PDS in Costa Rica

Today, as implied by the title, is our final day in Costa Rica. We got up, had breakfast, and ran out the door and on to the bus. When at the airport we said goodbye to Fernando, our driver, and proceeded to wait around for quite some time until we were able to receive our tickets.

The flight went smoothly, and we arrived at Charlotte Douglas at 10-ish. We were each reunited with our parents and left for home and sleep.

Overall, the value of this trip was in what we saw. Plants, insects, reptiles, fungi, mammals, birds, all in their natural environment is almost impossible to find in a city like Charlotte–but not in the Costa Rican jungle. And despite being a science trip, there was a good amount of cultural exchange in simply being there. Whether it was stumbling through Spanish, observing a different lifestyle, or simply talking to someone new, the surrounding culture rubbed off on us (in a good way of course).

Seeing rainforest like we did is a rare opportunity becoming increasingly rarer with it’s rapid disappearance. We saw how people impact the health and wellbeing of the forests, how people can reverse the damage done, and how people have already healed damaged land. We covered a wide array of ecological studies not in a classroom, but in reality–an experience that will not soon be forgotten.

We, as the students, extend a strong  ’thank you’ to the faculty at PDS who made this trip possible, to Mrs. Sivy for coming along for the ride, to all of those who kept up with the blog, and to Mr. Willard for organizing this trip and teaching us along the way.

And now it’s 12:46, and I’m sleepy. Good night.

Today was another jam-packed day of….well, traveling. Not to mention the rain came off and on the entire eight hour ride back to San Jose. This bus ride along the Pan-American Highway was very peaceful compared to the trip going out of San Jose. This time, we didn’t stop for shopping, we didn’t see surfers on the Pacific, and we didn’t see crocodiles. We merely slept and had a few bathroom breaks along with a lunch stop. Oh and I forgot…we stopped at a volcano. No big deal. The sleep was much appreciated by all of us considering we woke up at 5:30 in the morning. After an hour or two, one student would wake up, look around out the windows a bit, and fall back asleep.

The view of a pineapple farm outside the windows of our bus.

We stopped at a little area off the road for lunch. Today was the first time in 11 days any of us had loaded up on pancakes, hamburgers, french fries, soda, and doughnuts. And may I be the first to say, it was muy delicioso!!

Some of the students enjoying a nice, American lunch

After getting back onto the bus and having a few more snacks like Queso Acelerado Doritos, we drove a few more hours and came to the Irazu Volcano where it was pouring rain and freezing cold. Needless to say, the students weren’t thrilled to be there, but Mr. Willard suddenly became his five-year old self screaming “Woohoo!! We’re at a volcano! I’ve never seen a volcano before!!”

The crater we saw while visiting the Irazu Volcano

Most of the students just turned around and went right back into the gift shop where they had hot coffee and a heated building. While we were at the gift shop, we found a little critter in the garbage cans! It was a Coati. It sort of looks like a raccoon and it sure will scare you like one too when it jumps out of a trash can about five feet away from you!

The Coati in the garbage cans

For dinner tonight, we plant to meet up with Mr. Dewey, an art teacher at Providence Day, and then off to bed to get our beauty sleep for the plane ride tomorrow!

Today was our fifth day at Las Cruces. As the title suggests, the main themes of the day have been Agouti and Agroforestry, although the latter featured more prominently. In the morning, we took a short (10 mile) drive with our reliable bus driver Fernando. He took us to Finca Bosquecita (translated as “farm little forest”), a small farm (approximately 40 acres) owned by a nice farmer named Roberto.

Our group in front of Roberto's farm

Roberto is a sustainable coffee grower, growing his coffee alongside larger trees. This type of agriculture, know as agroforestry, is much better for the environment than sun-grown coffee. While growing coffee in rows without trees interspersed is more productive in the short term, it eventually leads to a host of environmental problems. Erosion is one of them, caused by the lack of deep roots to hold the soil in place. Another is poor soil quality, caused by the fact that coffee depletes the soil of nitrogen, an essential ingredient to the growth of plants. Agroforestry can prevent this by using trees that return nitrogen to the soil. These trees are called nitrogen fixers. Roberto’s farm also avoids the problem of pesticide runoff and toxicity because the trees provide a habitat for birds, who keep the pest population down naturally. He also uses the branches and leaves from the trees as fertilizer, thereby removing the need for artificial fertilizer. Here is a picture of Roberto and his coffee plants:

Roberto also has other plants and animals on his farm such as corn, beans, sugar cane, oranges, bananas, dogs, pigs, chickens, and cows. His farm is very self sufficient. Here is a picture of Roberto juicing sugar cane for sugar water, which we tried.

