army ants!

Today I spent most of the daylight out collecting flowers for the current faculty-led project. It was great! Maybe 30 minutes of rain the whole time. The six of us split into two groups, and I was the only botanist in mine, so I got to do all the dissecting of flowers in the field. We were looking for flowers we could get pollen and receptive stigmas from, and it was amazing how hard it was to find those basic structures in some of the flowers! Really diverse shapes. We probably got a total of 40 different species -- we're still trying to figure out exactly what we have. I was working on making slides of pollen and stigmas until 9:30. By then I just couldn't work anymore. We'll start again tomorrow at 7:30.

Being out in the field we saw lots of great stuff besides flowers, of course. The highlight of the day for me was seeing a whole colony of army ants on the move. It's something I'd been really hoping to see. It's totally different from the column of ants you usually see crossing a sidewalk. The moving front of the colony was really wide -- I could see several meters into the forest, and the edge wasn't visible. The ants were thick, covering everything, crawling all over each other and up the vegetation to waist height, foraging to feed the colony. There were insects running and flying away from them in every direction A few of the birds that specialize on following army ants were hanging around, picking up the insects that were stirred up by the ants. It was so cool. We stood and watched them for a long time.

There are several features of the forest that are becoming familiar, friendly things now. The height, the humidity, leaf cutter ants, lots and lots of palms. Smells that come and go as you walk past: a flowering plant, a high density of overripe fruit, or a peccary. There are even a few bird calls that are becoming familiar; pauraque, parrot, oropendula, various wrens.

I saw my first fer-de-lance today, a juvenile that was in the grass just outside the lab. Of course one of the herp guys in the class had to poke it until it coiled up, then put a strong light on it and take lots of pictures. Poor little snake. I was excited to get a look at it, though. Now I have a search image for things not to step on. I also saw a cane toad, a native species here. Big and toady-looking.

I'll put today's bird list with tomorrow's, need to go to bed now.