The Karamenderes is the river the Iliad calls the Scamander. It comes down off the Kaz Dağları and runs out across the Troad plain past Troy to the sea, and for most of that distance it flows through some of the most thoroughly farmed land in north-west Anatolia. Wheat, cotton, tomatoes. Field edges cut to the centimetre. It is productive country and, for an amphibian, close to uninhabitable.
Then, in one stretch, the valley narrows into a gorge.
What a gorge does
Araplar Gorge is not large. You can walk its length in a morning. But it is steep-sided, which means shade for most of the day; it holds water later into the summer than the surrounding plain; and its slopes are too awkward to plough, which means the scrub on them has never been cleared.
Those three facts — shade, water, awkwardness — are the whole explanation for why the fauna there is different.
A refuge is rarely a protected area. Much more often it is simply a place that was too steep to be worth clearing.
This is the unromantic mechanism behind a great deal of what survives in the Mediterranean basin. Species persist in the corners: gorges, cemetery walls, the margins of springs, land nobody wanted. Survey work in an agricultural landscape is largely the business of finding those corners and recording what is still in them.
The discipline of doing it the same way twice
Faunistic survey has a reputation for being the easy end of biology — you walk about and write down what you see. In practice it is the most protocol-bound fieldwork I have done, because the only thing that makes the data worth anything is that you did it identically last time.
A transect means:
- The same route, marked and followed regardless of where the animals appear to be that morning.
- The same times of day, chosen around the activity window of the species you expect.
- The same pace. Walking slower finds more animals, which sounds good and ruins comparability.
- The same recording: species, life stage, substrate, microhabitat, air and ground temperature, cloud cover, and the time.
Everything encountered gets a record. The eighth Ophisops elegans of the morning gets the same line in the notebook as the one snake you see all week. Especially the eighth one — abundance data is exactly what you lose if you only write down the interesting animals.
Mornings
You start before the animals do. In summer that means leaving in the dark and being at the head of the gorge as the light comes onto the eastern slope, because the first thing you want to see is who comes out first and where they choose to do it.
There is a sequence to it. The lacertids that tolerate heat best come out late and stay out longest; the ones that don't are out early and gone by eleven. Amphibians you find by turning the right stones near water, and by listening — a survey where you never stop to listen is missing half the herpetofauna.
By midday the gorge is empty of everything except the cicadas, and you sit in the shade and write the morning up properly, while you still remember which stone was which. Then a second pass in the late afternoon as the temperature comes back down.
What the record is for
The paper that came out of this work is a list — herpetofauna and avifauna, locality by locality. Lists are unfashionable. They do not test a hypothesis, and they are hard to publish in journals that want one.
They are also the only reason anyone will be able to say, in thirty years, what was lost.
A baseline has no value on the day you collect it. Its entire worth is deferred: it is a debt that the future pays back, to someone who will never meet you, on the day they need to know whether the species in front of them is a new arrival or the last of something. Every generation of field biologists complains that the previous one did not write enough down. The only available response is to write things down.
So: a narrow gorge, a fixed route, a notebook, four seasons. It is not a dramatic way to spend a year. It is a good one.