Spirit: from Balinese Frisbee to a Bornean Hospital

It was the end of one era, and not quite the beginning of the next. After my coral propagation class on Gili Trawangan, I dove into a strangely familiar netherworld that transcends time and space. I'm talking about ultimate frisbee.

Tuesday Beach Ultimate the week before I left Bali for Malaysia. That's me kissing Ari on the cheek!

After a midnight coincidence in a Balinese bar, in which I overheard the word "frisbee" and procured a ride the next morning on the back of someone's motorbike to a game of pick-up ultimate, I was hooked. I played as often as I could, from windy beach-litter-clean-up/frisbee combos to high-level mini games to mandatory practice each Sunday. Yes, I managed to try out for a competitive team, UB7, within my first week. The captain, Alex, convinced me to come back to Bali after my month in Malaysia to play on UB7 at the international tournament, Nusantara Cup.

Alex (front) and I set in a team circle during a Sunday practice.

Warming up before practice in my Balinese neighborhood, Sanur.

I made new friends, both Indonesians and ex-pats, on the field. Sweating and diving and nursing grass-cuts over dinner is, universally, the fastest way I have found to make friends. But frisbee also brought old friends to me, even as I lived in relative isolation here in an archipelago of Southeast Asia.

Ari Lozano was my high-school Fryz teammate and my got-your-back-no-matter-what co-captain for our college team, the Whitman Sweets. She swung by Bali to visit me after winning gold with the USA Under-24 Worlds Team in Australia (GO ARI!!!) We played plenty of pickup and dabbled in scuba diving, Ari's newest hobby.

For the Nusantara Cup, I convinced two more Fryz to visit! Here's Jessie Thoreson, one of the ladies who inspired me to play frisbee in sixth grade, and has continued to inspire me ever since. She brought her guitar and leftie backhand, and it was like no time had passed.

Unreal! Here I am with Jessie and Henry Phan (and my Balinese teammate Naja photo-bombing), another of my lifelong friends and inspirations. Henry was one of the first men to take me seriously as an athlete, and he was the same intentional, kind baller I knew in middle school. Fryz will be my family always.

The tournament was a huge success. I got back from Gili the night before, and Alex asked if I would be his spirit captain. That's a uniquely-frisbee leadership role involving sportsmanship, integrity, and positivity. It was my job to greet the other team's spirit captain before each game, shake hands, and ask if there was any particular aspect of their spirit on which they were working. After the game, I led our team in a consensus effort to rank our opponents' spirit in five categories: communication, physical contact, positivity, knowledge of the rules, and fair-mindedness. I was honored to be trusted by the team in this leadership role, as well as my informal contributions to team strategy, even though I was a transient through Bali. These people gave me a home in the middle of my Watson year, and for that I am deeply grateful.

I got to cut and handle this weekend, what a treat.

Throwing or faking? We'll never know.

As a bonus, we won the tournament! Our win marked the first time a Balinese team has ever won a tournament on its home island. In the finals, we beat my personal favorite team: Learning To Fly, all the way from Bangalore, India. After, I traded with one of the men for his orange jersey.

Our final photo with our second-place opponents, Learning to Fly.

The day after the tournament, I was physically exhausted, sunburned to the point of peeling, and hacking with an asthmatic cold. By 3:00 in the afternoon, Jessie and I couldn't stay away. We hopped on motorbikes and headed out to one last hurrah of pick-up ultimate in Bali. There, we found a dozen similarly-addicted frisbee players, all in various stages of injury from the preceding days, all smiling ear-to-ear because we were tossing a plastic disc once more. This sport is an addiction, a home around the world, a lasting family. I'll miss you, UB7, but know that we will meet again one of these days.

The frisbee players can't stop! Here's post-tournament pick-up.

And with that, I said goodbye to Bali. A sixteen-hour day of travel took me across several islands and channels to Java, Pontianak, Ketapang, and finally my destination of Sukadana, a rural town on Indonesian Borneo.

I must be here!

Fun fact, the island of Borneo is roughly the same size as Madagascar, but it contains three countries: parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, and the entirety of Brunei. The island is known as Borneo in Malaysian and English, but Kalimantan in Bahasa Indonesia. It's home to most of the world's remaining orangutans and hornbills, and also to some of the fastest rates of deforestation for oil-palm plantations.

