By Cece Wheeler, Middlebury College
Hello again!
After a day of rest and smoothies in Puerto Jimenez, we’ve been back at Piro Biological Station this week, enjoying our last few days of field work with butterflies before launching into our final papers and exams.
On Monday we took the colectivo to Miguel Sanchez’ house, just a few minutes from the station. We’re staying with him and his brother, Bonnie, as well as their nephew, Maikol, and their multitude of animals. Maikol’s grandfather originally owned the land that now belongs to Osa Conservation, so Maikol and his uncles know the surrounding area very well, and have been a great source of information about all the animals that live here.
The first thing I was told upon arriving at the house was that I had the same name as their cat, Sisi, which Bonnie and Maikol both found very amusing. There is also an un-named Red-Lored parrot that hangs around, eating our tomatoes and pooping on our clothes as they dry, and 10 or so dogs; Bonnie takes them all down for a run on the beach once a day, and informed me in confidence that his favorite is the brown and white one called Rio Blanco.
Bonnie keeping the parrot from snatching our fruit!
We managed to fit 3 river otter surveys into our first two days back at Piro, with Maikol accompanying us on the latter two. While we ended up wading in waist-deep water through most of the third river, we did find lots of otter scat, and spotted a bird-eating snake (it could swim, much to Jori’s displeasure). Maikol also found us some star-fruit to eat, and showed us how to give ourselves tattoos with the white powder on the underside of fern leaves. Chris unfortunately left his powder tattoo on for too long, and managed to sunburn the design onto his arm.
Beginning Thursday, we started walking up to the Osa Verde farm each morning to conduct butterfly surveys on the reforestation plots there. Chris was characteristically ecstatic about our bait options, which included fermented bananas and rotting fish. I’ll admit they’re better than dung beetle bait (see previous blog…), but fish that’s been sitting in a bottle for 2 weeks is still a close contender. The bait was designed to attract frugivorous butterflies, who supposedly enjoy the smell of decomposing flesh and feces as well as fruit, which is something to think about the next time a butterfly lands on you. We set up cylindrical mesh traps, each about a meter in height, with a plate containing the bait suspended from the bottom; once the butterfly lands on the plate, it usually tries to fly up into the mesh, but can’t figure out how to fly back down. 24 hours after setting our bait, we returned to the traps to remove and photograph each butterfly we had caught, which was more difficult than it sounds given that this often involved jumping over 5 foot wide irrigation ditches, hacking through razor grass with our machete, and reaching into traps that were filled with more wasps than butterflies. We definitely had a rough first day trying to locate the areas for the traps in the first place, and then learning how to handle and identify the butterflies, but we quickly got the hang of it, and found a surprising amount of species (about 30 total, and 400 individual butterflies) for an area that is just beginning to regrow.
One of many beautiful butterflies captured in our study
By Monday the 24th our field work was finished (although we still have a bottle of rotting fish sitting at our camp, because Chris likes to trick people into smelling it), but this allowed us to begin helping with 5am turtle patrols, and even fit in a night-walk with Maikol the other day. I don’t think anyone enjoys 4am wake up calls, but seeing the beach at sunrise is really pretty amazing, and we’ve all been very excited about sea turtles for a while now. So far we’ve relocated two turtle nests; an Olive Ridley nest that had 65 eggs, and a Green Sea Turtle nest with 89, and we’ve also seen one hatchling, which was definitely worth the early mornings.
Sunrise as we begin our early-morning search for sea turtles
Our first experience holding a newly-hatched Olive Ridley sea turtle!
Our night-walk was also well worth the lack of sleep; we went with a herpetologist (who was very excited about finding snakes) and his girlfriend (who was slightly less excited), and found not only snakes, but frogs and tarantulas as well. I think my favorite was the Red-Eyed Treefrog, but we also spotted a Caiman sticking its head out of the water, which we only found because its large orange eyes reflect so well in the dark.
Red-Eyed Treefrog spotted on our night walk!
We celebrated the end of field work with a much-deserved day trip to Mata Palo beach, and when we got back we were lucky enough to have Maikol cook dinner for us –definitely the best meal we’ve had yet. As of now we are deep into finals, and will hopefully emerge just in time to hike Chirripo, the tallest mountain in Costa Rica, next week.
As always, Pura Vida
Cece