Our team wrapped up our last sampling sites on coffee farms yesterday. To date, we have completed our combination of study sites in sun, shade, and bird-friendly shade coffee farms; our final session will complete our surveys of forest sites, which will serve as a control to the coffee agroforesty systems we have been investigating.
After we spent a sweaty and very stinky morning clearing moldy bait from traps, our team took a break with our shade-coffee farm guide Adaberto. He led us on a side trip to see some beautiful waterfalls, which were quite a steep and sweaty hike away! The 50m falls we sent up huge plumes of spray; between the wet and the gusty valley winds, I was colder than I've been since leaving home to begin this trip! We lunched on bean salad, rice, tortillas, and hard-boiled eggs at the foot of the falls, and then spent a few hours scrambling on the slick rocks and watching white falcons circle the sky.
My poor boots have been separating from their soles for about a week; at the peak of our hike, they ripped free of their improvised wire stitches and started flapping free. Not good, when scrambling up and down mountains through thick vegetation! I wrapped them in gorilla tape and stepped carefully for the rest of the day. This morning, I ministered to them with more aggressive wire stitches, more tape, and melted paracord as glue. They have only two and a half critical weeks of fieldwork left to make it! I'm rooting for them.
After our waterfall adventure, we descended the mountain and spoke briefly with a solemn-faced old man who was curious about our car (a rental, labeled with a coffee-tourism slogan) and purpose in his village. A very fuzzy white dog was napping under our car, and a small flock of chickens refused to move out of the way. They reminded me of the angry geese at our sun coffee farm-- two large, aggressive characters that like to bite our tires as we drive past. Sometimes we hear the sounds of them tormenting passersby drifting up on the breezes to our study sites.
After returning home, we had a brief coffee break before delving into possibly the grossest (though very satisfying) task involved in mammal surveys-- trap cleaning. The 300 Sherman traps, after 11 trap nights, are full of rat stink, moldy bait, mud, and feces. We blast music and make it a party, everyone scrubbing away with toothbrushes or running traps around the house to dry in the sun. All of the traps laid out on the concrete look like a futuristic glistening solar array, in miniature.
The day after tomorrow, we begin site scouting for our last session! We are hoping to find forest sites less fragmented than those we surveyed in our first session. Wish us luck, and many mammal captures!
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