I'm taking a break from packing to write my last post from Palo Verde. It was a long day. 4 hours of presentations in the morning, with everybody talking about their independent projects. It was fun to see how they more or less came together at the last minute. There were projects on turtle shell symmetry, foraging habits of iguanas, color change and temperature regulation of iguanas, different aspects of black-backed frog calls, job partitioning in acacia ants, pollination biology of morning glories... 16 different research ideas. The afternoon was for finishing our first drafts of papers on the independent projects.
I printed mine out at 5 so I'd have an hour to run around the woods and swamp before dinner. I saw a streaked-back oriole, white ibis, and black-headed trogon! I think it was my first trogon ever. Becky took a picture of me looking at it, I look pretty excited. I also got 4 acacia ant stings on the walk... a reminder not to focus too much on birds.
Everybody has been scratching away at their bug bites, but until early this morning I was relatively unscathed. But I woke up at about 4:30, and it seemed the accumulating bites had reached some threshold. Since then I've been scratching here and there pretty much constantly. I'm not sure exactly what they are... tick bites, mosquitoes, chiggers certainly.
We load up the bus tomorrow morning and set out for Cabo Blanco at 7:30. It's south and slightly east of here, on the tip of the peninsula that forms the west side of the Nicoya Gulf. A six-hour drive, apparently, if all goes well. There is no internet access there, and the phone is only for emergencies, but I'll try to collect blog entries and the upload them all at once on February 11th, when we spend a night in San Jose on our way to La Selva on the other side of the country. It's been wonderful hearing from some of you, I'll miss being able to read emails and chat online! But the schedule at Cabo Blanco is supposed to be more relaxed than Palo Verde was anyway, so hopefully I won't need to decompress as often. :)
We had a party to celebrate finishing our first independent projects and our time at Palo Verde. It was mostly just sitting around on the front porch of the biological station, passing the guitar around, grabbing and inspecting the insects attracted to the lights at night. There were a couple of really cool long-horned beetles. One of them wouldn't leave the beer can alone; we thought probably it was excited about the moisture condensing on the side. Craig passed around a really nice bottle of rum, and we played (and sang) everything from Bob Dylan to Tenacious D. It was the first time nobody was talking science; we just sat around crafting inside jokes and laughing hard. I'm getting up early tomorrow morning to say goodbye to Palo Verde before breakfast. We'll all catch up on sleep on the bus.
Next update in a week!
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You're reminding me how amazing the natural world really is. It's the same way children remind me to stop and look with wonder at normal things, beetles, millipedes, leaves. Even as it annoys the hell out of me that every time I take my kiddos to the park, they pick up the SAME Norfolk Island Pine needles and say, "Look, Ms. Logan! Look what I found!" At least I know they are still awed and excited... something I need to be more often.
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