After the tour and visiting with Roberto, his lovely wife, and our guide Rodo, we had the chance to buy some of the locally made coffee. To my mom: I hope you like dark roast. After lunch, we went on an Agouti hunt. Well, more like a scavenger hunt, as we didn’t actually get to hunt them. Check out our YouTube playlist link to the right for some video. Here is a picture of an Agouti that we saw:

We also had some other wildlife sightings today, such as this green tree frog and this toucan.

From the very beginning, Providence Day has been dedicated to helping the community and giving back when you receive. Today at Las Cruces we woke up, had a wonderful breakfast and met up with Rodo at around 7:30. He told us that we would be cutting down and pulling out invasive plants such as fittonia and shampoo ginger off of the edges of the trails. Las Cruces has given us delicious food, warm beds, and a beautiful forest so we were happy to get back on the trail and help. Mr. Willard and I both eagerly grabbed machetes provided by Rodo (for the bigger flowers on the shampoo ginger that you couldn’t just pull out) while others took large bags for the fittonia. We all had high spirits and it turned out to be a great way to spend our morning.Here is a before picture of the fittonia…

…and here is a picture after we worked on it.

After our clean up had ended we had a huge chunk of time before and after lunch to work on our major taxa pages and our endangered species project. We all worked really hard but we also found time to look at our favorite comic again, garfield minus garfield. It was a nice break from our usually tight schedule.

In our time before dinner we all got together in the classroom and watched a documentary called Birdsong and Coffee. It was about agroecology and how coffee grown in the shade creates a polyculture environment. The coffee plant’s natural habitat is under a forest canopy and not in direct sunlight. It also talked about the fair trade market which allows the actual farmers of the product get paid a decent amount. It takes out the middle man an allows you to get coffee directly from the farmer. Their company is called Community Agroecology Network or CAN for short. Here is a link to the website if you are interested.
http://www.canunite.org/
If you are interested in the movie Birdsong and Coffee, here is a link. http://olddogdocumentaries.com/vid_bsc.html
After the movie had ended we had even more down time to work on our projects and journals before dinner. When dinner finally arrived, we had a delicious meal of tuna, cookies, plantains and vegetables. Shortly after finishing dinner we split up and went on a night time frog hunt to help Eric with his taxa project. We only found one frog but a whole lot of spiders. Here is the frog..

…and here are a few spiders.

Overall, it was a very enlightening day but also a day for down time with our projects.

After an early start, our group arrived at the cafeteria for a breakfast of eggs and ham, cornbread, and rice with beans. We then met Rodo (our guide), who led us on our first hike of the day. The idea was to get a idea of the biodiversity (the number of different species) in an area of Las Cruces. We catalogued two things: ants, and epiphytes surrounding different types of trees.

Lindsay collecting ants to catalogue.

A collection of captured ants in a vial.

Alice studies ants, counting the number of species.

Will compares the different species of plants around different types of trees.

After our morning study on biodiversity, we broke for a rather familiar lunch of barbecued chicken wings. After an hour of relaxation, it was back to work to study a plot of land. Providence Day hopes to study a patch of cleared rainforest in order to observe the process of restoration. We divided the eight meter by eight meter patch into two meter by two meter squares, and catalogued the different species present.

The plot of land Providence Day will be monitoring.

Nelson catalogues the plants in a section of Providence Day’s plot
After dinner and a canceled night hike (due to heavy rain), we decided to call it a day and get some sleep.

We awoke to the wonderful call of the alarm bird, known for waking many sleepy teens up. Around 6, we arrived to the dining hall to see many birds flying around. The kitchen people put out chopped fruit onto a table, which attracted many different birds. Among the birds were about a dozen tanagers, a sparrow or two, and the national bird, the Gray-Colored Robin.

After a breakfast of rice and beans, we prepared for a morning tour of the garden. Our guide, Rodo, met us at the steps. A few of us grabbed bamboo walking sticks (not the bug) and we set off through the garden.
The garden is a very diverse collection of plants, from the native bromeliads to the exotic fig tree. Among the critters we saw were a humongous snail, twice the size of an American dollar coin, and several furry agoutis.

We eventually reached a lookout point in the garden where we could see a bunch of mountains on the distance. Mr. Willard experimented with the panoramic setting on his camera while the rest of us admired the view from the clearing. However, one of the most interesting things about the spot was the butterfly that landed on Mr. Willard’s shirt. We nicknamed it “88″ because the design on the wing resembles a “88.”

After a delicious lunch of fried rice with meat, we began our exploration of the forest. Rodo was very knowledgable of the area and Dora the Explorer. There were three species of invasive plants: a banana plant, a ginger plant, and a ground-dwelling plant with white and green leaves. A few of us were allowed to chop up the invasive species with a machete Rodo brought with him.

We then went to the bird tower, about 15 meters up. It was a very scenic view, although the feeling of being above the canopy was quite unsettling.

We eventually reached a point where Rodo had to return to help another group that was coming in. We walked a few hundred meters and saw a humongous strangler fig. The tree it was attached to was long dead, but the strangler fig itself looked like it could be a tree.

