Day 36: Our last site in Costa Rica approaches…

Well, we left Las Cruces today for our final Costa Rica site. At 7:30, we all piled on the bus. I had a mild headache from the night before (the wine I had was only 6% alcohol, but probably 80% sugar. Bleh) so I took Advil and then Dramamine. Did I mention we had a 7 hour bus ride ahead of us?

Definitely a wonderful time to catch up on sleep. I slept for a solid 4 hours, then we stopped for lunch. Afterwards, Hannah and I watched The Jungle Book on her computer, and I loved it! Definitely worth watching if you haven’t already.

After the movie, it was back to sleep. I woke at Las Cruces. We piled off the bus, unloaded the luggage, and had an hour free to do whatever. I explored the station a little (I think I found army ants. To be determined later) then got to the dining room at 6 for dinner.

After dinner, we met with Hannah (the professor) for feedback on our final Campanario manuscript. We decided to turn in early.

 

Day 37: Birds, birds, birds everywhere!

Hot damn, it’s hot again.

I know I really don’t have any right to complain, seeing as most of my friends are braving freezing temperatures and feet of snow up North, but sheesh. It is humid down here, and I really miss being cold.

It rained last night! Great, right?

Being from Southern California, rain is such a foreign concept that I don’t really understand what it does to the humidity levels. And now I do. At around noon today, it was probably 85 Fahrenheit outside but no more water could evaporate into the atmosphere. Including from my body, which makes wearing pants reeeaally uncomfortable.

Anyways, after breakfast we met with one of the guides who works at La Selva for a hiking tour. His name was Kenneth, and he told us that he was going to show us the flora and fauna of the region. We left the reception area for one of the trails and things picked up immediately.

First off, La Selva is probably the easiest place to navigate that we’ve been to so far. Even though there are greater than 60 km of trails here, many of them are paved (to aid with snake protection). There are markers along every trail and they hand out maps from day 1.

As we headed to the trail, we ran into a Great Curassow. They’re funky looking, about two feet tall with big, puffy bodies and a bright yellow crest on their face. From there, we entered the trail into the jungle and right away saw poison dart frogs! These guys are awesome; we saw the red and blue variant. They’re probably way smaller than you’ve imagined them to be; the biggest was probably a little larger than my thumb nail.

And then we saw birds. And more birds. And even more birds. All the birds that we had wanted to see over the course of this trip seem to have congregated in this one spot. We saw toucans (both species, so we saw Toucan Sam!!), toucanettes, trogons, wrens, orioles, hawks, kites…. the list goes on. Suffice to say it was a colorful few hours, and I think in total we ran into over 40 species.

Then, on the way back, it finally happened.

The moment everyone had desired.

He appeared.

WE SAW OUR SLOTH!!!!

I may not have mentioned it well throughout this, but there has been an almost unhealthy desire to see the most regal of all animals in the animal kingdom, the giver of light, the maker of happiness, the destroyer of all evils, the majestic sloth.

And on the way back to the station, we found TWO. It was unbelievable, and a few tears may have been shed (including from the angels crying in happiness when the beautiful creature turned its head skyward).

After lunch we had free time until 7 to work on project ideas. I walked off into the woods along a different trail with Amber and Leigh, and we hiked for a while without seeing anything spectacular. Callum and Leah joined us, and we made our way much deeper into the jungle.

It was awesome; we saw the rare variant of poison dart frogs, the neon green and black frog. We ran into spider monkeys, bullet ants, howler monkeys, and a few other cool birds, like a jacamar.

We had to get back to the station to finalize our Campanario manuscript. Once that was complete, Callum and I went back to check on the sloths. It’s very likely that we’ll be doing a project on them.

Can you believe it? We found a THIRD! Yeah, this day was truly unreal. We must have done some wonderful things to be graced by the presence of three sloths. This project is looking more and more feasible with every minute that goes by.

After dinner, we had a module on animal behavior and then pitched our projects. We basically need to finalize everything by tomorrow and begin data collection, so there’s not a lot of time to waste.

That’s pretty much it for today. ¡Pura Vida!

 

Day 38: Codename Sloth Project is a go

Callum and I went running before breakfast this morning, which was where he finally proved to me that he is a wizard. In the middle of the run, Callum said it would be great if it started raining on us. 5 seconds later, in all seriousness, the heavens opened with a deluge of water and we were soaked in minutes. It was crazy. Never mess with a guy who can control the weather.

Because we need to have our final projects at La Selva completed and the manuscripts written before we leave here, the schedule is heavily compressed. Today was dedicated to finalizing the project ideas and even beginning data collection.