Oil palms neatly criss-cross Borneo from my airplane window.

The reason for my trip to Borneo lies with an organization known as Health in Harmony. I was referred to this nonprofit by a friend of my mother's, and fate brought it all together. I'd been emailing with Health in Harmony's Director of International Partnerships, Amy, when she told me she'd be out of touch for a few weeks. Why? A scouting trip to Madagascar. At the time, I myself was living in Madagascar. Who shows up in the bedroom next to mine? None other than Amy! I spent a dinner and then some grilling the patient and knowledgeable woman about her groundbreaking work in One Health conservation. That interaction led me here, to become a monthlong conservation and education volunteer at Health in Harmony's pilot site in Borneo.

The story of Health in Harmony is very compelling. It all started when Dr. Kinari Webb, a young orangutan researcher straight out of Reed College, spent a year doing fieldwork in Borneo. She realized, as many ecologists do, that studying her beloved primates was not going to save them. She was horrified to realize that the apes might go extinct within her lifetime. She saw the illegal logging, spoke with local communities, and actually listened to what they had to say. This process, called "radical listening," taught Dr. Webb that in order to save orangutans, she would need to become a medical doctor and provide healthcare so the people living around the national park wouldn't be forced to log for their lives.

Really, Dr. Webb explains it all much better than I do. I highly recommend watching her TED Talk:

The next morning, I felt like I was dreaming as I walked through the spacious, white, outdoor halls of Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI, the hospital Dr. Webb founded. The hospital's rear boundary butts up against Gunung Palung National Park, one of the largest remaining tracts of Bornean orangutan habitat.

This triptych from the hospital's wall depicts an ASRI reforestation project in the degraded, marginal lands of the National Park. I'm interested to see the progress with my own eyes.

The orangutan poster is a popular destination for patients to take selfies.

A planetary health vibe permeates the hospital. This sign translates to, "Let's guard them now. Someday, they will take care of our grandchildren."

I spent my first afternoon acquainting myself with Sukadana, my home for the month of April. I am living in a breezy house once occupied by Dr. Webb herself. The roof is half thatch and half corrugated-metal. Insects, rats, and cats enter at will, but the mosquito net over my bed keeps the worst at bay. My only complaint are the twitchy yellow wasps that live in two nests daubed to our kitchen's rafters. These curious buggers buzz against my net all night, and they often wander right through the seams of the net into my personal space. It's unnerving to hear the buzzing get closer, then stop, and suddenly feel the tickle of a wasp's feet across my arm in the dark. I've killed a dozen between sturdy books so far. Maybe, if I keep at it, I'll get them all!

The central monument of Sukadana is this space-age salute to durian. Could anything be more Indonesian?

I parked my bicycle for a quick tour of the outdoor market, specializing in fish and vegetables.

The long, toothy, saltwater eels caught my eye (and nose.) I asked if I could take a photo with them, remembering how such requests to photograph without purchasing were met with angry glares in Madagascar. Not so here!

 

Not only did the fish mongers welcome my photography, they all requested selfies with me and their fish.

Here are just two of our fish-selfie album.

The marine-invertebrate-monger was not to be outshone. Here he displays a prawn and a slipper lobster.

In this highly Islamic town, you would be silly to direct anyone in relation to "the mosque," because there seem to be mosques on every block. But if you were to mention the "big mosque," there could be no doubt about the direction you meant to indicate. This glorious white structure looms above the horizon in a powerful silhouette. Its call to prayer can be heard echoing through the streets five times a day -- including right now, as I type. It's lucky I am a sound sleeper, because my poor housemate is awoken every morning at 5:00 am by the sacred Arabic songs coming through the loudspeaker.

The Big Mosque.

Already, Sukadana feels like a home. I don't have the ready-made community of a frisbee team, but the ASRI staff have the same loving camaraderie. I've heard there is an avid Zumba community, a swimming pool for Saturdays, and an early-morning bike crew, so I won't be lacking for exercise. Maybe I'll be able to teach my coworkers to throw a disc, too, and start a frisbee club. I imagine our name would have a nice ring to it: Sukadana Spirit, a team for ecosystem health.

