Escurridizo

The rainforest is slippery. One of those things that you never consider about an area until you arrive. Spent most of the day walking around if the very fine, high-clay, wet soil that covers most everything. I’m sure it would suffice for the coolest slip and slide ever, but out here we have snakes and scorpions and other things that bite.

So, lots and lots to talk about today. Got up nice and early as planned after having a few false alarm wake-ups. As I mentioned a while ago, Costa Rica doesn’t subscribe to the whole daylight savings time business. Without it, the day goes by in an interesting fashion. Today for example, the sun rose at 5:12am, way too early for anyone to really be active and then set at 5:52pm, before dinner even starts. I like it way better in CT where it’s starting to go down around 7:30 these days.

After breakfast went back to the lab to get some stuff together and then Amanda and I took off for the LEP plot on the crappy project bikes. About a kilometer into our 3.8km bike ride Amanda’s chain was falling off, so we paused to do some emergency adjustments on the bike. After that we were on our way. Parked the bikes and took a 600m hike into the plot.

At this point I was quite giddy since it would be my first day of real data collection and the sky was clear. Earlier, I had transcribed 36 trees to measure before we headed back for lunch. Got started with measurements at 8:30. Spent lots of time circling around trees, looking for the best views. I measured while Amanda held the reflector and jotted down the data points. By 11am we had done all 36 trees and took a celebratory picture with the jury-rigged reflector on a stick.

Biked back to the lab, walked over the bridge to lunch, experiment with iced coffee was quite successful. Got cleaned up somewhat and goofed around on the computer for a few. Switched gears and popped my fresh data into a spreadsheet. Out of 36 trees, I flagged 7 for odd increments from past years. After finishing the plot, I’ll try to revisit those and take special care in measuring.

Put my legs back on and got ready to go net bats with Amanda. We went up to the arboretum, about a .7km walk, to set up two nets. Since this was my first time netting bats, I was especially excited having seen only a handful of bats up close in my life. Bat nets are basically comprised of really fine netting organized into a number of pouches so that the entire thing is propped up on two 3m poles and spans horizontally about 6-7m. The idea is that bats don’t see or echolocate the fine netting and fly right into it and become trapped.

After setting up two nets near the gazebo, I shot back over to the dining room for dinner and to grab Amanda’s field meal. Ate quickly and walked back over (about a kilometer) to find a bat caught up in one of nets while Amanda was dealing with one on the other next. The little guy was squirming and trying to chew his way out. After close examination, turned out to be a girl bat.

Took those two bats back to the gazebo and identified them, measured the forearm & mass, and then set them free. With the first bat, I captured a picture of it just taking off with the wings wide open. It’s on Amanda’s camera, so maybe that one tomorrow. At 8:30 we called it quits, but found one more bat and decided to just let it go. Got back to the lab shortly after 9pm.

Long day, but really really productive. Got my first data points which really got me inspired and I finally felt like the project has started. I have a good feel for how long it will take to measure X number of trees, and excited to do some more on Thursday hopefully. I had a few more things to talk about I guess, but this narrative got pretty long.

Had some funny battery issues with the rangefinder at the worst possible moment and can’t seem to find many baseball fans. Probably going to post something to the effect of, “any Yanks or Sox fans out there, come watch the game tonight,” tomorrow on the message board.

The rest of the week will be sort of a hodgepodge. Tomorrow, my first trip into town hopefully, that should give me lots to talk about. Thursday a day similar to today but going out to the plot from 1pm to 9:30pm to do both trees and bats, we’ll see how that goes. Friday will probably be a data and hypothesis-thinking day with Amanda gone all day with the Bosques crew to an outside plot.

Saw a spider trap, kill, and mummify its prey tonight; coolest thing I’ve seen all summer.

BP