It's Friday night at La Selva, which means we just finished our beans and rice and are sitting down at the microscopes for a few hours of pollen-counting. Hooray! Amanda and I have gotten faster, now we're a veritable assembly line of stained-stigma slide production. But we've fallen a little behind in processing the slides, so tomorrow might be a morning of counting, too.
I think I've acclimated finally. Today I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt against the mosquitoes. All my clothes were damp with sweat, but I didn't feel hot. I learned to carry a handkerchief for my camera, which fogs up for ~30 minutes after being in the air conditioned office all night. Now that I'm used to it, I can't believe I'll be leaving in another 2.5 days!
I have been getting better with my camera, though. I've been trying to get a good photo of the strawberry poison dart frog, and I finally managed it. They are super abundant here, and much more conspicuous in the wet season. Other summer treats include baby peccaries, frequent tree falls, and lots of red mud.
A couple of nights ago there was a big storm and a huge tree right next to the River Station fell on the electrical wires. I woke in the middle of the night to a sound like a gunshot, and I thought it was a little strange that people were shooting canopy leaves in the middle of the night. (Using a shotgun is apparently the standard method for sampling leaves in the canopy, and there is a group doing it at La Selva at the moment.) The next thing I noticed was that I couldn't see anything AT ALL; I thought maybe I might be blind, but it didn't seem important enough to lose sleep over, so I went back to my dreams. In the morning we found out that there were wires in the river and half the station had lost electricity. A crew was out early to work on it; apparently the tree was hung up in the wires, because they felled it just as I was walking out in the morning. It was HUGE and we were all glad it didn't fall on the River Station itself. Amanda and I were out in the field, so we didn't miss the electricity; they didn't get it up again until early afternoon. So all the people who needed to use thermocyclers and digital scales sat in the rocking chairs for a few hours, I guess.
That's the excitement from the rainforest for now! I'm having fun, and looking forward to coming home.
1 comment:
That's some excitement, Sister! Shotguns and power outages and poisonous stuff. Can't wait to hear more details. I suppose you're mostly if not all the way back by now. I'm mostly hanging out this week, hopefully pretty lowkey. Maybe I'll call you in a couple of days here.
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