St. Kitts Adventure

We've been on St. Kitts (also known as Saint Christophe) for nearly a week now and I'm just now finding time for writing a bit about our trip! Things have been crazy busy getting the bat project up and running, but we've managed some very cool dual purpose adventure. Jason has a hard time putting on his tourist hat - every place we go he's evaluating habitat: fruit to eat, flowers to pollinate, water with the right set of access requirements…

So a quick overview of what we are doing here. Jason and Dr. Amanda Loftis here at Ross University's School of Veterinary Medicine co-submitted an internal grant to the school to study local bats and their parasites. Very few bat studies have been done here, and all during the summer. Additionally, the parasites and the ramifications for island health have never been studied. Jason is here to train Amanda and a solid team of students on all the steps and processes of bat capture and release. Where to capture, how to capture, how to untangle the bats from the capture nets, tips on handling bats (these students already have very good animal handling skills as vet students), what measurements and details are important to collect for bats, and then release. The net set-up and take-down is it's own set of skills to learn as well. So far we have spent every day scouting and surveying potential bat capture locations, and every evening attempting to capture bats. We only had one dud of a night, every other has had plenty of bats with the last two being crazy with trying not to have too many bats to handle. They also have two solid fall-back locations where large numbers of bats can be caught - one of which will be great for rainy days. So the scouting part is done! We will be spending the rest of our days being tourists and adventurers, with the bats in the evening. Yay for touristing!

I'll be posting day by day travel logs later, as well as a few things that require their own post. Like driving!

p.s. There are lots of photos on my facebook page. I won't post picture in here until I have access to my home computer because this mac and I aren't friends. Can't mess up the research photos!