Mud and Humidity

This station was the perfect place to wind up the course. Cabo Blanco is part of an Absolute Reserve (the highest level of protection, one of only a few places in the world to be designated as such) and is located at the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula on the Pacific coast. Every single thing in the reserve is protected, even from scientists. We could observe, but couldn't harm anything in doing our work. We only did one project here, since we were all frantic to get our papers finished and turned in. My group's project involved doing a snorkeling survey of fish in the lagoon--yes that is science, thank you very much. We had these awesome pieces of 6 inch PVC pipe that we wore around our wrists and kept our fish tallies on.
As you can see from the photos, the station is pretty rustic, that's the main building where the kitchen, dining and some sleeping areas were located. There were no walls around the dining areas, and we would get visited by raccoons and mosquitoes while we ate. There were also several hammocks around the station. A pretty good field day would be: take a survey in the morning, be finished by 10:30 so you can get be there when the fresh bread comes out of the oven for snack time, take a nap, lunch, maybe another nap, and work on papers the rest of the day.
We saw so many incredible sunsets from this station. There was a ritualistic sunset-swim that most of us took part in. We did have one day of fun after all our papers were in. We visited the waterfalls (as you can see, we could walk right up the rocks), did some non-scientific snorkeling, and spent time in the hammocks. We were all sad to leave.

This site was perhaps my favorite forest type, the cloud forest. There's not much rain here, and many of the plants get their main water from the mist. It's so special, and there's just not much of it left. Monteverde, the park, is something you should see soon because it is quickly losing its biodiversity as the habitat runs out and climate changes. The town outside of the park is very touristy, and since we weren't staying at a biological station we were just more tourists. This is also the spot where the flu ran through our group and we were all in our bunks with fevers for a few days. In our room, only Ryoko was still mobile, so she got liquids for the rest of us. We were all so tired as a group that it was probably inevitable that someone would get sick and we'd all go down. I had the extra fun of full-body hives, which I contracted from something on the first day. Between the Benadryl and the fever, I was delirious for two days.
One of the most special things of the whole summer involved climbing the inside of a strangler-fig (which is what I'm doing in one of the photos) that took you up into the canopy. When you got to the top you were just standing there, exposed, no rope, hanging onto a tree. It was incredible.
Trying to get out of Monteverde was an adventure, too. Our bus got stuck and we spent most of the morning trying to get it un-stuck. Many fabulous ideas were tried (including using us students as weight in the "trunk" to provide traction). A tractor eventually got us out. What you can't see in the picture is that in front of the bus is a ravine. We all secretly wanted to see the big, pink bus launch over the edge.

I just wanted to share a couple of photos now that I'm home and all trials have been survived.
Here are a couple from the mangrove swamp. One of me, just after "the incident", that's my dry boot I'm holding, it managed to stay wedged in some roots when I went in. The other is of some members of the group who managed to stay dry (although there were more wet people by the end of the day, it wasn't just me). I don't have any news yet on the camera, I haven't had time yet to send it home to Nikon.

I just found out that we probably won't have internet for the rest of the trip. We're leaving Palo Verde in a few minutes and heading to Monte Verde and then to the beach at Cabo Blanco. Just in case this is the end I'll leave you with a sunset that I got from Ryoko's camera...

Okay, so let's talk about non-human mammals. I don't really know anything about them, but I imagine that y'all are expecting pictures of some. So I asked around and found a couple photos. The monkeys (like this little white-faced monkey) are all over the place, the other most common type are the howler monkeys who wake you up in the morning but are less likely to be seen. They are not so cute at 5 am. Also, one of our groups did a project where they were interviewing locals for a sociological study and went to a local vet and took the photo of the jaguar. Apparently it's a big problem here (as it is in the States) that people get big cats as pets when they are little and then the cats have to be rescued when they get to be too much for their owners, that's this guy's story. Everyone wanted to touch his big paws, but were able to hold themselves back so as not to disturb him further.

Yesterday we hiked up Rincon de la Vieja, an active volcano. Only 12 of us went, because that's all that could fit in the back of the truck (as it was, it was an extremely long 2.5 hour drive to get there). Also, Pete gave us such a strong warning about how hard the hike would be that even though we now automatically apply our Pete-filter to everything he says, there still were some who thought that it might be too hard. The real dissuader was that Pete said that we would apply the Pirate's Code ("He who falls behind gets left behind" for those of you who aren't up on your pirate regulations). We were promised a fearsome hike across knife-edge ridges, a near-drowning in torrential rains, and that we would all have knee injuries.
...So, we pretty much ditched Pete by about halfway up the volcano. Just before the last of us got out of earshot we heard him say something about how we should wait for him up at timberline, which we did, against our better judgment.
We spent some serious time chucking rocks into the caldera. Actually, Anthony (our other co-coordinator) and I hit the summit first and waited around for everyone, but they had all gone to a different crater lower down. We found them. These photos are taken at the active caldera which was pumping out steam.

These little guys are all over the place. They guard the pathways and get a little bit fiesty if you sneak up and disturb them. They move surprisingly fast, and can even climb trees. They are about 20 cm long, but some of them are really tubby. We are all secretly thinking of ways to work projects around them so we can stay close to the air-conditioned lab.

I hijacked Javier's camera to take a couple photos of Palo Verde. We spent yesterday in the field surveying a couple of transects through a biological corridor. In some places the vegetation was so thick that we could hardly move through it. We were also competing with the ants, chiggers and mosquitoes for control of our skin. We got some good work done, but we were all pretty tired by the end of the day.
I think I mentioned that the station is in a park and located adjacent to a marsh, here's a photo from the station looking out across the futbol field and the marsh. It's pretty spectacular.

Well folks, the images that get posted here going to be a little different from now on. We were climbing across a mangrove swamp using the aerial roots as a walkway and I and my camera went in face first. I'll try to get photos from other people.
We're in the tropical dry forest of Palo Verde now. We went for a tour of the hills and through the marsh yesterday (not along the marsh, through it, up to our waists). Tomorrow we will get to start our field projects. The course is taking a conservation bent at this station, as it's a major focus of several of our resource people. It's strange to me to find myself wishing we could stop shooting the poop about conservation and get back to the field work. We met today with a guy who has been doing research and conservation work in Costa Rica since the early 60's, he had a pretty cynical view of things, as one would expect of someone who has seen the forests here shrink 90% in the last 30 years.
The mosquitos here are pretty amazing. They were horrendous the first day we got here, but yesterday the dragonflies showed up and have been taking good care of us. I always get a bunch of them to come with me on my runs in the morning. It's not exactly like running with Indie, they rarely pull on their leashes.

Last night we rolled into San Jose at about 5pm. We all ran out and did some shopping then went out for pizza. As we were sitting in the pizza place, we could hear some loud dance music coming from next door and decided to check it out. It was a club, and they charged a cover to get in but the price included three drink tickets so we went for it. As we worked our way back into the packed club, we realized that it was a bigger place than we had imagined, but that there was a big, black sheet dividing the room. We sent Tate to investigate (he's the innocent looking one with the glasses in yesterday's photo). He came to report that there were a bunch of women dancing and some men on a balcony. Three of the women, myself included, went to investigate further and found that it was something like the San Jose equivalent of a Chippendale. We couldn't stop laughing. It's apparently a common ploy in clubs here to lure women in and gets them drunk. Eventually the dancing men were replaced by a dancing woman and then everyone got to enjoy the embarrassment. We called it an early night.