This morning, I felt like I was on a wildlife safari rather than a routine hike to do a little fieldwork. I saw so many beautiful animals: a pair of currosaws flapping noisily and calling to one another for over ten minutes, a velvet ant (at least what I think is a velvet ant) over two centimeters long, and a large frog (okay around four or five centimeters, but that is really big compared to the itty-bitty rain frogs and poison dart frogs that we say at other stations). And these wildlife sighting make fieldwork so much fun!





But the big highlight of my day was (drumroll please...) THREE SNAKES! Looking back, I know that seeing three snakes in four hours really is something special. In almost four months in Costa Rica, I have only seen maybe five snakes, most memorably the two hog-nosed pitvipers that Ben, Forest, and I found while shifting through leaf litter at La Selva. And Las Cruces is not supposed to have many snakes. And snakes are supposed to be off the trail. But all these three snakes were very much squarely in the trail. I practically walked on them before realizing that that branch-like thing in the trail actually had scales and eyes.



Now I do like snakes. Really. It just totally unnerves me to almost step on a snake in a country that boosts a fair number of venomous snakes. Two of the snakes were some of the longest fattest snakes I have every seen. The one pictured was well over a meter long. Unforunately, I didn't have a meter stick with me to toss along the snake to confirm it, but it was really big. And the last snake was a bit shorter, but incredibly fat and its scale pattern reminded me enough of the fer-de-lance and hog-nosed pitviper to race by (on the very far opposite site of the trail) without pausing for a picture. Realistically, I don´t think that it could have been either of those species; I think that their ranges are restricted to the highlands. At any rate it was fat and I didn´t want to mess with it. So it has been a snake-y day. I am grateful that I have gotten to see so much of Costa Rica´s herpefauna in a few hours--but next time I would appreciate a little fair warning. If the snakes could hold up bright neon signs, that would be great.

Another day in the office...

My day began a little late as I rolled out of bed after 7 and scrambled up to the comedor to get some gallo pinto before the kitchen ladies packed it away. Now I have learned that I can´t trust the toucans to wake me up bright and early. After that, I hit the forest trail to play around with some methods for my independent project. Chris´work focus on how the local extinction of large mammals affects herbivory rates on seedlings and seed predation. So what he is asking is: What happens to the next generation of trees (the seeds and seedlings) if we take out big mammals that usually disperse seeds, trample and eat seedlings, and prey on seeds? To complement that, I want to look at how the local extinction of large mammals affects the composition of the insect community and how much that insect community eats seeds and seedlings. This will give us a more complete picture of herbivory, seed predation, and the community of the plants´enemies at Las Cruces and La Amistad, the large continuous forest which protects large mammals like tapirs and peccaries.

To do that, I am going to sweepnet the seedlings understory in randomly distributed plots. That just means passes a mesh net over all the seedlings. Any insects on the leaves get trapped in the net, so that I can conveniently collect them in a plastic bag and identify them back in the lab. (Sweepnetting makes me feel like a little kid running through a meadow catching butterflies; it is so much fun.) Emily, the PhD researcher from University of Michigan, suggested that I use pit-fall traps to survey the critters crawling in the litter layer.

For herbivory, I began by doing a guessimate of how many of the leaves in the plot had been nibbled on. This is a very rough totally unreliable guessimate, but I thought that it was impressive that over three-quarters of the leaves had at least some herbivory damage. Life is tough for little seedlings; would it be awful to grow up and know that, most likely, 75% of your limbs would be munched on? All in all, I am feeling more hopeful than overwhelmed about the project right now. We will see what Chris says when he arrives next week.

Summertime at Las Cruces

Just arrived at the biological station where I will be spending the summer. Since this was the first field station that I visited during the OTS semester, it feels a little like coming home. The forest is beautiful, the food is delicious (a nice change from the La Selva kitchen), and the bungalow where I am staying is absolutely charming. So it will be a great summer.

This morning, I hiked most of the trails with Anna, another PhD candidate who works with the same adviser as Chris. We looked for fallen fruits to see what is available this time of year and checked out the 2 hectare study plot. That was a great introduction to the forest. Over the next few days I will be doing some chores for Chris, tagging along with other researchers to see their projects, and brainstorming ideas for my own.

La Familia Quesada: Que Amable

For a few days in San Jose, the Quesada family took me in as one of their own. We went up to Volcan Irazu and Cartago for a paseo, or a day out. The volcano quieted down long ago and now there is a beautiful, bright blue turquoise colored lake in the crater. The vegetation is similar to the low, growing scrubby stuff that I saw on the paramo. The day was especially cloud, so we missed the supposedly beautiful view of the valley below. Even so, there is something wonderful and mysterious about wandering around in the clouds.



On our way down from the volcano, we stopped in Cartago, the old capital of Costa Rica, to see the Basilica de los Angeles. The church was built, oh I forget when exactly, but a long time ago to honor a vision of the Black Virgin. As the story goes, an indigenous women found a little figure of the Virgin craved in black stone when she was gathering wood. She took it home and put it in a box. The next morning the Virgin had (apparently) slipped out of the box and run back to the place where she was found. This happened a few more times to the women and then a few more time to a priest. So it was declared a miracle and the church was built. Now, people go there to gather holy water and also leave remembrances to thank the Virgin for miracles, like curing a sickness.

Overall, I just had a wonderful time being surrounded by Quesadas. They are a very loving and supportive family: lots of hugs, lots of conversations, lots of laughs. It gave me the warm and fuzzies. It was like a little dose of my mom´s hugs and chicken soup before I embark on another adventure.

Back from Nicuragua!

