I've got my ticket for my second trip to Kenya. Last time, I bought a bottle of Patron and went over to a friend's. We hardly touched it, though. I felt dislocated, part of a world suddenly grown incomprehensibly large. I felt that way once before, after buying a ticket to Peru. I went on a hike up in the Berkeley hills, amazed that I had seen so little of it before.

Eighteen hours of flying may seem like a tremendous journey now, but in fact I found the trip to Kenya disappointingly short. I wanted to struggle over the Atlas mountains or up the Nile, across the Sahara, by way of Khartoum where Gordon and the Mahdi's armies faced each other. My time in Africa was wonderful in every way, except that it was much too short. I still wish I were Alexander Humboldt, Stephen Maturin, or Charles Darwin, moving slowly through uncharted territory, immersed and impossibly distant.

This time I'm flying on miles, which is practically free, although I have an extra stop on the way there in Cairo. I didn't feel anything like the dislocation of the last time. Probably because I've been to Kenya, and Mpala, before, or maybe the sensation is proportional to the number of actual dollars I spend on the ticket. Instead, I had a strange dream that night. I missed my connection in Cairo and there were no flights until the next day. I left the hygenic nowhere-land of the airport and hired a taxi. The driver and I became fast friends and he took me all over the city. Driving through a crowded market, every face seemed beautiful to me. I thought that I could stay there and be happy, if only I didn't have somewhere to be. We delayed going back to the airport until the last possible moment. There were lines of wealthy passengers out the doors, and I missed my flight again. Collecting my thoughts, I realized that my luggage contained none of the things I should have packed for my field work.

Sorry, all, for the delinquency. I finally got around to sorting through the roughly 1500 pictures I took while in Kenya, and posted the best of the bunch on flickr. I have some additional material to post, too, but reviews came in on the paper I submitted to Neuron before leaving for Africa. They weren't particularly positive, so I've been trying to figure out how to to respond to them.

There is a delightful timelessness to this place and this work. The sun rises promptly at 6:20 every morning. You hear a few songs from a thrush or a chat and then the white-browed sparrow weavers start their screeching duets. They're really quite fascinating birds; they live in colonies, in nests built of straw and hung from the branches of acacias. They start their duets with a few faint calls and then work themselves into a brief frenzy that sounds like one bird but turns out to be at least two. Neuroscientists weary of studying zebra finches may find the precise coordination of motor and auditory information fascinating, and I doubt anyone would care much if a few of them disappeared.

I've spent most of the past two weeks following my superb starlings around on three territories. Their habits seem to vary quite a bit on the different territories, and it generally takes me several weary days of tramping around to get any sense of where they spend their time and, more importantly, where they congregate to sing. The territories are quite a bit larger than I expected; the largest I've worked in is at least 500 meters across, and they fly from one end to the other with infuriating frequency. I'll have snuck up on one bird who looks like he's ready to start saying something, when a couple of his friends will fly overhead making flight calls, and he'll head off to the other end of the territory to see what the fuss is about. Right around lunch time, though, 5 or 6 birds will find a few trees, perch at about midlevel, and start singing for about an hour. Unlike the sparrow weavers, they don't exactly try to synchronize their song, and it's a little tricky to get close enough that I can use my directional microphone to isolate one of the singers. Add to this trying to get inconspicuously into a position where I can also read the colored bands on the bird's legs.

The Cornell undergraduates I came here with, as well Dustin, are leaving tomorrow, and I'll be here for about ten more days. I've done a little bit of analysis, and it looks like it's mostly the males that are singing in these midday choruses, but I still don't know much about the structure of the song and I expect to be looking at spectrograms for some time to come. I've toyed around with developing an automated motif classifier for the European starling songs, and now that I've got another study animal with a ridiculously complex repertoire it may be time to invest a bit more work in that.

I seem to spend most of the rest of my time talking to other researchers at meals, tagging along with them for a half day or so, and going on birding expeditions and game drives. I go to bed around 9 or 10 and wake up feeling totally refreshed. It's a good life here.

Derek, Tiffany, and I drove out to Frankfort, IL last night to collect starlings. The ground was nice and frozen, so I didn't get stuck in 18 inches of cow manure this time. In Figure 1, I am demonstrating the left forehand technique.

I finally broke down and bought Starlings and Mynas by Chris Feare and Adrian Craig, which marks me off as (a) a giant dork and (b) somewhat obsessed with my job. In defense of my purchase/preoccupation, starlings seem to have inspired some pretty awesome names, like:

Superb Starling
Shining Starling
Singing Starling
Splendid Glossy Starling
White-winged Babbling Starling

and my personal favorite, Mysterious Starling. Who is sadly extinct. Sad, in part because a grant for studying the Mysterious Starling would pretty much write itself.

Maybe Sadie will bring me a Superb Starling the next time she's in Uganda.

Owning a starling is a messy proposition in the best of times, and Arnie, may he rest in peace, managed to leave quite a few traces of his existence in the postdoc office. So Carol is living at home now, where my housemates John and Kevin have agreed to let her occupy the sunroom. There's lots of plants in there, and windows, so she can amuse herself during the day in the manner of her more tropical sturnine cousins. Here she is taking a bath.