Derretir

I’ll probably melt away in the humidity by the end of the summer. Started off the day pretty normal at 6:30, had some sort of tomato & mushroom omelet for breakfast. Got the rangefinder and stuff together around 8:30 and took off to some nearby forest to continue practice on measuring heights. Really hot day, almost no clouds. Saw a bunch of peccaries on the way out, snapped a picture for y’all.

Also included an action shot of measuring a tree, pretty intense, I know. Spent the majority of the time walking in circles around trees so that I could find a point where both the trunk and crown are visible. After about three hours of becoming drenched and dirty, decided it was time to cool off before lunch and garner an assistant.

More rice & beans for lunch, I’m going to miss it in the fall. After lunch around 1:00, Dr. Chazdon came out into the field with me to use the rangefinder in Filter Mode. All that means is that the sensor only responds when the laser is bounced off a highly reflective target. We use one of those circle reflectors from a bike or a driveway. Dr. Chazdon held the reflector against a trunk as I shot it with the laser, which took some practice to get good at aiming. Using the reflector makes the rangefinder more versatile in the forest.

After an hour or so, Dr. Chazdon left to go back to the lab and work with Amanda/data. I continued to explore and measure trees in the arboretum. The arboretum at La Selva is maintained as the forest minus the understory, so it has a park-ish feel. Called it quits from there sometime after three.

Cleaned myself up and brought the computer back to the lab to work with some data. Spent most of that time correcting coordinates for trees that are inclined. Since the index I’m calculating as part of my research relies on the position of the crown rather that the stem, this was an important task.

So to back up, last night Dr. Chazdon, Amanda and I are sitting in the BOSQUES (our secondary forest project) office. They’re reading resumes of the two girls from Wellesley College who will be joining in June as research assistants/interns. Inaugural play of the 2007 blog:

Amanda (discussing backgrounds): Have they both had tropical ecology? This one girl worked with turtles.

Ben: I haven’t even had tropical ecology

…a bit later…

Dr. Chazdon (referring to one of the girls): Ben, you wouldn’t mind having a Muslim intern, would you?

Ben (taken off guard and flabbergasted): What kind of question is that?

Thinking about that last part later on, realized I should have done something to the effect of the opening scene of The Snuke, hopefully I’ll get another shot.

I also included pictures of a big palm and a cool flower that I know you were dying to see. Comments used to be limited to only users, but I fixed that and now it's free game. Dinner soon, more data crunch time later.

BP