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Marsupial Trapping in Bonito

If I told you I spent eight days in the forest capturing nocturnal marsupials, where would you think I was working? Probably Australia, the land of marsupials, where eutherian mammals (those that use placentas to transfer nutrients to a growing fetus) never arrived. But Australia is not the only place marsupials call home.

The small-mammal-trapping team, from left to right: Cyntia, Mariane, me, and Gabriel.

Brazil is home to many marsupial species, and I got to meet two of them as a volunteer with Cyntia Cavalcante Santos's small-mammal-trapping team. Cyntia is finishing data collection for her PhD. Her field work consists of spending a week at a time in the dry, tick-infested forests and sunny, cattle-infested pastures near Bonito, where the native ecosystem is a combination of Mata Atlantica (Atlantic forest) and Cerrado (tropical savannah).

Her plan is to complete six transects in each of eighteen locations, and she walks every transect four times: once to set out traps, and three times to check what hapless little mammals were attracted by the smell of juicy fruit overnight. She wakes at four in the morning and starts bushwhacking before sunrise. Did I mention she also walks a kilometer along each transect to collect scat and photograph tracks in the dirt?

If you do the math, that adds up to... a lot of sweat! And a lot of sweat bees to drink it.

While we prepared traps at the truck, we were covered in so many sweat bees, we could barely breath without snorting one up the nostril. These little guys tickle, and they are not fun to respire, but they neither sting nor bite.

I was lucky to accompany Cyntia on her fifteenth transect, along with two first-year college students from Dourados, Mariane and Gabriel. We walked the transects and set up two kinds of live trap: open-mesh Tomahawks on the ground, and folding metal Shermans on tree branches. We baited each trap with a fragrant chunk of pineapple or banana, then left them in place overnight in hopes that a nocturnal mammal would be lured inside.

Mariane models one of our Sherman traps for arboreal mammals.

Cyntia's goal is to understand how human land-use is affecting the habitats and ranges of mammals in the Cerrado. Here, native vegetation is being converted to cattle pasture at an alarming rate. I've seen it happen before my eyes. Primary forest is logged and burned. The remaining wood is gathered into piles to continue drying, so it can be burned later. The bare red dirt is plowed and planted with braquiária (Brachiaria brizantha), an African grass used for cattle pasture.

Real-time deforestation near Bonito. Notice the piles of burned wood, the plowed red dirt, and the intact forest on background hills.

After the ground is plowed, ranchers create uniform berms of dirt to prevent rain from eroding their land downhill into the creeks and rivers. These raised stripes can be seen years later, once grass has filled in the pasture. This tactic can be viewed as dedication to "the environment" because is preserves topsoil and reduces sediment pollution in rivers, but retaining soil is not the same as retaining species. Compared to primary forest, the difference is slim between a pasture, a pasture with berms, and an asphalt parking lot -- at least in terms of biodiversity. That's how it seems to me, anyway. Cyntia's research will tell us how pastures and cornfields really compare to forest.

Erosion-control berms give the pasture a striped appearance.

A male rhea stands alone in corn stubble, booming out low-frequency calls in front of a tragically-small forest fragment.

Not only are cattle the proximal cause of deforestation... these horned zebus are also a formidable obstacle to scientists walking through pasture!

Cyntia documents the vegetation of a mountainous "open" transect, a euphemism for steep-sloped pasture. A cow mopes in the distance.

Another effect of cattle on land: hummocks! Shoutout to Collin's thesis.

Sun rises over rolling green hills, the landscape we evolved to love in African savannas and now transplant onto every continent (at least, according to the evolutionary hypothesis of environmental aesthetics.)

We didn't capture any mammals our first day, in the pasture or the forest, but there was still much to be learned from the landscape, and many challenges to overcome.

Cyntia points out a young manduvi, the species of tree where endangered hyacinth macaws make 90% of their nests. The macaws nest in cavities excavated by woodpeckers in old-growth trees, at least fifty years of age. You can imagine how forest fragmentation quickly breaks down this evolved interdependence among species.

