chop and waves. On a tiny boat with no deck. With a telephoto lens that doesn’t autofocus.  I imagined myself using the logic of Mitch Hedberg to explain to my colleagues why my photos were so out-of-focus…

The main purpose of my boat surveys here in Negros Occ. (and in Guimaras) is to document and describe human activity in important Irrawaddy dolphin habitat. Mark, a colleague, focused his master’s thesis on surveying the dolphins here, so our research at this site is nicely complementary (and congrats to Mark, who just received his degree from Silliman University!).

However, we always have dolphin observers during these surveys, because any opportunistic data on where and when we see them is useful (as are opportunistic photos).  Also, it’s nice to see the animal that this research project is structured around.  Who doesn’t want to see dolphins?

My main motivation for going out today was so that all of my field assistants could see the dolphins (ok, I also really wanted to see them again).  I’d already gotten enough human activity survey days for this site, and had a dolphin sighting earlier this month with part of my team.  I almost called today’s survey off, because it was a rainy, gloomy, windy morning, and it just seemed silly to try to find Irrawaddy dolphins.  But…with only two days left at this site, we had to try.  So, we boarded our two tiny wooden pumpboats, operated by our wonderful boatman, Jojo, and one of his friends.

I was shocked when, maybe an hour into surveying, I caught a glimpse of three stubby waddy heads popping out of the chop about 300 meters away.

As the waves tossed our boat around, I gave Julius, the assistant nearest me, clear instructions: “If you see me start to fall, save the camera first. Camera. First.”

This is not the easiest species to photograph, and these weren’t the best conditions. And I am pretty inexperienced with photo-ID. So, I am not horribly displeased that I managed to get some photos (actually, I’m a little surprised).  See the link before for some more of them.

Queasy for Waddies

On being burned out

I guess I'll work or something now...

“Going to the field!” – normally, that phrase makes me giddy with excitement.  The chaos of pre-field preparations is made manageable by my eager anticipation of the Next Adventure.  I’ll put on my Adventure Hat (straw fedora) while packing, and play songs about rambling and roving (and make up appropriate lyrics: “The life I love is finding dolphins with my friends – I can’t wait to get on the road again”).  I dream about the moment when I’ll first emerge into that humid tropical air that seems to portend exciting explorations ahead.  Ah, that moment! – it always makes me grin.

the resemblance is uncanny.

I thrive in the field.  I love the research, I love living in beautiful rural parts of tropical countries, I love adapting to new places.

It turns out that this excitement, for me, starts to fade after 8+ months of running a field project that moves from site to site.

I’d underestimated how challenging this 9-month stint in the Philippines would be.  I’d spent 13 months working in Thailand just after college, and have had several 2-3 month research trips, and I assumed that 9 months would be something I could manage handily.  I followed advice to pace myself, to take time to explore the country, to enjoy it all.  I’ve found, however, that it’s an awkward period of time that makes one constantly feel torn between immersion and retaining strong mental ties to home.  Plus, I’ve been somewhat rootless since the summer of 2010, hopping between field sites, my parents’ home, and a series of sublets and guestrooms and couches.

I just wanna go home and sleep.

Being more of a “grown-up” has changed things:  Besides the stress of managing my own project and lugging my “mobile field station” around the country, I’ve realized that my other commitments back home – personal and academic – have meant that I haven’t been able to fully embrace my time here.  These commitments feel much stronger than they did when I was a freshly graduated, 22-year old field assistant.  Feeling stretched between two very different worlds, and being unable to fully commit to either, makes it significantly harder to adapt.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’ve been burned out for the past couple of months; I’ve felt exhausted, unmotivated, unconnected with the present, and rootless, and my physical health hasn’t been great (even my typing is suffering – I’m making puzzling typos and grammatical errors that I’ve never made before).  But, following wonderful advice that I read in Bernard’s fantastic book on anthropological fieldwork, I keep daily notes on my mental and emotional state.  This is to make me aware of how my state of mind might shape my perceptions.  And this has allowed me to acknowledge that my fatigue is predisposing me to apathy and sloppiness, and so I can muster up all of my remaining motivation to combat those tendencies.

