Setting Things In Motion

The last two mornings were spent out in the field.  On Friday, Enrique the new-to-Bosques, but not to OTS assistant joined me to help out in the identification of my 15 target species.  In all we found 68 trees representing 12 species, which was less than I had hoped, so I plan to extend the plot in a couple of directions.  Surprisingly all the tagging only took 2 hours and I was back to the station for some lunch and hair care.

The rest of Friday was more or less uneventful.  I saw my first green and black poison dart frog on the trail one of these days, looks totally radioactive.  Also saw a mot mot (fancy bird) fly above the trail on the way back today.  In peccary news, there were some recent births in the lab clearing and a few pigs were definitely chewing on the “leftovers,” and we had peccary for dinner last night.

This morning Dr. Chazdon and I decided to hit the trail to LEP and begin the coring (which isn’t anything like coring an apple).  I set out bags for ten trees and we completed them within ninety minutes.  I can anticipate coring near 50 trees on a full day of work with two assistants.  This also presented a wonderful photo op, so here’s some pictures of what my field lab and coring look like.

We were back for lunch, which was my favorite lunch, arroz con pollo, papas fritas, and platanos maduros.  Met a bunch of new folks today between lunch and dinner.  At 1:30 p.m., Amanda, Dr. Chazdon, Taylor, Fei and myself had a meeting to discuss the plans for the next six or so weeks.  I successfully got the meeting moved to the comedor as to enjoy my first legitimate coffee break of the summer.  We established a pretty decent schedule for while Amanda is away for five weeks on an OTS plant systematics course beginning Wednesday.  Here’s Amanda, Hoi Fei, and Taylor at our afternoon meeting/coffee break.

Prepared everything for sample processing including balances and water displacement equipment.  Completely botched the volume measurement and had to redo them all after dinner.  I won’t go into the details, but it definitely didn’t show off my genius.  

And hey...how ‘bout them Yankees?

So I hit a breaking point and signed up for mlb.tv, but the internet at La Selva seems to have just under the right amount of bandwidth to broadcast a game smoothly.  Rumor on the street suggests that the bioinformatics course has “equipment” plugged in that uses “90% of the bandwidth.”  So I guess I’ll wait it out for now, at least the audio portion works well.

Recently got the first batch of samples in the oven, which will be ready to mass again on Monday or Tuesday depending on the time it takes to dry to constant mass.  Tomorrow, I’ll be doing laundry, getting sample bags ready and probably won’t go out to the field.  Monday will be a trip into town for various supplies including, but not limited to a new bike, eskimo churchill and a load of platanos maduros fritos.  

I think that’ll do it for now.  Beginning to set in motion a little vaca to Panama in mid-July.  More on that later.  Thanks for reading!

BP