Kansas 2005

Part 3: Manhattan

If you tell someone that you live in Manhattan, certain assumptions are made. One of these is that you live in New York. However, there is another, more overlooked Manhattan, and it's nestled in the flint hills of eastern Kansas. It is a fairly large town, by Kansas standards, and the home to Kansas State University.

Our rental Buick pulled into the Little Apple on Thursday, soon finding the home of Cathy. We spent some time there, and then we went to my cousin's house.

My cousin Joey is my age. He's entering K-State this fall, at the same time that I go to Rhodes. He, however, managed to land a summer job. He's house-sitting. That means, just for the sake of clarity, that he gets paid to live in somebody else's house. He's allowed to use their car, have friends over...basically to treat the house as if it were his own. Which is awesome.

Early in the week, Joey had left a message on my mom's cell phone inviting me to sleep at his place while I was in town. I returned the call to enthusiastically accept the offer. The plan was: dinner at a Mexican restaurant with the Parents and then mad party at Joey's house. He invited every friend ever invented, and an awesome dance/LAN party ensued. All of his friends are crazy (every single one). They are also all awesome. And so, much later (2 AM) I looked at the clock in surprise, because nothing had even begun to wind down, but I was awake later than ever. I forced myself to get to bed, though, in the hopes that I would be able to wake in the morning and not in the afternoon.

The next morning, a few of the friends had left, but a number of them had slept over in the house. I spent the morning and much of the afternoon playing against bots on Unreal Tournament, which I rock at. I think bots are stupid. For dinner we ate steak (of which I'm a fan, despite having eaten it only four times during my entire life). Steak is better in Kansas. Anyway, we needed to get to bed early in order to prepare our bodies for the next day's activities.

Sometime before 5 AM, my uncle Dave walked into the room I was sleeping in and told me to get up. I went to the kitchen, poured myself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and tried to wake up. A brisk walk through residential Manhattan did wonders for my wakeful state, and then we left. Dad and I went in the rental car, following closely behind Dave and his assistants in his SUV, the only SUV I've ever met that actually does its work as an SUV instead of just being driven on the roads by soccer moms.

A half-hour later, we were parked in the middle of tall grasslands on Fort Riley Army Base, with no road for at least a mile in any direction. There were seven of us in all: Dave, his daughter Ellen, two people I didn't know well, and my dad and me, obvious outsiders. We were present as observers, to document the goings-on of this elite group of ornithologists.

For of all things, birds were what brought us to an army base at the crack of dawn. People who study birds like to know all about their behavior. Since most birds look essentially the same as other members of their species, it is necessary to find a way to identify them. This is accomplished by affixing metal bands with tiny etched serial numbers to the legs of a bird. This can only be done, of course, when the bird isn't flying away from you. This requires capturing the birds.

Moments after arrival, the team deployed ten "mist nets," designed to capture birds in flight. After the nets were operational, we waited. And we picked ticks off ourselves. Forty minutes after arriving, we went around to the nets (called a "net run") to see if we'd caught anything. This is when things started to get fun.

After the birds were disentangled from the nets, they were carried in cloth bags to the banding station (a tarp near where we were parked). We (and when I say "we," I mean "everyone in the party except for Dad and me") took a visual survey of each bird, measuring, aging, and sexing it. Then we clamped a metal band to its leg and let it fly away. The coolest part of the day was when I actually got to hold one of the birds. It was a Bell's Vireo, and I held it in my hand and let it fly away. They're tiny little creatures; even smaller than you think by looking at them. Most of the bulk you see when you look at a bird is air poofing out their feathers.

After four or so net runs, it was too hot to continue banding birds, and we went back to the house.

The rest of our time in Kansas (an evening) was spent back in Wichita, dining with Mom and Dad's friends from college and their daughter. It was good fun. The next morning, though, we boarded a plane and headed back to the great state of North Carolina. I immediately began writing a summary, and now it's finished. Now all I need to do is finish writing about my wrist...