So, here’s my mental list of “Keep it together, Tara!” tips; I’m assuming I’m not the only researcher who deals with field fatigue, so I’m sharing what I’ve found to be helpful:

• Smile, dagnabit. Smile. It helps combat the irrational impatience that can arise when you’re tired and frustrated with things not going right. Remember to engage with your research team and your interviewees.  This makes everything more fun.

• Sit back and think about the “bigger picture” of your research for at least 5 minutes right before going out on the boat and before going out to do interviews.  Remember why you need these data.  Please don’t go, “Bah, I don’t feel like doing that now…”

• Don’t yield to the lazy shoulder demon – if you feel that annoying stickler shoulder angel tugging at your conscience, listen to it.

• Now, more than ever, force yourself to be super-organized.  A tired, apathetic brain doesn’t retain details well.  It needs a support system.

• Think about future Tara, who is relying on the data that you are collecting now.  Don’t give her sloppy, incomplete field notes, please.  Don’t give her data files that are haphazardly named and located in whatever folder was the easiest to click to at the time.

• When you feel frustrated, identify why.  If a field assistant is making a mistake, or doesn’t understand something, it’s probably because you didn’t explain things well to them.  Gritting teeth is not a solution.  Smiling (see above) and clearly explaining yourself is a solution.

• That pile of unentered data sheets seems like a real bore, huh?  Too bad.  Just put on some music and attack it. One at a time.

• Does handwashing your clothes seem like a great injustice (especially jeans, oh my, the jeans)?  Cold bucket showers seem like the height of suffering?  Power outages unreasonable?  Remember – (1) you’ve handled this all before and been fine, and (2) this is a way of life for millions (billions?) of people.

• Eat well. Take yer vitamins (I’m a vegetarian, so vitamin B is particularly important).

• Be kind to yourself (this comes from many friends and my advisor having to repeatedly tell me this).  Maybe you haven’t mastered Tagalog, or even come close to basic competency in Ilonggo.  Maybe you haven’t been able to exercise each day.  Maybe you’re not happy with some of the snap decisions you had to make in the field.  And maybe you’re realizing that you won’t be able to do what you proposed as brilliantly or completely as you’d proposed.  You are probably not the only field researcher to “fail” in these ways (I certainly hope not).  Wearing yourself down with self-doubt and regret only makes things worse.

• Find something exciting to look forward to as a milestone – e.g., that fantastic diving/white sand beach vacation you have planned for your last week in the country.

Follow these tips so you don't go the way of Ray Finkle.

I’m hanging on during these last few days of fieldwork, before 5 weeks of data analysis, library research, and some government agency interviews in more urban settings (with a smattering of working mini-vacations for a change of scene).

It’s hard to come to grips with the fact that I’m not fully appreciating my time here right now.  But, deep down, I know that it’s been a fantastic experience, and I hope that some time refocusing over the next month or so will help me more fully realize that.  I really owe a warm thank you to the people who have helped me along the way.  Without them, who knows what kind of sloppy mess I’d be right now…

there but for the grace of all of my friends...

License and Registration, please. PLEASE!

Note: I’m writing this as an ecologist with limited experience studying and understanding the governance of resources.  This is not meant to be authoritative, but rather, is based on my impressions.  Please let me know (nicely…) if I sound foolish.

Do you know how many fishing regulations you just broke?!

Earlier this week, I saw this news story posted by Oceana.  It’s about a Rare conservation fellow (great organization!)  in Lanuza, Philippines, working with the local mayor on a loan program to help local fishers cover the cost of registration.  The plan outlined in this story is like a real-life manifestation of my nebulous daydreams for solutions at my field sites in the Philippines.

It’s fantastic (at least, to my relatively naive and inexperienced eyes).  It helps get fishers registered and encourages them to use alternative livelihood practices to help repay their loan.  And it is a safer alternative to unscrupulous, higher-interest lenders (I actually just interviewed a barangay captain who mentioned exploitation by such lenders as a major problem in his community).

