I don't feel ready to leave Palo Verde. I'm just getting used to being here, starting to remember the plants and easily identify the most common birds. I can even sometimes subconsciously recognize the rustle of a peccary in the dry leaves. Today, for the first time, I noticed a baby capuchin hanging out on its mother's back, grasping with all four limbs and tail. Apparently there are some in every troop, it's been right in front of me every time I ran into the monkeys, but I was too overwhelmed with everything to see the details. Anyway, I'd better get used to it, because that's the way this course operates -- stay in one place long enough to get a small foothold, and then move on. Maybe someday I'll get to come back here again and cement the prickly Pochote tree, the Guacimo with it's cardboardy-sweet fruits, and bright orange flowered Jaquinia in my mind.
Today I crept off just before sunset with my friend Becky (a fellow believer in enjoying every day) to check out the water hole. We keep hoping to see some big mammal besides a peccary -- maybe even a cat! No luck, but there were frogs, parrots, capuchins, and a male curassow tromping through the woods. By the time we were nearly back to the station, it was properly dusky. We scared up a Pauraque (or maybe it scared us up). It flew off making a beautiful sound like drops of water in a metal container, amplified and slowed down. Birds are weird and cool. In fact, life is. That's why I'm a biologist. :)
If you check out earlier posts, you'll see that Raffica the Magnificent has begun putting up photos for me. I'll try to get a few more to her before we leave Palo Verde. I think there's one from the first capuchin troop I encountered, plus a photo of a Malvaviscus flower and it's excellent nectar-stealing bug.
So, we finished analyzing data for our first independent project today. We were looking for differences in how the acacia-leaf-sucking coreid bug (from our first study) interacts with different species of acacia and ant. We were expecting to find differences (that the bug would prefer one species of acacia, and that some ants would be more aggressive than others), but nothing was significant in our analyses. But this is interesting too! (It might be more interesting if our sample sizes was big enough to give us any confidence in our results...) Anyway, it was fun and I learned a lot about how to think about study design, statistics, and thinking in a group. If you want the details, ask me sometime -- I think they'd probably bore just about anyone who reads this! Now that it's time to write up the study, I'm learning to truly understand, in my soul, how slow the internet here is and how long downloading a pdf can take.
Life lessons, ladies and gentlemen. Next week: how to think longingly of the slow connection at Palo Verde when stuck in Cabo Blanco with no internet at all. Am I addicted? Seriously though, I'm going to have to wait 8 days to find out what happens on February 5th.
Entertaining anecdotes section! Yesterday, two ant-crazy guys (Joe and Bill -- all the fellas here have very normal names) independently managed to get acacia-ant stings on their lips. I got to see my second scorpion, too -- this one's back was completely covered by tiny baby scorpions! It was kind of cute, and at the same time gave me the creeps. This morning after breakfast there was a cinnamon hummingbird throwing a fit about the hooting ferruginous pygmy owl next to the station. The owl didn't seem to care one bit.
New birds for the list: white-tailed hawk, mangrove cuckoo, and olive sparrow.
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