Vanessa's Journal

Sept. 7, 2009

Here We Go Again

As I write this, I am in the midst of packing up my gear for yet another field season in Wolong Nature Reserve, where I will try to capture wild giant pandas in order to put GPS collars on them and follow their movements. After living in the U.S. for the last five months, I find myself getting ready to transition to my “other life” in China.  

I will go from my centrally heated apartment where I can get hot water instantaneously by a turn of the faucet to a field station that has no electricity, where we resort to boiling water over the wood stove to wash our faces. I noticed after rummaging through the closet and dragging out the old hiking boots and field backpack that my “Wolong belongings” look oddly unfamiliar. It is as if they belong to someone else. And yet the smell is so powerfully reminiscent of the odor of burning fuelwood that permeated our field station and made an impermeable mark on all of my belongings. I get the feeling that no amount of washing will remove that smell. And it carries with it so many memories and assures me that it was in fact, I, that lived there for five months over the course of last winter. I was there and the experience is still in me.

As I make this transition, I will also go from spending my days staring at a flat computer screen in an office cubicle to hiking through pristine forests and encountering rare animals. I welcome this change, even though it comes with a need to embrace sore and wet feet, smelly clothing, and the feeling that no matter how many steps we have already taken, there are surely many more before us on this uncertain journey.

The goal for this field season is seemingly simple and is the same as the previous two seasons. We would like to capture four giant pandas in box traps so that we can briefly anesthetize them and place GPS collars around their necks. Once we release the pandas with their newly acquired tracking devices, we can subsequently follow their movements. We hope that we can learn something about these mysterious creatures that are in great danger in today’s industrialized world in which animal habitat seems to disappear rapidly at the hands of human activities before our very eyes. If you were following at all over the last few years, you will know that we have to date failed miserably at capturing giant pandas (to put it bluntly). The pandas have outsmarted us and left us scratching our heads, trying to put together the mysterious puzzle of their lives from the few fragmentary pieces we have before us.

This year, we plan to expand our arsenal of trapping tools and techniques. We are pulling out all of the stops because this is our last chance. I have purchased some devices called trap-site transmitters, which attach to the traps and are flipped by triggers when the traps close. We can hopefully pick up the transmitters’ signals from a good distance away, thus lessening the amount of human disturbance caused by the trap checkers around the traps. We are also hoping to build a whole new set of traps in special locations that have jumped out at us as being “popular” spots for pandas over the last few years. In general, we are not holding back and I hope that the outcome will be different this time around.

As far as my own mental preparation for this season, I have taken a somewhat unorthodox approach to cultivating a panda trapper mindset. Over the course of the last five months of taking a break from trapping, I have tried to remain in the game so to speak by taking up some extracurricular activities. The first is dancing. I found myself taking a mid-Ph.D. foray back to the passions of my youth and decided to put 20-plus years of dance lessons to good use. I felt that in order to process the ups and downs of last season, and perhaps the tumultuous ride of my entire Ph.D. program, I needed to hasten my childhood creative energies and create a dance.

I spent every weekend over the course of two months working with five beautiful local dancers trying to tell the story of what it is like to wake up every day and work toward something that seems unachievable. I used movement to explore my thoughts about what it is like to have to rely on other people to the extent that you cannot accomplish anything without them, and yet the pain in the failure you experience is somehow dulled by the value of rich friendships that perhaps carry even more meaning than the original goal. After lots of blood, sweat, and tears, my piece was performed on the Capitol steps in Lansing. As I sat and watched, it all somehow made sense. Like completing some sort of alternative therapy program, I came full circle and am now ready for another go at it.

The second activity I want to mention is fishing. I have spent a good deal of free time exploring the beautiful and diverse river and lake systems of Michigan with my husband, an avid (and sometimes obsessed) fisherman. I was given an amazing fly fishing rod and reel from a mentor and before I knew it, I was immersed in the world of flies, line, canoe paddles, and of course, lots and lots of water. I have discovered that panda trapping is a lot like fishing. You strategically select your location, you prepare what you think is irresistible bait, and you go out and wait. Then you wait some more. Maybe you catch something and maybe you don’t. And you spend your entire day trying to formulate the keys to success, when really it sometimes feels like it is all luck and luck is not on your side.

What I learned in the many hours spent looking down at the glistening water with my line and bait out, just waiting and hoping that this would be “the cast” that would bring in “the big one,” is that fishing and panda trapping are both lessons in patience. It is the patient ones who persevere. And so, after an entire summer of exploring various rivers and canoeing for countless miles (and only flipping the canoe over once!), on what would be our very last day of fishing, my husband finally did catch the big one in the Grand River -- a 2-foot long northern pike. And he caught it after we circled back to the same spot three times and he kept at it with a kind of determination that you see only when someone dares to think that they can. To be honest, I was falling asleep in the boat at that moment, but I snapped into the present at the sound of a 35-going-on-5-year-old screaming “PIKE” over and over again. It gives me hope that the “third time’s the charm” for us with panda trapping this winter. It is all about patience.

I hope you can follow along and enjoy the ride with me this winter. Here we go again.