the longest days yet (falling down a mountain)

The past few days have been some of the longest days we've had on this trip. We've been doing tropical forestry field work in the forest behind La Iguana all day every day. I won't bore you with the details (and I also don't want to relive the experience) but basically we've been waking up early to have class at 8:30-9:30, then we go to the field until lunch around 12:15. Then we don't come back until we collect our data only to then process our data until dinner (6:00). On Monday and Tuesday we had our presentations before dinner so we could have class after, but today we had no class after dinner to have time to study for the test tomorrow!!!!

Tuesday we had to collect five leaves from a dicot and a monocot (just types of plants) in five 10m transect UP A MOUNTAIN. The slope couldn't have been less than 50 degrees so it made it extremely difficult to collect samples and even just measure 10m up the hill. I fell down flat on my face more than once trying to get up and down the hill. Wednesday we had to make a 20m by 20m plot and then divide that into 5m squares to identify and measure every tree in that square. But today was the longest and arguably worst day. First of all it was the hottest day, and second of all, by the end we had counted the leaves of over 100 plants as well as processed well over 60 leaves for % herbivory. This is already an insane amount of data to collect, but to add insult to injury we had to fit 6 people around a 1m by 1m square ON THE sloped forest. In one of our squares there was an insane ant HOLE in the ground so we had to count leaves and take pictures as quick as we could. In that SAME square there were also spiky vines that would stick to your clothes so when you tried to move around you either stepped in the ants OR got snagged on the vine and SOMETIMES BOTH. Phew. I just had to get all that out. The only thing that kept morale up on Wednesday and today was playing 80s music haha 

class on Sunday night 

Lebron showing us the trail (that's not the dog's name we just nicknamed him that for some reason) 

the forest used to be a plantation for this type of tree so that was another fun thing we had to deal with 

you can really see how sloped the land was by seeing Stella Rae (the person in white) at the top of the pic

me standing with my map I made in front of a big tree 

these are the pics we had to get in the field of all the leaves with bite marks 

the many emotions experienced today 

On a MUCH lighter note, the highlight of the days was always swimming after we analyzed our data and then again before bed! As I said earlier, there are over SIX pools on the property! There's barely any light pollution since we're basically in the forest so you get to swim under the stars! Also there are a lot of dogs that live here and one that we nicknamed Bus Dog (because he got on the bus right when we got off of it when we arrived) actually jumps in the pool to swim with us. It's been a long three days but I've definitely learned a lot! 

one night I saw a toad eating out of a to go container 

Tomorrow we have our test, but then we have a free day (which means POOLS all day hehe). We'll get to the next location on Saturday..we're going to the VALLE!!! Every Panamanian I've talked to so far and told about our program has asked if we're going to Valle de Anton, It's a very pretty part of Panama that's very cool and full of wildlife. 

you can see Coclé (where we are right now)