Can you guess the project group I was a part of? Probably. How could I leave the sloths alone out there? With an opportunity to study such unique creatures, I couldn’t choose anything else (although I was really pushing for a dart frog or bullet ant project). After breakfast we had time to run pilot projects for our studies and basically make sure that they would be feasible. For the sloths, this meant that we had to go out and find the sloths from yesterday and make sure there were things we could look at to formulate a good study.

We first went to look for Jeff and Tina (yes, we are already naming them. It’s in the name of science, so it has to be ok. Just like turning on your hazards, AKA park anywhere lights). Jeff completely startled us; we found him in a tree near where he was yesterday, but then he took off at what seemed like maximum sloth speed and moved through a ton of trees.

Side note: Watching sloths move through trees is so stressful. They always look like they are just moments from plummeting off the branch.

After we spent some time watching, Jeff grabbed onto a vine and began climbing upwards. All of the sudden, he disappeared from view, and we completely lost him. Yup, somehow we managed to lose a sloth that was right in front of us. These animals are great with camouflage, but it was still humiliating.

We then went and found Tina. She, being the obviously more faithful sloth, was right where we left her and barely moved while we were watching. She should do great. Finally, we tried to find the sloth that was near the bridge. We had no luck for almost an hour, until Becca found her not 10 feet from the side of the bridge.

We met after lunch as a class and finalized ideas, then began data collection. For sloths, we are watching the animals for hour long shifts, recording any movement and the ambient conditions. I ended up sitting on the bridge for an hour watching the bridge sloth, and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. Sloths absolutely have life nailed. They just eat, nap, and move so they can eat some more. It’s meditative watching one in a tree for an hour.

The sloth group met after an hour in the field and we all switched roles, so I was assigned to watching Tina while Franceca and Becca looked for Jeff and Callum watched Bridge Sloth.

After dinner, Caroline and Becca did paper talks. We watched the sloth near the bridge using night vision binoculars and talked to a girl at UCR doing research here on whip scorpions.

¡Pura Vida!

Day 39: Meditation

Today was the day. It was make or break for every group. Today was the day where we all had to collect pretty much out entire data set. We have tomorrow morning, but the symposium is tomorrow night so most of us would rather be working on statistics and planning the presentation by then.

After breakfast, I grabbed some hobos to record temperature for me.

Sorry, I should probably get the capitalization right on that one. Otherwise you’re gonna get the wrong idea about me and my outlook on humans.

I grabbed some HOBO temperature loggers from Braden, programmed to record the temperature every minute until they basically run out of battery. Braden also shared some of his music with me on a dipstick (this is now what we call USB thumb drives). Have you ever heard of Monsieur Rigolitch? The DJ who mixes Balkam jazz grooves with French hip-hop? Yeah, me neither.

By this time, my group had already started their observation period for each sloth. I dropped the HOBOs off at each person and then joined in for my shift of sloth-watching. It was great, let me tell you what. Watching sloths is like mediation. They have got to be the most content and peaceful animals out there.

We watched sloths until lunch. After an amazing meal (it’s already boring talking about the food. Suffice to say there hasn’t been a a bad dish to date) I watched part of a soccer game playing on the TV in the dining area. We then returned to our posts and watched sloths until dinner.

We tried to watch sloths after dinner, but it turns out that animals that are difficult to find during the day are truly impossible to find at night. Instead we found agouti pacas off the side of the bridge. This was awesome, because the paca is highly endangered due to hunting. It was awesome to see an animal that the local guards are stoked to see and share on their radios to one another.

The rest of the night was spent entering data in the classroom.

Day 40: I guess it’s finally over

Jeez. Today was our last day doing field work in Costa Rica. In the morning, we had time to do some last-minute data collection, so we went hunting for sloths in the woods. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a single one. Zip, zilch, nada.

Again, not sure how you lose a sloth, but it has happened enough times now that I know it’s very possible. I decided to work on data analysis to be more useful. In order to run the statistical tests we wanted to, we needed to organize our data sheet in a lot of different ways, and we spent the entire morning just moving and changing numbers.

After lunch, I got to watch a little more soccer, then it was back to the grind. We finally began analyzing our data in JMP and found some cool results. Symposium at 7, only 3 groups.

Afterwards, I went on a night walk with Emily to look for red-eyed tree frogs. We didn’t find any, but definitely saw some other cool stuff. For example, we found a caterpillar that looked exactly like a tuft of white fur. Unfortunately, I found out that under the soft fur are things that sting, and I am currently still experiencing fairly intense waves of pain from the encounter. Hm.

It was worth it for science, right? No, after an hour of pain it definitely wasn’t. Oh well.