Nature Nerd-ing

Well I lied about not having internet here... I guess it would be tough to do research up at the station if there wasn't any...
The field station has been pretty awesome so far, despite the freezing cold and rain every day (I am currently wearing as many layers as I brought down here). It is really beautiful up here, and its been nice to have time to just hike around, read in a hammock, sleep, etc. One of the guys up here has been waiting on a part for his research project, so he and I have become partners in crime of uselessness. We've been helping another girl a lot with her project on dung beetles, which generally involves us setting traps at different altitudes using human "ca-ca", and then picking them up, sorting and pinning the beetles. Who knew there were so many species of dung beetles? Not me.

We had to set traps all the way down to 400m (we're at 2300 here I think), so we got to go on a sweet road trip down to this other field station called Jatun Sacha in the lowlands, technically in the Amazon area. It was amazing down there... really hot, but there was so much more to see in terms of wildlife. They also have this crazy high tower (I think 20-30m) in the middle of the jungle where you can climb up this semi-rusted ladder, using a safety harness with non-functioning caribeeners (spelling?), to a bird watching platform that sways when you move at all, or with the wind. Despite the total fear of death, it was an awesome spot to watch birds from. We saw a bunch of parrots, and then a ton of other birds, the names of which I learned and then forgot. We were down there for 3 days while we waited for our traps to fill with beetles, and during those days our days consisted of nature walks and birding attempts, and our nights consisted of "herp" walks (trying to find frogs and snakes, but in our case it was generally just spiders and cool insects). We also swam in the Napo river (feeds into the Amazon eventually), so we swam in an Amazon river, just not the Amazon river. Turns out that whole myth about the parasitic catfish that can swim up your stream of urine and lodge itself into you has never actually been recorded to happen with people... they use the smell of to get into the gills of other fish, and so theoretically its possible but probably highly unlikely. Shouldn't take your biology lessons from Grey's Anatomy. We missed a sloth that a couple other people saw one morning, and we kept missing the monkeys until the last day when we were coming back from the river and finally saw them in the trees above. The whole trip got us hooked on the Amazon, and so when Jenna gets here tomorrow, her, Jason and I are all heading to this wildlife reserve right in the thick of it where we can theoretically see anacondas, piranhas, river dolphins, etc. Pretty pumped!

Yesterday we had to set a few more traps at higher elevations, so we went to this old Inca trail just over the ridge from the station here, which was really beautiful but not the best maintained and so there were a couple places where mini landslides had taken out part of the path and we had to scramble up gravel to get to the other side. The kicker on the trail is where the Inca path meets up with this massive oil pipeline coming down from the top of the mountain. Ancient meets modern transport. Anyway... should get back to pinning these beetles. I'll write again when I get back from the Amazon, with hopefully crazy animal stories.

Oh, and the internet connection is too slow here to upload photos on this page, or on Flickr... but I do have a ton of moths, spiders and the occasional frog or blurry bird for when I get to a faster computer!

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