Final Days at Palo Verde

The past couple days have honestly been a blur, mainly spent working on the various assignments that needed to get done during our last days here at Palo Verde.

One assignment was to construct a dichotomous key for some of the common plant species that surround the station. A dichotomous key is a tool that can be used to identify certain species based on traits that they possess. Each species has to follow the other in a sequence and you can't repeat traits. This actually turned out to be a little difficult- it's pretty much like putting a puzzle together and took a lot of thinking about plant traits. However, while we were walking around looking at the traits of each plant, there were a couple of awesome individuals hanging around the area which made walking around in the sun a bit better:

Giant group of Coatis! 

All of the marsh animals!

After that, we had our midterms. They went pretty well, it was just a chore to convince ourselves to study for the two exams that we had. Especially after finishing up IPs, the concept of more work was just not appealing. Then, as an extra bonus, we had to do our rewrites for our IP papers pretty much right after the exams. But finally, all the work is done and now I just get to relax. Which ended up looking like this for the brief period that we had between exams and rewrites:

Shout out to Miki for having the patience to do this to my hair and taking this picture. 

I did also manage to take one last hike in the morning to watch the sunrise from my favorite lookout point here. It turned out to be well worth it to hike up there:

So although the last couple days here at Palo Verde have been a craze of work-induced stress, I've still managed to take some time to soak everything in. I feel like I blinked and the past three weeks went by. I'm a little sad to see Palo Verde go- the habitats and organisms around here are fascinating. But I will admit that I'm getting a little tired of the station itself (there's pretty much nothing to do past the trails that we already did).

We head out tomorrow to the home stay section of the course. There, we'll be learning Spanish at a language academy as well as staying with a family for the next two weeks. I'm really excited to meet my family tomorrow. If home stay is anything like how it was when I visited Nicaragua, I know I'm going to have a great time. Let's just hope that my Spanish comes back quickly.

For now, adios Palo Verde!