Today's schedule is very content-heavy for Geology, so we've spent most of the day on-campus.
We started our morning with 6:30AM birdwatching. We were very lucky during our birdwatching session. We saw blue-gray tanagers, parrots, chachalacas, an emerald toucanet, and
a bellbird as it was flying off. We also saw a variety of wrens, jays, and flycatchers.
After breakfast, the students had a GEO lecture followed by a water quality sampling lab. I tagged along for the lab to take pictures. I can't even possibly begin to understand or explain the water sampling and testing process, but it seemed interesting from my vantage point.
Tomorrow, we leave for Arenal. I'm not sure what the internet situation will be, so this may be the last post for a day or two.
OH. One more important thing. If you read last night's post, I mentioned an interesting situation involving an unidentified plant. All of the naturalists got together and did some super sleuthing and figured it out. The plant was part of the family of dumb cane. The reason this plant is called dumb cane is because juices from the plant are TOXIC and can cause temporary speechlessness. Historically, dumb cane was given to slaves as a form of punishment. Read more about dumb cane
here and
here.
(For the record, we didn't go traipsing through the woods randomly sampling wild plants. The naturalist guiding our night hike gave us each a piece--including himself! Obviously, lesson learned on his end and on ours--we were lucky we didn't have a more serious situation.)
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| Blue-gray tanager |
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| I don't remember...some sort of flycatcher maybe? |
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| Parrot |
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| This is definitely NOT a posed shot of birdwatching. |
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| Emerald toucanet |
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| Water quality sampling |
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| River crab |
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| I think they're testing the pH or something. |
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| Doing science things. |
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| Victoria is the color of the pH stick from a picture on her phone. |
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