The ripe fruit of manduvi.

A saprophytic plant, nearly identical to the northern groundcone I saw last summer in the temperate rainforest of Alaska. I have no idea what this plant is, though, because the groundcone genus (Boschniakia) lives only in western North America.

Cyntia poses with native bamboo. We played music on the stems, hard as wood and hollow as a straw. Each stem was a different diameter and emitted its own note.

One morning, I was renewing the fruit-bait in the traps by myself when I noticed that a swarm of black ants had taken over one of the Shermans. The ants moved slowly, almost leisurely, along the branch. They were huge, but not the gargantuan size of a bullet ant. Their black color was matte, not shiny, and their limbs seemed substantial, as if the ants were molded plastic instead of chitin exoskeleton. Each of their faces was covered by a flat shield, from under which glowed a ruby-red light. If ever I have encountered alien robots, these were them.

The ants milled around the trap with confidence, but no hurry.

I watched, entranced. When two ants encountered one another, they paused for an intimate greeting of entwined antennae. I assumed the ants had been attracted by fruit, but when I finally looked inside the trap, the pineapple chunk was intact and abandoned. The ants didn't like pineapple. So why were they here?

A rubber-band-chewer hard at work.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that many of the ants were intently chewing the rubber bands I'd used to attach the Sherman trap to its branch. "Can they digest rubber?" I wondered. The ants reminded me of municipal road-workers, called out after a windstorm to rapidly clear the streets of downed trees. Later, Cyntia told me my analogy was spot-on. These ants "own" specific trees in the forest, and they guard them jealously from epiphytes, bee hives, leaf-eating insects and, apparently, small-mammal traps. The ants were actively removing our trap.

I marvelled at their intelligence. Surely they had never encountered rubber bands or metal before -- how did they know to focus on chewing the rubber bands? One patrol ant must have encountered the out-of-place object and called for backup. I imagine the crew biting on all parts of the trap and scratching their antennae about what to do. Finally one ant bites the rubber and finds it softer. How did that ant communicate its discovery to the rest? Did they argue before they settled on the band-chewing plan? How did they organize into band-chewers and sentries? What messages do they send through entwined antennae, invisible pheromones, or vibrations?

In my excitement to photograph the ants, I accidently bumped into the trap. I jumped back, expecting the ants to swarm with speed and anger, but they did the opposite. They became absolutely stationary. Now, the illuson that they were plastic ant toys became inescapable. I waited for them to resume their walking, greeting, and chewing, but after five minutes I gave up and walked away from the red-eyed robots, frozen in place as if time itself had stopped.

Unfortunately for me, time had not stopped, and I had to run to finish baiting the rest of my traps!

Another highlight of the trapping project was getting to meet the people whose land we were surveying. As I explained in my recent post, Vale do Bugio: Tourism as a Tool to Protect Private Ecosystems, most Brazilian land outside of the Amazon is private. That can be tricky for researchers who seek to understand ecosystem-wide phenomena. It means that mammalogists must be both expert scientists and expert socializers.

Cyntia began each day by greeting the landowners, explaining her project, offering a glossy Wildlife Conservation Society magazine about Cerrado research, and making small talk about just about everything.

We spent over an hour meeting Seu Claudio, an elderly farmer whose five children have grown and moved away. His brown skin wrinkled around his eyes, his arms were strong and lean, and his smile alternated between teeth and gaps. His eyes spilled tears when he told us that his wife, Donna Maria Rosa, had passed away one year and five months before. He pointed out the blackboard on his front porch where he had written a voltage equation for the electric fence and a note to his late wife: "PARABENS!! PELO SEU DIA DAS MAES," happy Mother's Day. His loneliness, loss and love were plain to feel.

Claudio accompanied us on our hot, dusty hike up his thorny mountain to set out the traps. The next day, I noticed that his blackboard had been updated to include our four names at the bottom: "Gabriel - Nina - Dr. Cyntia - Mariane." He filled us an enormous bag with lemons from his garden and thanked us for the magazine, which he'd read cover-to-cover the night before.

