Saturday, August 8, 2009

I'm out of cute titles

So the exciting news today is that yesterday we did laundry! Clean clothes!!!! Of course, it proceeded to POUR yesterday and today. I've gotten quite soaked and have kissed goodbye the possibility of wearing dry shoes. Oh well. The only bad part about the rain (which for the most part is beautiful and really cool) is that it likely knocked all 50 models off the grass blades we put them on yesterday morning. My notes as to how to find them are all the same (usually, "on the grass blade, next to the other blade of grass"). Imagine a dense patch of sawgrass that goes up to 1.5m and runs for a km. That's where we put 50 small lizard sized clay models. In other words, we're screwed. I'll let you all know tomorrow how it turned out.

I kind of feel more sciencey when I'm doing the models and random habitat measurements (basically, walk into a patch and measure everything that hits a 1m line at 1m and 2m heights). I certainly look more dorky though. I have taken to draping my tape measure around my neck, keeping a rite in the rain notebook in my pocket and usually some flagging tape hanging out. I look like at any point I might get the urge to fit a suit or tie bright pink bows on everything. Add the sharpie and pencil I keep in my bun and I suddenly understand all the weird looks I got from people driving by.

The other exciting thing, and probably more exciting in an absolute sense is that we found an Anolis pentaprion!!!! This is a very cryptic anole that we searched for for 6 weeks in Costa Rica and every day and night in Panama. And we found it and we caught it!!! (And by "we" I mean "Anthony" but I was there... ) Anthony even got another one last night!!! It was so exciting. We also got to watch an awesome lighting storm from the observation tower. (We then realized that sitting on a metal tower that reaches above the forest canopy, on top of a hill, during a lighting storm was probably a bad idea.) Combine the pentaprion with two other Losos lab teams finding rare anoles (including two individuals of a species that hadn't been seen in 30 years) yesterday and I'd say yesterday was a great day for lizard people.

Other than that, we saw some really awesome capuchins up close yesterday. We also saw parrots, heard howlers and saw tons of frogs. They're all over the place after the rain. I still haven't seen a sloth but a bunch of people have. Maybe soon. :)

Summary:
- we found a pentaprion! (aka the anole we've been searching for for 8 weeks in the field now)
- we did laundry!
- I look like a total dork when I'm decked out for the field, and it's not just the mud and the field pants.
- I'm in for a bad morning tomorrow as I search for 50 needles in a 1.5m high, 1km long haystack.
- I'm apparently converting to metric.

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