Palo Verde 101

As I sit here writing this, I am currently sipping on some peach iced tea on the porch in front of my room with the balmy temperature of 97 degrees. So needless to say, life is pretty good here at Palo Verde National Park. Palo Verde is located at the northwestern part of the country, which is about four hours from San Jose. The habitat here is dry forest with a huge wetland attached to it, so there are plenty of interesting animals abound.

Coatis!

Iguanas on the roof!

And Capuchins, oh my!

The past couple days have been really packed though- we've been in class a lot. This is so we can have full days in which we can work on our independent projects that are coming up in the not too distant future (if anyone has a good idea for one, hit me up). Additionally, we've also been doing work on our first faculty-led project, which is being led by Chris Mowry from Berry College. Chris has worked with coyotes and primates in the past, but we unfortunately didn't have great sample sizes for either of these organisms here (although we did see Howler monkeys yesterday!). So we've been working on conspecific defense cues in mosquito fish. Basically, when the fish senses a predator, they release a chemical to alert the members of the same species. So we've been doing some behavioral tests to determine reaction times as well as the number of attempts that they make to get to shelter. As of writing this, they're still crunching the numbers, so I can't tell you what the answer actually is. But long story short, we got to play with fish, and got to finger paint:

So fierce.

We also had the opportunity to visit some rice and sugar cane fields, which was also really interesting. There is a lot of agriculture surrounding the park, so it's always a delicate balance between public relations. Actually, some of the farmers are permitted keep their livestock IN the park as an attempt to keep down some of the invasive species of grasses. All in all, it was an interesting morning. Not to mention, we got some free samples of freshly harvested sugar cane, which was delicious.

Our guide, Don Miguel, slicing up some sugar cane for us. 

Other than class and working on our projects, we've mainly devoted our free time to exploring the park. Palo Verde is around 71.04 square miles, so there's plenty to see. One of my favorite trails so far was a lookout point that led us up through the dry forest and then up to a rock scramble. Once past the rock scramble, the trail led to an amazing view of the marsh, which extends for miles around:

Last night, our exploring took us to the boardwalk that extends over the marsh. From there, we were able to shine our lights out over the marsh and spot some of the glinting eyes of the caimans. We finished off the night by laying down on the deck and doing some stargazing, which was incredible. There's very little light pollution here, so the amount of stars that we could view was amazing. I think we're going to do it again tonight, which I'm really excited about.

I will provide more updates as they come!