Went for a night walk after lecture and work time in the classroom, motivating myself with thoughts of jaguars and bats after a long day in the hot sun moving ants around from acacia tree to acacia tree. (There is a cool ant-tree mutualism in which the tree provides special food supplies for the ants, called Beltian bodies and extrafloral nectaries for protein and sugar respectively, and the ants in return ruthlessly attack any intruder on their territory, including unwitting backpacks.)

I guess like me there are a fair number of critters who can’t fall asleep out here. No jaguars were met (yet) but we saw some other night hunters, including bats and, more excitingly, tarantulas. They move like predators, cruising over the leaf litter on their delicate feet keeping their more impressive mouthparts and fuzzy bodies aloft. 

We saw a spider near to this one catch a sizable cricket and consume it hungrily before our eyes. The tarantula seemed unmoved by this view, and more interested in continuing its own explorations.

Almost back at the station, I spotted a reddish-orange eye reflection in the shrubs. The spiders’ eyes had shone back white or blue-ish, and cats were supposed to glow green, so I wasn’t sure what it could be. On closer (careful) investigation, we found this little guy staying perfectly still on the ground, blending in perfectly except for those reflective eyes.

Can you see the bird? It’s a paraque, a fairly common night bird often seen on roads and in clear spaces. Not sure what it was doing there or why it would want to perch so still on the ground with so many hunters around, but a good find nonetheless. 

Bedtime now, for me at least. The howler monkeys will be up at 5, and I have breakfast at 6:30, but the party (for some) rages on outside while predators of all sizes swoop, crawl, slither, pounce, and wait outside.

Today was a day of reflection- we went on a morning walk and identified birds with the park naturalist, but were then set free to wander the woods and the marsh on our own. When we’re not in a big group, it’s easier to slow down and check out the little stuff, turn over rocks, sit and watch a capuchin for twenty minutes (and thoroughly piss it off), spot the baby crocodile eyes in the water, and get REALLY close to a ctenosaur.

This capuchin tolerated my observation for 15 minutes, continuing to crack open those seed pods you’ll see in the picture and drop them more or less on my head. Eventually, however, he or she seemed to get tired of me and climbed out of the tree, showing me teeth.

The ctenosaurs were all over today, and they blend in well enough to the surroundings that you could almost walk right over them… except that they are 3-foot lizards who do not appreciate such actions. If you get really low, though, and come up quietly, they’ll let you get reasonably close before diving into a hole or running away (or biting you, if you’re very unlucky and/or tasty-looking).

Also sometimes they sneeze? Not sure if that was an aggressive behavior or just a virus.

Our last stop of the day was the top of “La Roca,” the local high point overlooking the tufa marsh and the experimental patches of mowed weeds (there are lots of invasive-plants problems limiting the bird habitat nearby) along with the Tempisque River and the nearby mountains. The view was described to us as “soul-changing,” and I think it might actually have lived up.

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a lot of good views in my life (the Annapurna mountains in the Himalayas, Yosemite and its waterfalls, glaciers and snowscapes and coral reefs, to name a few) but this one… people talk all the time about how important diversity is, and how great nature is, and science and identification and harvesting the knowledge that the planet still holds from us, but looking out from that rock was special. There’s a spirituality in science, at least for me, that takes the research and the insight and the millions of questions still left to answer and makes them sacred. I don’t feel it in the everyday dirt and grind of school and research and reading, but above it all, my spirit or mind or whatever wants to leap up and glide on the updrafts with the wood storks and the hawks, and look down on it all, and ask and answer all the questions. 

It’s crazy diverse, due to the confluence of North and South Americas and their respective flora and fauna, the trade winds and mountains creating microclimates and heavy rainfall, and the fairly consistent year-round temperature. (Among other things.)

It’s bordered by both the Pacific and the Atlantic, between Nicaragua and Panama:

(photo from US Dept. of State website)

And I’m slowly (or not so slowly) falling in love with it.

Today was sort of our first real day (they keep telling us that, and then we have another “first real day”- yesterday was our first whole day in Costa Rica, today was our first day in the field, tomorrow we have a full day of lectures and prep for work, and the day after we actually start on projects). Essentially, we continued to dive into our plans and prep for the trip, arriving at Palo Verde, our first field site, just before lunch.

Interesting language note: a “ferretería” is not, in fact, a store that sells ferrets. (A panadería sells pan or bread, and a zapatería sells zapatos or shoes, getting the pattern?) So my dreams of a big store full of nothing but ferrets and supplies for their care were dashed, but I learned that a ferretería is, in fact, a hardware store. 

Palo Verde is fairly distant from any such frivolity, in any case. We’re a bit remote, at this first OTS field station, in the largest preserved area of dry tropical forest in Mesoamerica. Dry forest is more or less what it sounds like- not a rainforest, but a super diverse deciduous forest of trees and lianas, populated by monkeys, coatis, agoutis, curaçaos, ocelots, snakes, ctenosaurs, a million types of birds (that might not be an exaggeration… it is unclear) and bugs, bugs, bugs. Among the highlights were the spider monkeys, capuchins, and howler monkeys we heard and saw in the trees, giant ctenosaurs (black iguanas), and a boa constrictor that we caught slithering along the path. 

We headed from the dry forest then down toward the marsh at the bottom of the hill. At the beginning of the dry season (now-ish, I think) there are fewer mosquitoes (but they’re still here…) but still water in the wetlands, where we saw more birds than I could count and a few crocodiles who were given a wide berth by all. We stuck around the observation pier and tower there until sunset, which wasn’t actually too buggy and was definitely very beautiful.

More to come soon on Costa Rica in general, and the way it it pretty much the coolest place to study all of the things!

It’s not the end of the day yet, but it feels like we’ve done a lot. After breakfast, we headed to OTS (the Organization for Tropical Research or, for those who speak Spanish or pretend to (like me) la Organización para Estudios Tropicales). Here’s their website, in case you want to check them out- I recommend it! They do a lot of neat tropical biology for conservation, expansion of knowledge, and inspiration of the people of the world, according to their director of educational programs: http://www.ots.ac.cr

We hung out outside there for a while, just kinda chatting and checking out the cool trees- pretty much everything here is interesting to look at, even the landscaping. Epiphytes on everything, huge leaves, strangler ficus, new birds… 

We went shopping after that, mostly just for entertainment though a few people needed to replenish sunscreen, shampoo, and notebooks. In a little mall, we found some shops selling medicinal plants like aloe and something that looked like daisies.

Practicing my Spanish with the restaurants, shops, and people around me has been challenging but awesome. I’ve lost so much… but I remember a lot, too, and it’s great to actually put this stuff into good use. As my Dartmouth drill instructor used to exclaim: