Today is our first day off after a strenuous but very rewarding first week doing site surveys! To examine how mammal diversity is affected by how a coffee farm operates, we will be selecting several sites on sun-grown, shade-grown, and bird-friendly* coffee farms and comparing the mammals we find there to those we find in forest sites. That means that this past week, we spent hours hiking around various fincas (farms), identifying areas with appropriate slope, usage patterns, amounts of coffee, and distance from roads and rivers to use in the study. The area is very mountainous, humid, and stunningly gorgeous. There is a distant volcán in the vicinity of our base. Although the volcano is dormant, we had a long tremor yesterday morning at breakfast that woke our sleeping colleagues up!
My mostly high-school Spanish is surprisingly adequate, though I'm still shy about striking up conversations with our guides and with locals. Things to work on.
This morning we had a group yoga practice (our leader Mandi is a former instructor), which was fantastic for working out the kinks that accumulated with extended travel and daily hikes. Breakfast was Megan-made french toast with generic nutella and our finca's bird-friendly coffee. I hand-washed my laundry and hoofed it over to reception to check emails, and this afternoon I plan on checking out the rest of this resort and probably spending some time at the pool. Oh, sometimes the rough life of field biology wears on me!
Tomorrow we will begin our first study site, hiking out about 150 traps to our first three locations and learning how to set things up. After that it's pre-dawn wakeups to check traps every morning before things heat up too much. Ready to catch some mammals!
This morning we had a group yoga practice (our leader Mandi is a former instructor), which was fantastic for working out the kinks that accumulated with extended travel and daily hikes. Breakfast was Megan-made french toast with generic nutella and our finca's bird-friendly coffee. I hand-washed my laundry and hoofed it over to reception to check emails, and this afternoon I plan on checking out the rest of this resort and probably spending some time at the pool. Oh, sometimes the rough life of field biology wears on me!
Tomorrow we will begin our first study site, hiking out about 150 traps to our first three locations and learning how to set things up. After that it's pre-dawn wakeups to check traps every morning before things heat up too much. Ready to catch some mammals!
*more on bird-friendly coffee forthcoming
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