FIELDS OF DREAMS // The volunteers: DOING BIRD DUTY // One task requires a sense of humor

DATE                  09/25/94
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               NEWS
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  L06
STORY LENGTH          20 INCHES
HEADLINE              FIELDS OF DREAMS // The volunteers: DOING BIRD DUTY // 
                         One task requires a sense of humor
BYLINE/CREDIT         DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS         OC:STUDENTS:CENTRAL 
                         AMERICA:AGRICULTURE:ENVIRONMENT:RESEARCH:BIRDS: 
                         VOLUNTEERS
 .
    Raffi Hovsepian and Raphael Diez, two of the University of
  California, Irvine, students who spent the summer on Lynn
  Carpenter's farm, picked a research project that requires a sense
  of humor.
     Their mission: to see if birds can help regenerate ravaged
  pastures by eating tropical fruits and, when they're done,
  spreading the seeds in their droppings.
     It's a dirty job, but then again so is almost any task on the
  muddy farm.
     "You fall on your rear a lot," Hovsepian explains.
     Birds naturally play an important role in seed dispersal in
  their normal habitats. But to find out if they could be enticed out
  onto barren pastures, Hovsepian and Diez, both 21-year-old biology
  majors who grew up together in Walnut Creek, decided to stick fruit
  in some trees around the farm. They spread screens underneath to
  collect telltale bird droppings.
     "Once they defecate, hopefully it'll rain, and just leave the
  seeds," Hovsepian says, trying to be optimistic about the
  data-gathering to come.
     At the foot of one of the trees they have selected for their
  experiment, Diez asks Hovsepian for a boost so he can climb up and
  saw off an errant limb.
     But when Diez lifts his slimy boot toward Hovsepian's
  locked-together hands, Hovsepian takes one look and backs off.
     "Did you step in cow stuff, dude?"
     Diez avoids the issue.
     "Gimme your hand, dude!" he insists.
     Hovsepian obliges. His hands turn brown. He wipes them on his
  pants without further investigation.
     "Everything smells the same here anyway," he says.
     Hovsepian is the cautious one. He worries about the parasites in
  the rust-colored soil crawling up under his fingernails.
     "You wash your hands, but the eggs are still there," he says.
     He prefers the comforts of the Italian restaurant in San Vito
  to, say, the wilds of the virgin jungle at the nearby Wilson
  Botanical Gardens.
     In contrast, on one visit to the garden, Diez and a few of the
  other undergraduates sallied off into the heart of the thick rain
  forest to break in their new machetes -- and got lost for six hours.
     "I took the marked trail," Hovsepian says, "I went to Mamma
  Mia's pizza, had a pizza, and by the time I got back, they were
  still lost."
     Diez had no regrets.
     "He's Mr. Adventure," Hovsepian says.
     "He's my wife," Diez chuckles.
     Both students lived with local families -- the only practical way
  to find lodging near Carpenter's farm.
     Hovsepian's host family, which also took in student Larry Young,
  held a party for the two young Americans as soon as they arrived,
  inviting six unmarried young women in the area.
     "Three for me, three for (Young)," Hovsepian says.
     None of the women spoke English, and Hovsepian knows only a bit
  of Spanish -- but even that may have been too much.
     "I just said si, si, si, and I have three fiancees."
     After everything was set up, and after 24 days of
  data-gathering, Hovsepian and Diez collected more than twice as
  many seeds from under the trees they spiked with fruit as from
  under the control trees left fruitless.
     But like all the other students, Hovsepian and Diez won't have
  their results analyzed or their conclusions ready until the end of
  their fall semester for-credit independent research class. They'll
  do that with Carpenter, too -- but in Irvine.