Well, today was Sunday, which means two things. One: brunch day!! Brunch day is a great day here on the Farallones, taken very seriously. Today, Hannah made homemade cinnamon rolls (seriously delicious), and the rest of us worked collectively on breakfast tacos (homefried potatoes, scrambled eggs, bell peppers, corn tortillas) and fruit smoothies (pineapple banana strawberry). It was amazing. The second thing Sunday means is that I now have less than three weeks remaining on the island, which I absolutely cannot believe. So, figuring that I’ve lived in the same house for five weeks now, I decided it was time to put up some pictures of the house.
The first thing to understand about this house is that it has been around a long time. It has seen a lot of people, a lot of things, and a lot of events. It has collected things, things left behind on purpose or not, or things brought out here with the sole intention of leaving them in the house, for a very long time. It is a veritable treasure trove of odd things, and I still don’t know where everything is, and probably never will. But, for starters, we’ll start with several key downstairs rooms.
The Shoe Room (1)
The first room you come to when you enter the house is the Shoe Room. The Shoe Room is pretty simple, it’s exactly what it sounds like. If you take just a minute to think about all the things we must step on when walking around the island during the course of a day, it makes pretty good sense that no outside shoes are allowed in the house. Thus, the Shoe Room is where you change into your house shoes, take off your windbreaker, gloves, hat, sunglasses, hardhat, and anything else you might be wearing solely outdoors.
The Shoe Room (2)
Everyone has at least two pairs of shoes out here (hiking boots and rubber boots), as well as a couple of jackets, so the shoe room gets pretty full.
As you can imagine, it also gets pretty smelly. It is one of the weekly chores (which are done every Saturday) to clean out the Shoe Room, but it never really stays clean for more than, oh, twenty minutes. It also takes on a very special odor, different every week, which can get pretty ripe by the end of the week.
No matter how gross it gets though, the Shoe Room is probably the second most necessary room in the house (behind the kitchen, of course).
When you walk through the door, out of the shoeroom and into the house, there is a hallway, and you can go either up the stairs, left to the living room, or right to the computer room.
The Living Room (1)
The Living Room is pretty much what any living room in any house is: the room with comfy chairs, a comfy couch, and a couple of nice windows. It’s where we go to read, and where Russ’ computer lives.
We don’t often all congregate in the living room, unless it’s been a really easy workday and everyone is back early, with nothing to do before dinner. Sometimes, if someone is running late on dinner, we’ll all find ourselves in the Living Room, reading or chatting or whatnot.
The Living Room (2)
The flags you can see all over the walls in the Living Room are for the Farallon Patrol, the volunteer group of skippers and boat captains that makes up the majority of the transport to and from the island. (Whoever designed the flag needed some serious advice on color matching during a few choice years, but whatever.) The Living Room is also where our weather station is, which I pictured in an earlier entry.
Finally, what sets this Living Room apart from other Living Rooms everywhere are the decorations. As you can see in this photo, there are a lot of bird things everywhere, and some of these birds and real, stuffed birds, and some are not. They’ve been decorated, banded, given hats, or whatever. They’re very cute. The Living Room is also where most of the island’s records are kept, most importantly the old journals (I still have to write about the journal…will do in a few days). Journals are kept every single night, right after dinner, and it’s really fun to read journals from 30 years ago, discovering what was the same about island life then and what was different.
Computer Room (1)
The last room I’ll talk about today is the Computer Room. The Computer Room holds a lot of the most important things in the house. To begin with, it has our two house computers, where all of our data entry takes place. Every day, the six of us collect a LOT of data–chick weights, chick feathering status, diet watch information, band numbers for newly banded birds, band numbers from resighted birds, band numbers from dead birds, information in general about dead birds, attendance of various bird species at their nesting sites, pinniped census data, you name it. We are each in charge of data entry for a few different studies, and it’s important to keep on top of it, or it overwhelms you.
All data is entered on the computer and immediately backed up to an external harddrive and a thumb drive. Once all the data for a study is completed, it is proofed, meaning Pete/Russ and whoever entered the data go back through it ALL, making sure what’s in the computer lines up with what is in the field notebooks and binders.
Computer Room (2)
The Computer Room is also where we keep all of our experimental protocols (in the binders on the shelf), field data notebooks (a box of yellow notebooks next to the binders; these notebooks are on a very special type of paper that can take a lot of abuse–weather, guano, whatever), and census data clipboards. Everything on this wall is incredibly important. The experimental protocols often have to be consulted a few times during the course of a study, because the details that have been hammered out over the years can be really difficult to keep straight when you’re working on ten studies at the same time.
Computer Room (3)
Finally, the Computer Room is where you can pick up all the supplies you might need before you go outside to do a study. Almost everything that is necessary for the studies is on this shelf–headlamps and flashlights (for looking in crevices and working in the Habitat Sculpture), banding pliers of many shapes and sizes, bands of many shapes and sizes, spray paint (for painting chicks, which we do to tell them apart from their siblings and the chicks of neighboring nests), industrial glue (for putting on colorbands), weighing bags and scales, whirl paks (sterile little bags for collecting samples, most often diet samples), gull towels, and fanny packs (which you really need when you’re carrying around most of the other stuff on the shelf). We also use a bucket to weigh birds when it’s really windy, and collected bands from dead birds go in containers on this shelf. Phew! Lots of stuff packed in here.
Well, that’s a whirlwind tour of part of the downstairs. I’ll photograph the rest of the house bit by bit and hopefully get through it all. Tomorrow’s a very light workday for me, which is nice, since I had 7am diet watch this morning. During diet watch, we noticed that the gulch which we overlooked during the watch, had an apparent oil slick in it. We noted a Pacific Loon and a Western Gull swimming around the gulch who appeared to be oiled (it wasn’t a dark oil, so no dark blotches appeared on the birds; rather, they just looked slightly yellowed and very waterlogged, which is not characteristic of birds who are meant to spend so much time in the water). It’s unknown where the oil came from, most likely a passing ship, but we keep track of oiled animals on the island and do what we can.
Alright, that’s all for now! Dinner’s almost ready! Pete’s making homemade veggie burgers, elk steaks (provided by Meghan, whose friend shot the elk), veggie kabobs, and sweet potatoes, and we’re watching a movie during dinner. Seriously too much food.
Best,
Eleanor