I have to apologize for the fact that this post is so late.
We have had almost no free time in the past few weeks, and the free time that
we have had has been filled with trying to finish all of my assignments. This
post was written on February 17th, but I have not had a chance to
upload it (the internet has also been especially bad recently).
The
beginning of my week, though fun, was not particularly exciting.. We had a
ridiculous amount of classes (including five hours of econ in one day). On
Wednesday, we had a really awesome outreach volunteering experience. There is a
school in Atenas that has an intensive English-learning class for students
around my age. They have been taking this class for three weeks and needed to
practice with native English speakers. It was the perfect setup- they knew
about as much English as we knew Spanish. It was a lot of fun trying to figure
out how to communicate with them. We played a lot of different games in English
and Spanish. We played the game Taboo (which is when you have a word that you
are trying to get your teammates to guess it by giving them clues about the
word). That game is really hard to do in Spanish. We had a lot of fun hanging
out with the Costa Rican kids, and are going to meet up with them again next
week to go to a nearby waterfall. It was really nice to meet them, especially
since many of the kids are the ones that we will be staying with during our
two-day homestay.
On Thursday
we were off to the most unbelievable trip. We went to Monteverde Cloud Forest National
Park, which was paradise. We got to Monteverde in the early morning and had class
outdoors on one of the larger trails. The class was all about cloud forest
ecology, which was very interesting. It was a very interesting lecture.
Monteverde is a cloud forest where they have three main seasons: misty, dry,
and wet. About twenty percent of their rain is horizontal rain (which means it doesn’t
come directly from the clouds). About forty-three percent of the biomass here
in Monteverde is composed of epiphites (which are plants that live completely
on other plants with no contact with the soil. To give you an idea as to how
lush this place is, there is about 1000 kg per hectare of plant growth in the secondary
forest parts.
After the
lecture we went on an orientation hike with Edgardo (the tropical ecology
professor). The park looked so prehistoric that I half expected to see a
brontosaurus walk out of the forest towards us. There was a really cool
suspension bridge that took us through the canopy of the rainforest. It was
interesting to see the forest from a different point of view than normal. It
was also really interesting because most of the biodiversity of a rainforest is
located in the canopy, so we saw a lot of the organisms we wouldn’t normally
see. We hiked up to the Continental Divide, where on one side of the trail we
could see the Caribbean Ocean, and on the other the Pacific. We were literally
walking through the clouds. It was an amazing experience. After lunch we had a
short break, and then more class. In the evening, we had dinner at an Italian
place (with delicious vegetable pizza), and then went on a night hike. We
didn’t see much wildlife because the other people were way too loud, but we did
see some bioluminescent larvae. Some of the other kids stayed outside after the
hike, and we sat and looked at the stars for a few hours. There wasn’t much
light pollution at the reserve, so the stars were brilliantly bright. I saw four shooting stars!
The next
day we began our FEX (Field Experiment, which is required for every class). We
could conduct an experiment on anything we wanted to related to ecology. We
were given two hours to explore the park with our partner and to begin
designing the experiment. My friend Lauren and I decided to test how human
traffic on the trails impacted bird activity. We compared the most heavily used
trail and least used trail. We quantified the number of people that passed and
compared it to number of birdcalls that heard. I still haven’t analyzed the
data, but the raw data seems to point to a trend of significant decrease in
calls made during and after a visit of noisy groups. And apparently our
professor is doing similar research on the impact of road noise on long-term
bird activity. Overall it was a very nice experience to get to sit in the woods
for three hours and just listen to the birds.
After FEX
was completed, we went to Bajo de Tigre and the Children’s Eternal Rainforest
(which is a nearby reserve). There, we saw one of my favorite animals of all
time a SLOTH. I don’t know how Achim (one of the professors) saw it. He was sleeping
about thirty feet up a tree about twenty feet off the trail. I didn’t really
get a good picture of him because he was so far away and had his back to us.
But I was very excited to see him. Not ten minutes after we walked past the
sloth, we saw two white faced capuchin monkeys a fair ways away. One of the
monkeys saw us and ran over to beg for food. Apparently they have learned that
if they pose for the tourists, most people will give them food as a reward. One
of the girls had a banana peel that he definitely smelled. When she tried to
put it in her bag, he noticed and ran to a tree right next to her. We took a
few pictures and left, but he decided to follow us. He followed us for a good
part of the trail until we got to a part where a tree hung over the trail.
Then, he jumped onto the tree branch and stood over us as we gathered around
him. He was ridiculously close-maybe two feet above my head. That made me a
little nervous, because I was afraid he would try to jump on our bags and try
to open them for food. We quickly left, and thankfully he didn’t follow.
Other cool wildlife
we saw this trip:
- -Kuwati (one of them trotted up the trail towards
us and nonchalantly walked by)
- -Quetzal (male and a female pair, who were
sitting in a tree outside of the lodge that we stayed in at the front of the
park)
- -Frogs of all kinds
Today was our day off, and once again I woke up without my
alarm at seven this morning. Its impossible to sleep in here! We attempted to
go to the beach, but got stuck at the bus stop for an hour and a half because
the Costa Rican public transportation system is very convoluted and not very
well organized. We got fed up with waiting, and so walked to a restaurant and
then went home. The rest of the day was in the pool and nearby trying to finish
the mountain load of homework that I have for the next few days.
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