Fisher registration is an important step in proper fisheries management, for several reasons:
(1)  It allows those in charge of monitoring and enforcement to easily identify who is fishing in their waters (and who should and should not be).
(2) It serves as a source of revenue for local governments, and often that revenue is allotted to monitoring and enforcement.
(3) It can make a nebulous network of fishers “tighter” – it provides management bodies with information to better reach local fishers with outreach programs about fishing regulations.
(4) Similarly, it benefits the fishers – as with #3, it can improve the availability of other programs aimed at helping fishers, and could be a source of funding for such programs (and, of course, better regulated waters should benefit fishers in the long-term anyway).

PAO's boat - properly registered (see numbers near bow)

Yet at my field sites, as in Lanuza, many fishers can’t afford the registration fees.  (This is also mildly inconvenient for researchers, as inaccurate lists of the number of fishers can mess with your household interview sampling plan…but, I suppose that’s not so important in the grand scheme of poverty and resource protection).

Of the sites where I’m working, Malampaya Sound seems to have the most dire need for a plan like this.  The major complaint by fishers is rampant illegal fishing by local fishers; many of these illegal practices are small-scale (e.g., non-commercial fishing boats dragging gillnets, which is illegal because it’s considered an “active gear”, banned by national regulation).  The Protected Area Office (PAO) should be the main entity responsible for monitoring and enforcing fishing regulations.  However, as I’ve written elsewhere, they are unable to fulfill their duties due to a lack of funding and personnel.  Though the lack of funding reflects several deeper governance issues, one obvious problem is that registration fees are supposed to contribute to the operating funds of the PAO.  The rate of registration in Malampaya is very low, and thus, the contribution of registration fees to the PAO is negligible.

If you're fishing without a permit, the purple avenger will come find you. Unless you don't buy a permit, because then she won't have fuel for her boat...

Which makes for a bit of a tangled situation: the PAO is in charge of enforcing fisher registration.  But, the PAO cannot properly enforce anything unless it has enough funds.  It is unlikely to see a significant increase of funding unless revenue from registration increases.  There needs to be some catalyst – like the loans program described above – to break out of this cycle.

I just want to stop the madness

At my other sites, in Guimaras* and Negros Occ., many fishers remain unregistered as well, but the bantay dagat (sea police) are relatively well-funded, and the main complaint of fishers here is illegal commercial fishing, often sponsored by wealthy companies based in other cities.  The main perceived threats to their marine ecosystems, therefore, are commercial boats coming from “outside”.  As such, registration of local small-scale boats won’t necessarily directly address those issues.  In these cases, fisher registration could help fund programs to aid fishers in other aspects, perhaps by strengthening fisherfolks’ associations and giving them more of a voice in policy-making, and training for alternative livelihoods.

Unfortunately, my more immediate life objective is to collect data for an academically rigorous PhD dissertation, rather than dedicating the time and effort needed to launch programs like this.  And, of course, they would never succeed without buy-in from the local government (which, depending on the place and people involved, might actually benefit directly from lax environmental enforcement…).  But I’m going to keep this idea alive and well in the ol’ noggin…

More importantly, I’m going to open discussions about this with my collaborators at my field sites – these are people who are much better equipped than I am to implement solutions, and I hope that they will find a way to inspire the right people.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Guimaras oil spill (photo from www.elaw.org). This schoolgirl may now be a registered fisher...

* Side note about Guimaras: There was an oil spill there in 2006.  Compensation was to be offered to all registered fishers thought to be affected.  Predictably, registration skyrocketed, such that one of the barangay I visited was listed as having 84 fishers.  I met the barangay captain and was confirming those numbers: “So, there are…50 boats here, and 84 fishers?”  He looked at me like I was nuts.  ”At most – at most – we have 15 boats.”  I showed him the copy of the Agriculture Office’s report.  ”Ah!” he laughed, “Yes, many fishers registered all of their family – including children – as fishers, also.”  NB: Oil spills are not a recommended method for encouraging fisher registration.

Fishing Bycatch of Terrestrial Megafauna Observed

The bycatch problem extends further than we’d thought…

Bycatch of terrestrial megafauna

In Paco Beach, Pulupandan, Negros Occ., Philippines.

Waddies in the News…and associated musings.

Irrawaddy dolphins.  They’re cute.  I will admit, I have daydreamed about watching one dance with a top-hat and bow tie, and about cuddling one.  (I often work without enough sleep). So, with their charismatic appearance, they are definitely a great potential “flagship species” for the conservation of their ecosystems.

the dolphins haven't let me put a hat or bow-tie on them...yet.

However, not many people have even heard of them, and they have not yet been thoroughly studied. I’ve previously posted some background about them.

With all of that, then, it’s exciting to see them in the news!  There have been quite a few stories that I’ve come across recently (see below for links).

However, like many, I feel somewhat torn between the perky, perhaps naive “publicity is good!” sentiment and the more careful, perhaps cynical “maybe publicity that misleads and misrepresents isn’t necessarily all good.”   Whether it’s local news stories about a little-known dolphin species, or wider-reaching publicity about big, global issues like climate change, how science and conservation are portrayed in the media is a tricky subject.  Many of these stories linked below contain factual errors and oversimplification, the most common being that we can know the exact numbers of dolphins that are alive today and that we can confidently say a tiny (<100) population has increased to be slightly less tiny (but still <100).

I recently read a story, sent by a colleague,  about the dolphins in Malampaya Sound (where I worked for 7 months from 2010 until January 2012).  Apparently, WWF-Philippines had “revealed” new figures about their population and mortality in bycatch, yet my project has been the only one working on that in a dedicated way since 2007 (WWF-Philippines did a lot of dedicated work before the project funding ended in that year). Did someone analyze my data for me, and send the numbers to the news?  Though that’s an intriguing possibility, I had to acknowledge that it was more likely that the numbers had just been “guesstimated”.

And they apparently cited fish pens and dynamite fishing as the main threats.  This is… incorrect.  Dynamite fishing is rare there, and only occurs on the very outer portions of their habitat.  Fish pens do alter their habitat, but the main threat is bycatch in other fishing gear.

So, I wrote a somewhat dense response to send out to the listserv.  I’m not suggesting that this publicity is bad because it’s inaccurate – I’m saying that it should be better.

i'm critically endangered. rub my belly.

My questions to those of you who think about these things:

(1) How important is accuracy in these stories?  When should scientists just “let it go” and accept that scientific names will be written incorrectly, numbers will be misquoted, and complexities oversimplified?

(2) Do you agree that the public can and should be taught about scientific uncertainty?  If so, how?

(3) Do the “ends justify the means”?  If a misleading news story leads to positive awareness and action, is that all that matters?  (This is also timely given the fuss and controversy over the Kony 2012 campaign…).

(I actually have many thoughts about “communicating science”, many of those being highly cynical…I’ll rant about that at a later date).

_______________________________________________________

Anyway, here’s some of the latest Irrawaddy news:

Newly discovered subpopulations:

• First report of Irrawaddies in West Kalimantan, Indonesia (that would be southwestern Borneo).
• Irrawaddies found in coastal waters of Vietnam
• A better article from the same news source about the waddies in Vietnam

Conservation initiatives:

• Letter from Society of Marine Mammalogy to the Cambodian government, congratulating them on their declaration on the conservation of Mekong River Irrawaddy dolphins.
• Proposed sanctuaries for freshwater dolphins in the Sundarbans, Bangladesh

Featuring Irrawaddy dolphins:

• The cooperative fishing between Irrawaddy dolphins and fishers in Myanmar.
• National Geographic’s “Freshwater species of the week“

Waddy Hugger

Guimaras Megafauna Tales

Fieldwork in Guimaras has been…completed.  Now in the big city across the Guimaras Strait, Bacolod, preparing for round 3 of Philippines fieldwork. Enjoying a hotel room with wifi, cable, and hot water…

Through our Local Ecological Knowledge interviews, we came across many accounts of marine megafauna in Guimaras…including:

- A dugong rescue.  The barangay had photographed the stranded dugong, which ended up being successfully returned to the sea.  They apparently had joked: “OK, dugong, if you don’t get back out there, we’ll just have to eat you!” to try to encourage the unfortunate animal to try harder. (Photo link below)

