It's now been a month since we arrived here in Costa Rica, and almost as long since I've posted anything here... It seems like time moves too slowly and yet flies by all at the same time. I meant to write more regularly, but it turns out you get really busy when you're working your ass off all day. Then it seems like everything we do is the same from day-to-day so I feel like I have nothing to share, and yet I see awesome and spectacular things almost every day here. And
now, I'm completely backed up I don't even know where to begin, so I'll just jump in and we'll see where this takes me...
I really just want to share pictures/stories of all the cool animals I see here (I'll get to that, don't worry - if you just want to look at pictures, see the end of this post for the link to my flickr page), but I guess I could start out with a little more background on what I'm doing here.
This past year I volunteered in a lab and through our weekly lab meetings with a few professors and grad students I met Mike, who is working on his PhD at Minnesota. A few weeks before the end of the school year, right around the time I was becoming very stressed about not having any jobs/plans for the summer/future, Mike ran into me and asked if I had any plans for the summer and if I would be interested in going to Costa Rica as one of his field assistants. The catch was that he couldn't pay me, but he could pay for the flight and all of my housing/food. The upside was that I would get the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica for free, essentially, and get a lot of field experience working with birds. Seeing as I had no other plans set up, it was a pretty easy decision.
The project - Mike has worked here at La Selva for a few summers on his project, looking at the sociality of this particular species of wren, the Band-backed Wren. These wrens are interesting in that they often exhibit cooperative breeding, where one or more offspring ("subordinates") will stay around and help the dominant pair when they are mature, instead of going off to breed themselves. So we are looking at how relatedness of subordinates relates to how much they invest in territory defense or care of young. This involves catching birds to mark them and taking blood samples to determine relatedness. We also do playback experiments, in which we play their song (mimicking an intruding wren) and observe how the birds react. (Click
here to here how funky these guys sound)
 |
| Adult Band-backed Wren |
We also spend
a lot of time just looking for them. Even
if we hear them call or sing, it can be almost impossible to find them moving along the trunk or branches of a tree with a lot of vegetation, like this:
Where we work - These birds are also interesting because they don't really live
in the forest. They like to nest in isolated trees that are not touching other trees, so they usually set up territories on edges or in clearings. So we have two groups of wrens that we can observe on/very near the station itself, but most of the groups we work with are on a cattle ranch that is adjacent to La Selva.
To get there, we go on a quick hike through the forest, slide down a muddy slope, cross some barbed wire, and ford a stream. We are then at "Señor Macho's."
 |
| A rare glimpse at the mountain from one of the pastures - it's often shrouded in clouds |
Once there, the going is fairly easy. We mostly trudge through pastures with the occasional scramble under barbed wire fences and a few stream crossings to get to certain sites:
 |
| This is where the rubber boots come in really handy |
We will usually spend a full day out there, bring a pack lunch, and basically be on our feet looking for birds for up to 7-9 hours. It's exhausting. And we always have to watch out for these guys... not dangerous, but definitely curious:
 |
| Moo |
There are at least two herds of cattle, probably more, and they are rotated fairly frequently, so we never know where they'll be when we get there each day. The day we met this particular group, we were in the process of setting up one of our nets across that barbed wire fence. I gradually became aware that the constant
moo-ing we were hearing in the distance was getting louder and I turned around to see this herd charging in through the open gate at the other end of the pasture I was standing in. We frantically got all of our equipment over the fence and I crawled under just before they arrived, ready to head over and check us out.
-------
Until next time, mis amigos! I will just keep writing about what I think might be interesting, but if anyone is actually out there reading this and has anything they are dying to know more about my trip, let me know!
I've been taking a ton of pictures, so if you want to see more of the cool critters I've seen so far, check out my flickr photo set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/76038115@N00/sets/72157634211768609/
I update it fairly frequently, so check back often! (FYI: I add a lot more pictures to it than I do to my facebook photo album)