With three OTS students, I traveled to Ometempe Island in Lake Nicuragua for a few days, partly for the adventure and partly to renew my Costa Rica tourist visa. The island is absolutely beautiful--very rural with cows, pigs, and roosters strolling in the dirt roads, dry forest that explodes with bouquets of brilliant flowers on empty branches this time of year, two towering ancient volcanoes, and the sound of howler monkeys in the morning.



The first day, Gabe, Allen, and I climbed Volcan Maderas, a 1600ish meter volcano with cloud forest and a crater lake at the top. Since this is the dry season, the cloud forest was not especially cloudy, but it did still have branches dripping with mosses and the short, twisted trees. It reminds me of a fairy tale. These high elevation forests and the paramo, the high elevation shrubby prairie-like habitat, are my favorite ecosystems in Costa Rica. So I always enjoy hiking through them.

The next day, Gabe and I rented bicycles to bike 11 kilometers to San Ramon, a small dusty town on the other side of the island, and hike to a waterfall. To visit the waterfall, you can either pay $3 to go on a well-marked path owned by a ritzy hotel or you can pay $1 to walk on the community trail. They recommend that you hire a guide for the community trail because it is not well marked. Guess what we did--choose the community trail and decided to tough it without the guide. Yep. I think that we were fairly lost for the first hour or so. Gabe doesn´t. At any rate, we hiked in mostly the wrong direction for a while until we stumbled across a few men clear-cutting the area who told us to follow the dry creek bed to the waterfall. And then, after a long, hot hike with not quite enough water or lunch fixings, we reached the waterfall. It was absolutely gorgeous. No Niagara Falls, but an imposing mossy covered cliff face with a stream of water that fell to a shallow pool that we could wade in. So the hike was definitely worth it.



Allan and Kaori left one day early to meet family in San Jose and catch a flight to Quito, respectively. Then yesterday, Gabe and I got up bright and early at 4 am to make our way back to Costa Rica. We rolled back into San Jose at 11:00 last night after 8 hours on the TicaBus, 1 hour on a ferry, and 2 hours on the local Ometempe bus. So we had a long travel day.

For the next few days, I am staying at Andrés´ house in the San Pedro area before I embark on other adventures.

Errands in San Jose & Future Adventures

A DAY IN THE CITY: San Jose traffic--with all its honking horns and black exhaust--is certainly a change from the rainforest. It can get exhausting to hear cars, look at concrete, and dodge through crowds constantly. I would rather have ten hog-nosed pit vipers in my study plot than be caught standing in the middle of a San Jose traffic jam. So the city can be an overwhelming experience, but at the same time, I`ve learned to appreciate its gritty rhythum. And the people (despite everything you will hear about josefinos) are generally a nice crowd. The merchants that I talk to have always been patient with my Spanish. So that is fun.

I spent the day running errands: food for my bus trip tomorrow, knitting needles and yarn and books for all my bus trips in the next week or so, a hat to replace the one that is somewhere on the Osa Peninsula (see, Mama, I am preparing for the tropical sun in Nicuragua!), and shorts to replace my favorite chili pepper frisbee short that are in La Selva.

Tomorrow morning, I am taking a bus to Nicuragua to stay at Finca Magdelena for a few days. The hostel is on a working organic farm at the base of a volcano on an island in the middle of Lake Nicuragua. My friends who went there for spring break have said that it is really beautiful. It will be a great time to relax, read, and hike, but the real motive for going to Nicuragua is to re-new my tourist visa for another 90 days. The rule is that foriegners can only stay in Costa Rica for 90 days at a stretch and in between they have to leave the country for 72 hours.

After Nicuragua, I am planning on coming back to San Jose to stay with one of my Tico friends. Along with the other Ticos and one other US student who is staying in Costa Rica a week late, we will hike Volcano Barva in a large national park a few hours from San Jose. Ben had hiked this volcano when he had comed to Costa Rica earlier (and I was in the hospital without an appendix); he warned us to prepare for very very wet weather.

Then I am going to take a bus to Orosi with Fabi and stay at the guesthouse of a small national park ranger station. It is in the mountains near Cerro de la Muerte, almost on top of the Talamanca Mountain range that runs alone the spine of the country. That means that the moist, montane forest vegetation will be beautiful with lots of mossy and that there will be far fewer bugs to nibble on my ankles. Finally, I will end up in Las Cruces for my field assistantship with Chris Graham. So it promises to be a wonderful summer!

End of the Semester

So all the students are heading back home today. It has been a little sad saying goodbye to the friends that I have made this semester, but I know that we all have exciting lives to look forward to. I will likely cross pathes with that other ecologists.

I throughly enjoyed my time in La Selva. There is a beautiful variety of old growth and secondary forests, lots of snakes and frogs, and howler monkeys. Definitely recommend La Selva to anyone traveling to Costa Rica.



After La Selva, we spent two nights at Rincon de la Vieja, a sort of active volcano in northern Costa Rica. When hiking up the volcano, the elevation changes from 600 to 1900 meters. And I know that different plants grow at different elevations, but seeing the change happen during a 3 hour hike was incredible. We started in a dryish forest that looks a lot like a temperate forest in Arkansas at the begining of spring. Then palms gradually filled up the forest. Then, really suddenly, forest canopy dropped and instead of the diversity you normally see in tropical forest, there were only two or three tree species. Then we reached the top of a ridge that only supported shrubs with thick leathery leaves and small plants. At the very top of the volcano, almost to the crater, it was unbelieveably windy and rainy. So windy that I felt like I would topple over and so rainy that I could barely see 10 meters in front of me. And (yeah, it gets better) all the rain stung with sulfer from the volcano. It was a very dramatic ascent and absolutlely worthwhile.