Pájaros

Quite a couple of days for seeing some birds out in the field, not to mention monkeys. I’ll just include pictures of the two spider monkeys and one of the toucans I saw today. Frankly not much to say about today, my blog posts can’t be as consistently entertaining as the guys over at http://bensojealous.blogspot.com.

Other people saw both a Boa and a Fer-de-lance (Terciopelo en español) (super-poisonous) last night on the trails. I’ve yet to see anything bigger than a little green vine snake.

Had to get up like 10 minutes earlier today to get the rangefinder out of the lab office before everyone left for a plot outside of La Selva. I would have gone, but the “project car” is a Suzuki Samurai, way too small for this guy. Since I got up that ten minutes before usual, some time after breakfast was given to the earliest siesta ever.

Hit the trail at about 8:15 to the arboretum to do some scientific-based practice. I worked my way across the arboretum measuring many of the trees. I replicated the maximum height measure four times from the same perspective for each tree. As I was getting started two toucans swept right in and landed above me, made me think about Fruit Loops and other great cereals back in the States. Before lunch I was able to do this for 45 trees.

Trekked back over the river for lunch, then bought some laundry soap for 665 Colones, which turned out to be a $1.29 charge on the Visa. Dropped that off at River Station, put my pant legs back on and went to measure some trees along the river. This is where I saw the spider monkeys.

At first I heard a lot of rustling and things falling to the ground, so I walked over to see what’s up. I saw one sort of just hanging in the tree doing the monkey thing and this other guy feasting on the seeds of the palm. I’m constantly impressed by the ubiquity of wildlife. There’s always noise of birds and bugs and other creatures and every corner presents something new.

With about 90 minutes of data collection in this part of the forest I added 14 trees to my data book when I heard the rain coming. I actually saw it coming across the forest and scrambled to put the “water resistant” and “partially submersion resistant” rangefinder into the dry bag. Luckily I was about 250m from the River Station and scooted back over there to pick up where the last siesta ended.

Cleaned myself up, headed over to the lab around 4:00 pm. Did some emailing, found out I was awarded another $525 in grants, great news. The average standard deviation of the 59 trees I measured four times was about 27 centimeters, pretty good, but I can do better. Comments were great yesterday, gracias. Had no time to tackle the bag of damp laundry, it’ll wait until tomorrow.

Worked on my plan/goals for the summer with Dr. Chazdon just a few minutes ago. She’s leaving tomorrow morning. Allotted myself another week for practice and setting up GIS and data projects. After that it’s full time data collection, yay!

The research assistant helping me on my project is older than me, Bengali, and arriving June 4th…

BP