The email updates part 2

created: Sat 03 February 2007 22:06:07
last updated:

Subject: my epic adventures so far
From: "Phil Davis"
Date: Mon, October 30, 2006 2:28 pm
To: everyone

Hello everyone,
I am in town for a couple of days and its good to get back to warm showers, beds and the internet.

I've been having lots of steaks which seem to be the national dish and yesterday I had a wild boar pizza, as you do. Steak dinner costs about 4 pounds!

I have spent the last three weeks at various condoreras monitoring condor numbers and conducting condor feeding experiments.

We were based at a disused school but often trekked to different locations. The Condors fly about for most of the day, travelling up to 100km in a day to find carcasses to feed on but at night will roost on rock faces. The day would start with some of us getting up early to monitor condors coming off the rock at first light, which is about 6:15. The rest of us get up and start to make breakfast for when the first lot get back, about 10.

We take shifts going out to count how many condors are on the rock every hour and recording them along with weather conditions, cloud type and any other notes. This is for local scientists to find out how far condors are travelling and where they roost in certain conditions, for example two rocks close together may be used at different times if the wind is going in a different direction.

The other experiment is the condor feeding experiment. Basically its a scaled up version of feeding bluetits in your back garden! We take two sheep and put one in a bad place (say near a road) and one in a good place (up a hill) and see which the condors prefer and how long they spend at each carcass and then later weigh them to see how much they ate at one sitting.

We had to kill the sheep, I was offered the chance to do this myself but resigned myself to just watching. I've never seen an animal being killed so was just curious. The sheep we used were already old and manky so did't seem too bothered about having a huge knife pulled through their throat and then their necks being broken. Circle of life eh...

The sheep experiment was mostly a sucess but one of the sheep I was watching was eaten by other birds, foxes, even domestic dogs and not a single condor! One sheep was approached by a Goucho (local cowboy type person) who must have been puzzled as to why there was a dead sheep in the middle of a field used only for cows...

The three weeks were fairly relaxed compared to what we are doing next which is the trek. The last group to do it were really really tired by the end but said they enjoyed it very much. The trek includes a summit attempt of Mount Tronador(3400m) which the last group did not achieve beacuse there were 70mph winds! The temp was -5C and with windchill that brings it down to something like -30! So it was just not possible. I have a couple days after this to pack my bags and prepare food etc. We need food for a week (resupplies on route), sleep stuff, clothes, ice axes, helmets, snow shoes etc etc, so it all adds up. The first portion is trekking through hills and mountains and the last few days are the summit attempt.

After the 17 days we are back in beautiful Baraloche to relax and have more excellent steaks.

==
phil davis