Here comes the sun! Waking up at 6:30 for breakfast (eggs, rice, beans, freshly made tortilla) is easy when the sun is up and the flies are flying. Everyone was itching to get out into the jungle, and so we headed up towards the peak of the nearest mountain. We definitely had some great collecting, with each of us finding a few specimens of our respective study/hobby groups, and I’m fairly happy with my photos from this morning. Getting exposures correct in the shadows of the jungle can be difficult, and there are a lot of black backgrounds, but it certainly beats nothing! After making it up to the top of the mountain (altitude = ~1300m) we came back down to our lunch while rain clouds started to blow in. With perfect timing we got back to the lodge only minutes before the rain hit and just in time for lunch (pasta, fried pork chop, coconut & dulce squares). The food here has been awesome, and Patricia has been spoiling us! After lunch we proceeded to pin the day’s catch and make our notes for the day. With the rain still coming down all afternoon, the only thing left to do was sit in a hammock and hope the insects came to us. A bit of a slow afternoon, but the morning made up for it! After dinner (broasted chicken, mashed potatoes, broccoli, and rice) the rain had finally ceased, so we stepped out for a quick night walk to look for herps, then sat and looked at the Milky Way, visible to the naked eye so far from the light pollution of major cities.

There were a ton of reptiles and frogs hopping around the trail today, so many that I think we may have seen more species here than I have seen in all my other trips combined!

The clouds seem to come and go in the blink of an eye, revealing dramatic landscapes of rolling mountains one second, and concealing all but the closest of trees the next.

Well, it seems that the rain is determined to keep us lodge-locked for the rest of the day. Hopefully tomorrow morning will be as nice as today was so we can get out and find some more flies!

Beto had us believing that our dinner tonight was actually Crested Guan (a large native chicken-like bird); he is certainly a big fan of practical jokes!

Tonight was the night of the giant wolf* spider it seems, with an orange species courting Andrew’s laptop (which is also orange) and a black species waiting for Nichelle to come to bed. Being inquisitive, we figured we’d try feeding them with some freshly caught moths. The orange species put on a good show, pouncing on the moth the moment it hit the floor and then running between Joel’s legs while he was squatting, while the black species didn’t seem to be hungry. Both were released outside before bed!

Despite having experience with feeder roaches back in Canada, Andrew had a bit of a freakout after a large cockroach landed on his shoulder in the common room. Hilarity ensued!

MTC…

* – I say wolf spider with a grain of salt as I’m not an arachnid expert by any means, and Neotropical spiders are a little more diverse than back home!

Today, we go into the jungle! After a relatively slow, but very good, breakfast at the Adventure Inn, we piled into what was to be our first of three taxis to begin our journey to El Copal Reserve. Our driver Roland was extremely helpful, especially when he realized that the city we were trying to get to was much further than he had originally thought when we had agreed on a fare the night before! Without missing a beat, he drove us to Cartago, found us a 4×4 taxi, and made sure that the driver was ok with splitting what we had paid Ronald! Altogether some amazingly nice people. Mario then drove us through the winding and progressively worsening roads to El Humo, where we met up with our final driver of the day, Maya. After loading all of our gear (and Andrew) into the trunk, we set off for one final, wild ride up into the mountains. As we climbed higher and higher up the mountain and the clouds began to draw closer and closer, the habitat around us changed from sugar cane and cattle farms to beautiful tropical rain forest with flowers blossoming all around. Before we knew it, Maya had us into the lodge with only a few minor scrapes on the underside of the truck! Since Gil is the only one able to converse in Spanish, the rest of us got to look around and ogle over all the amazing places we’d be exploring in the next 4 days, while he arranged our ride back to San Jose and how the lodge worked. The station itself is rustic, but comfortable, and our hosts couldn’t be friendlier, or better cooks! Beto and Patricia welcomed us with smiling faces and freshly prepared lunch (rice, palm heart, coleslaw, and fried beef) and after getting settled into our rooms, we headed off into the jungle to find us some flies!

The weather today wasn’t overly great with constant overcast, making the collecting a little slow and the photography rather uninspiring, but we each came out of the jungle 4 hours later with new insects we had never seen before and ideas about how to make the next few days as productive as possible! A quick rest to pin our insects and tally our birds, then off to dinner (vegetable soup, rice & a burger pattie) and pleasant conversation with Beto and Patricia (thanks to Gil), topped off with dulce, a raw, condensed sugar cane product that was a great way to finish off the evenings meal. Talk of an evening hike quickly ended as each of us realized our beds were calling ever so loudly! Perhaps tomorrow night…

The sections of San Jose and Cartago that we drove through today were some of the better looking Latin American towns that I’ve had the chance to travel to. No mountain-side slums, few run down buildings, plenty of people out dressed for work and ready to go! And the driving was far and away the safest I’ve seen south of the USA!

We heard Total Eclipse of the Heart in both Spanish and English on the way to El Copal, in 2 different taxis… what are the chances?

The drive from San Jose to El Copal was about 2 hours, including 2 taxi changes and some mountain road construction.

The bird fauna here is not what we were expecting, with more lowland Caribbean species around than we thought we’d see.

When we mentioned we studied flies, Beto asked if we knew Monty Woods or Jeff Skevington, who both work in Ottawa at the Canadian National Collection! Jeff is actually my co-advisor, and had been at the station only 2 weeks before we got here. Small world!

Speaking of small world, I happened to notice that the t-shirt Beto was wearing on our arrival was from the YMCA of Hamilton-Burlington, two cities that are about a half hour from Guelph. This is getting weird.

MTC…