Vanessa's Journal

 

Feb. 6, 2010

 

The worker bees take a break

 

I sit here now in unfamiliar surroundings. I find myself in an impersonal and foreign hotel room in a city outside of Wolong trying to collect my thoughts and make sense of the last one month of my life spent in China.

I reluctantly took leave of the tranquil mountains for a day to brave the cacophony of car horns and people shouting over one another in the city. I am here to exchange money and also set the refresh button on my internal clock, with the hope that I can gain a new burst of energy for this next period of trapping.

Since I last wrote, there has not been much of note to report from the field. We have kept plugging along with our field work and trap checking like little worker bees. Only in this instance, it feels like we aren’t producing any honey for all of our labor. We did catch another red panda, however. One starts to appreciate the red pandas so much during the long trapping season. It seems as if they appear just to make us feel better. They make us feel as if someone out there appreciates all of our efforts in putting out endless meat and projecting immeasurable hopes and expectations out into the mountains around us. Somebody out there is benefiting from all of this. Our efforts are not completely in vain.

It has become a running joke around the field station now to see how many red pandas we can entertain with our trapping. There are three traps in particular that have been formally adopted by the red pandas. The signs left behind suggest that the red pandas are spending long hours lounging on the tops of the traps, as if they provided some kind of luxury sun roof. Lounging out on a cozy trapping roof, basking in the sunshine while taking a break from gorging oneself on endless free meat –– that sounds like the life, doesn’t it?

But now we come to a phase in which things are changing at the field station. It is an inevitable tide of change that comes with the prospect of working in China during the festive Chinese New Year. This is by far the most exciting time of year here. The party officially lasts for a whole 15 days if you stick to the traditional custom. It is a time of great celebration and fellowship and one that we are all eagerly anticipating. Two of our field personnel have just left to go off to see their families in other parts of China, while the locals and myself will stay back to hold down the fort.

We decided not to close the traps this year for the holiday. The main reason is that the Chinese believe that there is a special kind of good luck that comes with the New Year. Some of my field team members believe that the holiday in fact may present one of our best trapping chances purely on the basis of the spiritual and cultural importance of this period. I am not about to argue with that logic, as it makes as much sense as any other trapping strategy we have tried. Besides, this year we have trap transmitters on all of the traps and we can pick up their signals down at everyone’s houses by the main road. So we will multitask by partying and checking transmitter signals all at the same time.

Although I will miss the peace and quiet at the field station, it will be good to get back to civilization and not have to stare at the same four people all day. I am looking forward to experiencing Chinese culture at its finest yet again and reconnecting with many friends. Not to worry, we will still visit the traps periodically to add meat. And if our transmitters are telling us that we caught something, you had better believe that we will hike our rested selves up to the mountain in no time, while eagerly anticipating that first peek into the trap to see what animal stares back at us from the inside. Who knows, we may just get lucky.