Making social connections with private landowners can be a burden to scientists in Brazil, drawing down precious hours for fieldwork and data analysis. But I also see an enormous value in these relationships forged between academics and farmers. Conversations foster compassion and curiosity. Maybe these human connections will help keep the country from polarizing. Production, subsistence and livelihood need not be antagonists of biodiversity, conservation and science. All humans need both food and a functioning biosphere to survive.

Over the next week, we managed to capture six marsupials of two species, from both forest and pasture landscapes. One was the catita (gray short-tailed opossum, Monodelphis domestica).

Why leave the trap when it feels so safe?

She acted just like my sister's pet mouse, Cleo, when we brought her home to her new cage.

The second was cuíca-graciosa (agile gracile opossum, Gracilinanus agilis), an arboreal marsupial with a curly tail, thick black eye makeup, and translucent ears.

Here, Cyntia weighs the cuica in a plastic bag. She will also measure its limbs, collect its ectoparasites, and preserve its feces in alcohol.

"Look, Mom, I can fly!"

When we released the mammals back into the forest, they often took a few minutes to leave the trap.

I was amazed at how they sniffed, explored, and observed their surroundings just like a pet mouse or a human. I've never spent much time around small mammals, preferring reptiles, fish, and birds, but it was heart-warming to notice the similarities between me and my cousins.

True to its arboreal nature, the cuica shot straight up the first acuri palm it came to.

And then it watched us. 

As a tangent, check out the Wikipedia page for this species and see if you recognize the photos! When I checked Wikipedia to find this species's English name, I realized the page had no photo. Always a joy to contribute to the world of free-use online media!

Cyntia photographs the hoof-print of a deer.

Small mammals aren't Cyntia's only interest. She wants to know how all mammals are using Cerrado landscapes, but those pesky jaguar and peccary don't fit inside Tomahawks, so Cyntia uses a different kind of trap: cameras.

After a week of small-mammal trapping, I volunteered to stay behind with a soon-to-be-Master's-student, Renata. Along with Almir, the university driver, we collected fifteen motion-triggered cameras set out a month earlier. As you might expect, half the cameras faced cornfields and pastures, while the other half were nestled among native acuri palms and bamboo stands.

It was a marathon day, and we only paused for soupy tuna sandwiches at three in the afternoon. The sun was setting, we had fourteen cameras in the truck, and we were feeling good, until...

"What's that buzzing?" asked Renata as we got near the fifteenth camera. Yup, small wasps called marimbondas had built a hive in the camera box. Renata tried whacking the box to get the wasps to leave, but that trick only works with ants and mice. These wasps got angry. They swarmed out and stung Renata on the knuckle.

Plan B: get Almir! I remembered back to my high-school bee-keeping days, when we used smoke to calm the bees before stealing their honey. What could we use to make smoke? I suggested paper, but Almir had bigger ideas. He found a can of air freshener in the truck, and he improvised a blow-torch by lighting the scented aerosol on fire with a cigarette lighter.

Almir wields a flower-scented blow torch.

He didn't calm the wasps with smoke. He incinerated them with flames.

Renata looks on from a safe distance as dusk sets in.

It did the trick. Once enough wasps were vaporized, we stuffed the camera in a feed-sack and tied a tight knot. Back at the lab, Renata threw the whole buzzing mess in the freezer. An hour later, we opened it up to find sluggish (but very alive) wasps and a papery apartment complex filled with larvae and honey.

The marimbondas had built a veritable city in our camera. I was sad to destroy it.

As if the poor camera had not been through enough, we doused the hive in insecticide and pried out the hexagonal architecture with a butter knife. Finally, the camera was liberated. We expect many photos of... wasps.

Renata, victorious with insecticide in hand, after a long day.

Me, exhausted with butter knives in hands, after a very long and wonderful week.

Best of luck on your doctorate, Cyntia! Thanks for including me in your science!

Dad's Daily Bug

This flying red beetle chews on the leaves of acuri palms, leaving jagged topiaries in the woods.

Mom's Daily Bird

A social flycatcher on a termite mound. Not to be confused with the lesser kiskadee, great kiskadee, or boat-billed flycatcher, which all have similar patterns but different sizes of bill!

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