First Day of School

So, I'd been hoping to post a photo a day, but since I left the States I haven't had the bandwidth to upload them.  I'll save them up for when I get back,  I guess.

Today the class officially started.  We had a great breakfast with beans & rice (pinto) and eggs, fresh pineapple and papaya, and amazing juice made from some fruit related to the pawpaw.  If it has an English name, nobody knew it.  After that we spent several hours with packing ourselves up, heading to the main office, packing up the course equipment, and taking care of paperwork.  

In the 20 minutes before lunch I got to go out with my binoculars for the first time.  There are a few excellent birders here to learn from, and even the most common disturbed-habitat birds are a novelty for me, so it's easy to have a good time.  There is a tree near the OTS office with a colony of Montezuma Oropendulas in it.  They are spectacular birds, about the size of ravens but warm brown with yellow tails, red beaks, and blue on their faces.  They build hanging basket nests.  I also saw baltimore orioles, a palm tanager, great-tailed grackles, rufous-collared sparrows, a tropical kingbird, a Great Kiskadee, clay-colored robins, a golden-naped woodpecker, and I think a brown-crested flycatcher.  (I apologize to anyone who is bored for this and all future species lists.  Feel free to skim over them.)  And that was just in the suburbs; wait until I get at the wetland tomorrow.

The ride to Palo Verde took about 5 hours.  We had fancy tour bus: big, shiny, air-conditioned; everyone got two seats to themselves.  A little strange.  I spent half of the time sleeping, half looking out the windows.  There was a lot of sugar cane, which is an increasingly important cash crop here.  (I just learned that it is replacing rice in the Guanacaste region (NW) -- rice is grown by small-scale, family-owned farms; sugar cane is grown mostly by 3 big corporations that are buying up the small farms.)  There were also a lot of flowering trees.  It's the dry season, so many deciduous trees drop their leaves and put out flowers.  The most prominent tree species was some kind of legume.  The individual trees were isolated, but you could see them for a long way because the entire canopy was a mass of fluorescent orange flowers.  

We got to Palo Verde in time to unload the bus and unpack our bags before the sun set.  After dinner there was a long lecture on restoring the wetland (which had been overrun by cattails) followed by a short but much more entertaining primer on life for scientists at Palo Verde.  The condensed version:  1)Watch out for africanized honeybees.  If they go for you, run fast.  2)Avoid rattlesnakes, vipers, and toxic snakes.  3)The ubiquitous scorpions aren't lethal, but you should still be sure to shake out your shoes every morning and check your towel before you dry off after a shower.  4) When the army ants come through the station, just move outside and wait.  They'll leave eventually.  

Now I'm sitting cozily under my mosquito netting with a nice breeze blowing through the screen.  Tomorrow we'll get our first guided natural history hikes.  I'm looking forward to it so much!  Then we'll start thinking about project ideas.  I hope you're all doing well wherever you are.