Hello all,

So, it looks like working on a website will most likely be postponed until I have a password for the computer lab, for now I’m squatting Rachel’s (advisor) and Kate’s (other assistant) computers.  Perhaps I should have brought mine…..  Soon I’ll get some pictures out, however!

Well, everything is going fantastic!  As I have always know, I *love* the tropics!  And, also as expected, I’m now having a major panic that I want to just be a scientist when I grow up….  Why do I have to make everything so hard and complicated!!

BCI is all that I expected and more.  It is incredibly lush here, in fact I seem to have brought the rainy season with me!  Every day since arriving has been dotted with torrential downpours.  We are constantly damp when outside, but I find in enormously comfortable.  The two lab buildings are air conditioned, and therefore a good place to keep equipment/valuable dry safe (interestingly, these are also the only rooms we can lock, the dorm rooms have no locks, you can bolt yourself in, but not when you aren’t there).  The scientist lounge (complete with DVD player!!) is also a/c, but frankly it is all way too cold!  I need a sweatshirt inside!

BCI (for photo, see here: http://www.stri.org/english/visit_us/barro_colorado/index.php) is a smallish island (a few kilometers in diameter), and the lab facilities are tightly clustered in a bay.  There are trails throughout, yesterday Kate and I wandered around a little, hiking in 100% humidity is certainly easy on the lungs!  We climbed the “tower”, has been there fore many years and is used to collect weather data from above the canopy.  It s rickety old thing that goes up (I’m useless at this!) perhaps 50 feet.  Maybe more?  From there we caught a glimpse of a capuchin, and several very interesting birds.  Tonight will be my first real expedition into the forest, as Kate and I will be netting bats (unless it rains…).

Rachel’s project actually involves a lot of lab work.  She nets only to collect test bats, these bats are then brought into the flight cage and acclimated to eating fish (not their normal diet, but it works!) from our hands.  The bats go through 2-3 weeks of training and trials.  The bats listen for the mating call of the tungara frog (noisy little buggers!) and can fly directly to them and catch them.  Rachel is studying whether they can learn new auditory stimuli and whether this learned can be transferred to other bats.  And they do!  Very interesting stuff.  Her work has been strictly on the island so far, there is a bat flight cage set up for her project there.  They recently built her a new and larger flight cage in the STRI area in Gamboa (the town from which the ferry leaves, on the east coast of the canal).  She is renting an incredibly nice house there which is owned by a USGS scientist who only spends a few months at BCI each year.  So far, half my time has been in Gamboa with Rachel, working on setting up the new flight cage (putting my zookeeper skills very much to work).  Today we mostly finished up, however we were swarmed by nasty little yellowjackets while sorting through the leaf litter, and were both stung 10 times or so!  It was really extremely unpleasant, and even now, several hours later, one Claritin, and back on the island, they still throb and I feel a little off.  Yuck.

Anyways, the plant and wildlife here is phenomenal.  Howler monkeys are all over the island, we here their calls every morning and throughout the day (an unbelievable rumbling noise).  At my first lunch, a troop was feeding in the tree directly outside the cafeteria.  Leaf cutter ants are omnipresent, and so cool!  Little armies of them marching along great distances!  The birds are fantastic, of course.  I have several to look up, but there are greater ani around the lab clearing, oropendulas (fantastic orioles) making their basket nests nearby, kiskadees everywhere, and supposedly a pair of spectacled owls that hang out by the lab at night.  Iguanas are everywhere, as well, and bats roost in most of the dorm stairwells.  (and their urine is exactly like tapir pee!)

The dorms are also incredibly nice!  They are buildings of 4 rooms with balconies, each room has two beds (but I do not have a roommate right now), and a bathroom is shared between two rooms.  The island isn’t very full right now, but will become so in the next few weeks.  There are several other bat researchers here (American, German, and Columbian), the “monkey girls” studying the howlers, and several others studying fig wasps etc.  It’s like summer camp for biology nerds!

One of the best parts is, that even though the island is close to shore (it is just a hill that was flooded when building the canal), the ferry puts in quite far away and so we have a trip up the canal!  It’s really an incredible engineering feat!  Cargo and cruise ships pass in sight of the lab buildings/cafeteria.  Taking the water taxi ferry just now we sped past them.  Its really unbelievable!  However, many carriers chose not to take the canal because it is so expensive (a major portion of the Panamanian GNP), and unload their good onto the railway.  Rachel has seen obviously new cars being driven down the road from Pacific to Atlantic coast.  It’s amazing to think that many of the products we buy have been down this canal!

I find that (although I never need it!) my Spanish is still functional!  However, the Panamanians speak far to rapidly for me to understand…

Well, I feeling worse and worse from the wasp stings, and Rachel is yelling at me (through Kate on the phone, I’m back on BCI, Rachel will be in Gamboa for a while) to go lie down, so I’m off!  I doubt we’ll be netting tonight, mom, unless I feel better!