January 18, 2007 – Monteverde
Monteverde is a cloud forest. It’s way up high in a mountain, and is apparently shrouded in mist most of the time. When we arrived yesterday it misted for most of the afternoon and evening. Today started out misty, but then got sunny. It’s also much, much cooler here than it was at Palo Verde, the temperature has been in the 60s and 70s (compared to the 80s and 90s). We’ve all been bundling up in our long pants and long-sleeved shirts, and even then it’s a little chilly. I’m not complaining, though, I definitely prefer this to the heat.
Today we hiked up a mud pit to see the continental divide. Not kidding. It was about a three hour hike (give or take a few wrong turns) pretty much straight up the side of a very muddy mountain. By the time we got back down, my boots and my pants up to about my knees were caked in mud.
The accommodations here are very, very nice. Palo Verde was nice by field station standards, Santa Rosa was a campground with outhouses (not my favorite way to live), but this is like the Ritz Carlton of field stations. The rooms are fairly spacious, with two bunk beds in each, beautiful hardwood floors, and our own bathroom with a (warm!) shower and flushing toilet. Also, someone comes in every day to make our beds and lay out fresh towels (also very unexpected). The food is fantastic. For lunch on the first day there was sort of a pasta primavera (alfredo sauce with vegetables) and dinners have been a lovely spread with salads, rice, beans of some sort, chicken or another meat, vegetables, and a dessert! The first night was the creamiest ice cream I’ve ever tasted, and tonight was flan covered with a caramel sauce. This place is definitely spoiling us for everywhere else (particularly Corcovado, the sight we have a “love/hate” relationship with, according to one of the professors – very hot, very humid, very very rustic).
We start doing our field projects here tomorrow. Currently, three papers are in the draft stage – Applying Optimal Defense Theory to Ant-Acacia Mutualisms, Environmental effects on nectar production and pollinator interactions with the flowering plant, Ruellia nudiflora (I hate this paper so very, very much), and The Effect of Ant Size on Myrmeleon crudelis Capture Success. The project I might tag along with here is on butterflies. Hopefully it will be interesting and go well. The novelty of doing fieldwork nonstop is starting to wear off, and now it’s just . . . work. Fifty-one more days to go, and I hope that they will be enjoyable, at least some of the time.
Today we hiked up a mud pit to see the continental divide. Not kidding. It was about a three hour hike (give or take a few wrong turns) pretty much straight up the side of a very muddy mountain. By the time we got back down, my boots and my pants up to about my knees were caked in mud.
The accommodations here are very, very nice. Palo Verde was nice by field station standards, Santa Rosa was a campground with outhouses (not my favorite way to live), but this is like the Ritz Carlton of field stations. The rooms are fairly spacious, with two bunk beds in each, beautiful hardwood floors, and our own bathroom with a (warm!) shower and flushing toilet. Also, someone comes in every day to make our beds and lay out fresh towels (also very unexpected). The food is fantastic. For lunch on the first day there was sort of a pasta primavera (alfredo sauce with vegetables) and dinners have been a lovely spread with salads, rice, beans of some sort, chicken or another meat, vegetables, and a dessert! The first night was the creamiest ice cream I’ve ever tasted, and tonight was flan covered with a caramel sauce. This place is definitely spoiling us for everywhere else (particularly Corcovado, the sight we have a “love/hate” relationship with, according to one of the professors – very hot, very humid, very very rustic).
We start doing our field projects here tomorrow. Currently, three papers are in the draft stage – Applying Optimal Defense Theory to Ant-Acacia Mutualisms, Environmental effects on nectar production and pollinator interactions with the flowering plant, Ruellia nudiflora (I hate this paper so very, very much), and The Effect of Ant Size on Myrmeleon crudelis Capture Success. The project I might tag along with here is on butterflies. Hopefully it will be interesting and go well. The novelty of doing fieldwork nonstop is starting to wear off, and now it’s just . . . work. Fifty-one more days to go, and I hope that they will be enjoyable, at least some of the time.
posted by Allison at 9:36 PM
1 Comments:
holy cow, why wasn't jatun sacha that nice? are they accepting volunteer workers? volunteer workers for two weeks? volunteer workers for two weeks who speak some broken spanish?
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