- Whale shark stranding. The barangay had old snapshots of the butanding, or whale shark, that had been stranded there in the 1980s or 90s.  We’ve gotten a lot of reports of stranded and entangled whale sharks, and part of me is becoming more and more intrigued by these massive animals.  There seem to have been a lot around Guimaras… (Photo link below)

- Dolphin slaughter and violence! So the story goes: in one barangay, the captain allowed the local people to slaughter and eat a stranded dolphin.  However, there was a Department of the Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) staff member in the barangay who vehemently opposed this (as he should have).  Being ignored by the captain, he reported the slaughter to the media.  Incensed, the captain shot and killed the DENR staffer.  Allegedly…it seems he was released quickly due to lack of evidence.

Dr. Parreno and her team at GSC have also been asking if fishers had any remains of marine megafauna, and they’ve found a number of skeletal remains as well as photographs.  In Malampaya Sound, too, I’d come across fishers who’d taken photos of stranded dolphins, though unfortunately the photos were not clear enough to be useful in matching the dolphins to the photo-ID database.  Educational campaigns could teach these communities how to report strandings and how to collect samples, take photos, and bury dead marine megafauna in a more regular way so that they could provide even more helpful information to researchers.  It’s exciting to see how interested many people already are in the marine megafauna that they come across, and strengthening links between these communities and researchers could harness the power of that innate interest.

Tracking down the past

Have you seen this dolphin?

it was a dark and monsoon-y night.

Prelude, or: I need more sleep.
I knew this dame would be trouble the moment she walked in.   She has “field researcher” written all over her, like sloppy scribbles in a Rite in the Rain notebook.

Another grad student.  Why don’t I ever get the rich ones?

“I need your help.  I think the dolphins are in danger…”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well…there aren’t many left.  But I can’t know for sure how bad it is unless I know what it was like before.  I need a baseline.”   Her eyes lit up with intense curiosity, electric enough to explain the frizz in her hair.

That’s what they always want.  A baseline. “Why don’t you go to Web of Science?  Why come to me?”  My patience wore thin.  Real thin.  Like her hole-riddled, button-down field shirt.

“That’s the problem… scientists haven’t been studying these populations for very long.  I need someone to find information from the past, to figure out if there were more dolphins before.”

“Oh yeah?  I don’t work for cheap, kid.  You’re a grad student.  How will you pay me?”

“I can get you mangoes.  Guimaras. Mangoes.”

I don’t get excited for much, but those two words got me.  I was stuck to this case, like the duct tape holding her ragged field pants together.  I put down the bourbon and picked up my clipboard.  Time to go dig up the dirt on these dolphins.   Time to rustle up some informants and ask some standardized questions.

they really are that good

How this is relevant:
To understand the conservation status of Irrawaddy dolphins and their ecosystems, we need to look to the past.  Understanding how things have changed over the previous decades gives us a context for assessing the current situation.  Knowing that a currently small population used to be much larger, and inhabit a much larger area, indicates that there have been some significant impacts to that population of animals – which is cause for concern.

But, the Guimaras and Negros Irrawaddy dolphins haven’t even been known to science for a single decade.  The Malampaya Sound Irrawaddy dolphins have only been known to science since the late 1990s. We have no scientific baseline to work from before then. In the absence of dedicated scientific studies, local fishers are probably the best sources of marine megafauna data for recent historical periods.  They’ve been around, on the coast and in the sea, for decades.

Dr. Louella Dolar (Tropical Marine Research for Conservation) and Mavic Matillano (WWF-Philippines) have collected information from older members of local communities at these sites – exciting stories of dolphin times past.  Dr. Lilian Parreno (Guimaras State College) and her research team have been working on similar surveys since last year.

I’m currently trying to follow in their footsteps by conducting informal and standardized interviews of coastal communities about their local ecological knowledge (LEK) of dolphins.  Sometimes, it involves picking a barangay that seems like it would be on the edge of the dolphins’ range, wandering over there with our marine mammal identification photos, and asking, “Which dolphins have you seen here?”, and “Have you seen this dolphin?”  Fortunately, the Irrawaddy dolphins are pretty distinctive, with their stubby, round faces.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOLPHIN?

Informal survey in the outer limits of Irrawaddy dolphin habitat in Malampaya. Particularly informal for one of the field assistants...

It’s fascinating to think about the questions we could potentially answer through interviews:  Where did the dolphins used to be, 20, 30, 50 years ago?  How many used to be in a group?  How often would they be seen?  What has changed over the past decades?  It’s a little like playing detective.  We’ve come across some really interesting stories, which I’ll share in the next post.

It’s been trickier than I’d hoped – people’s reports vary widely, and the logistics of getting to all of the villages have been challenging.  And, sadly, a picture is emerging of a past with more abundant fisheries and more abundant dolphins who came closer to shore and weren’t afraid of boats or people, both here in Guimaras and in Malampaya Sound.  Listening to some of the very old fishers talk makes me feel like crying sometimes – hearing the wistfulness in their voices as they describe the seemingly idyllic past.  Of course, memory isn’t perfect.  And of course, people have a tendency to romanticize the past.  But I still get the sense that so much has changed, and much of it for the worse.

Let’s start at the very beginning.

Two important, if not gripping, first steps (a very good place to start):

(1) Visiting the local fisheries office to scan any reports and references that I can’t find elsewhere.  The office in Buenavista is a 5 minute walk from my apartment, and the people there are very, very nice. I even ended up with a delicious grilled banana.

Scanning reports at the Municipal Agriculture Office...wheeee!

(2) Translating questionnaires & training a new field team: Another field site, another dialect: Hiligaynon.  It’s a Filipino language, like Tagalog, but there are many, many differences in vocabulary and, as far as I can tell, verb forms.  It’s musical and bubbling and beautiful to listen to, though I can’t understand much of it.  So…I’m lucky that I have four bright field assistants from the area (thanks to Dr. Lilian B. Parreno at Guimaras State College).  They are also very, very polite – my sister and I are still getting used to being called “Ma’am”.  (My sister’s been with me since December, helping to manage things).  Which is good, because translating questionnaires and being trained on interview methods and data entry isn’t the most exciting stuff – they were patient and quick to learn throughout.

Data entry training time!

An extra day of translations, training, and practice at the beginning of a field season can (I’ve learned the hard way) save a lot of time.  It still amazes me how superficially basic questions can turn out to have myriad interpretations… it’s fascinating enough to combat the frustration that such twists in communication can elicit.  And it still amazes me how hard it can sometimes be to pinpoint exactly what I mean:  ”What are you asking with this question?”  ”Well…it’s to find out…um…you know?  You know what I mean, right?”

Words turn out to be more diaphanous than assumed, and the seemingly concrete “word” assigned to a concept can end up being confusingly inadequate.  The most frustrated I ever get doing this fieldwork is when I feel incapable of communicating clearly… I try, instead, to be pragmatic about it, and to appreciate the complexities of language.  And I try to become better about truly knowing what I want to say and what I want to ask.

Thankfully, the field assistants are fast workers and learners, and we were soon able to jump out of the office and enjoy traipsing about the scenic fishing barangay of Buenavista.

Scanning reports at the Municipal Agriculture Office…wheeee!

Data entry training time!

Correcting each other’s translations

Eira and Aisa practicing interviews in Tacay

Harold and Lloyd ready to trike back to town

Criste and Aisa ready to motorbike down to the coast

The field assistants! in Getulio.

Lunch in Getulio

Traveling Field Station

Photos from our trek from Malampaya Sound to my second site in Guimaras.

What it’s like to travel with:
1 dolphin costume, 2 camera cases, 1 hydrophone, 1 portable scanner, several fieldbooks, 4 computers, 2 clunky external hard drives, 2 GPS units, 3 binoculars, various smaller electronics, office supplies, and important documents. And maybe some personal belongings.

Thankfully, we were greatly aided by immensely helpful people undaunted by our mountain of luggage, and the easy availability of porters and/or free luggage carts at the airports.  Traveling while heavily burdened can actually approach being easy in the Philippines.

Traveling Field Station