We then spent about ten minutes swinging around on a vine. Eric and Will were quite the swingers, though Mr. Willard’s technique left something to be desired. Eventually, we reluctantly left the vine to see…. this:

A snake! It was either a false fer-de-lance, or a real one. The real one is very poisonous, so a few of us started panicking. The more levelheaded ones took pictures and waited for the snake to leave. We left the snake and came to a small stream. I decided, as an extremely reckless adventurer, to cross the river to get to the mossy rocks. Of course, as soon as I got on the mossy rocks… I fell into the river. Luckily, only my pants were wet, but the humor in the situation made up for the potential rash.
We returned to the cabins and got ready for dinner. Dinner was noodles, garlic bread, and cooked zucchini. We then had a lesson on ecological restoration. One interesting attempt at restoring forests was the Orange Project. A juice company called Del Oro made an agreement with an industrial company so that the orange peels and pulp would be dumped in a field to attract birds to help fertilize the area. It was a success, before it had to come to a close due to legal issues.

More of our favorite comic:

Today consisted of traveling, bathroom break, traveling, quick leg stretch, traveling, lunch time, and you guessed it…more traveling. In total, we spent about seven to eight hours on the road. But it sure didn’t seem like it.

Our bus driver, Fernando, actually made our bus ride quite interesting by taking us to a little outdoor store where you can walk along a bridge and find crocodiles. The store was west of La Selva and a few miles away from the Pacific Ocean. My favorite part of the trip was when we drove by a great cove for surfers along the Pacific Ocean and surprisingly, we stopped to watch a surfing contest. Many surfers were out on the waves and I was wishing I could join in with them. I did get a few action shots though!

We scurried onto the bus again and I managed to fall asleep between the bumpy roads and the many breaks. I woke up to Tyler yelling at me and poking me and saying “Lindsay, get off the bus!!! Go!” and so I grabbed my camera and ran off the bus (may I add with no shoes, thanks Tyler) and I saw a man with a big stick. And guess what was on the stick…a three-toed sloth! The man was helping it cross the road! We snapped a bunch of pictures while it tries to climb through the bushes and some even got this video:

A few hours after that, we arrived to Las Cruces safe and sound. We got some history on where we are staying, Las Cruces Biological Station, and our guide, Rodo, told us that there is a house called the Wilson house where students stay. Something interesting about this house is that the Wilson family used to live there. They even died there, and rumor has it that ghosts of the Wilson family like to appear around the dining hall. Workers here say that Mrs. Wilson is always wearing a white gown and she has blonde hair. Now that’s a little creepy…
Only after being here a couple hours, we have spotted agoutis, which are a kind of rodent, and squirrels. When we capture photos of these little creatures I will be sure to add them on here! Rodo also says that those two mammals are the most commonly found mammals on site, but occasionally you can find Kinkajou, which is a type of raccoon. We already found one of those in La Selva and it is posted on the mammals page in our Major Taxa Projects.
The Biological Station tries to conserve energy so they use solar panels to heat the water in the kitchen since they use a lot of water. Rodo also says that there are a few earthquakes a day here! But fortunately, you can’t feel most of them so you don’t even know they are happening.

After dinner tonight, we had the station director, Zak Zahawi, talk to us and tell us about the history of the Botanical Gardens/Biological Station. In 1958, the Wilson family purchased about 25 acres of land and immediately began planting palms and other plants to create the botanical garden. They kept expanding and had about thirty years of research until the entire science station burned down from a short circuit. So unfortunately, they lost all the research that they had collected and some may never be restored like weather data. The only building that was left was the Wilson house which still remains. Later, the Wilson family sold all of their land to OTS. When Mrs. Wilson passed away and Mr. Wilson became too old to take care of the land, a man named Luis took over and managed all of the land. OTS is still looking to purchase additional land to expand in order to protect tropical rainforests.

We began our day at EARTH University with a traditional plate of rice and beans–the usual. Today was the day we were leaving the university and staying in San Jose, the capitol of Costa Rica. Our bus left early in the morning, as we had many things to do. Our first stop was at the arial tram. Constructed to help educate tourists about the importance of the rain forest and the biodiversity in the tropics, the arial tram consisted of us viewing the understory, canopy, and emergent layers of the rain forest, a location normally inaccessible. Here we were able to see up close many of the species of plants that eluded us from the ground. Epiphytes such as Bromeilads, Orchids, and certain Figs were most common in the canopy, hitching a ride on other more established trees like the Mahogany and aptly named “Broccoli Tree”.

Back on the ground, we enjoyed a quick walk through some of their forest. We saw many colorful beetles and most impressive was the eyelash viper seen camouflaged amongst the fallen foliage. When we finished our obligatory gift-shop rounds, we boarded the bus to our next stop: The University of Costa Rica (Department of Microbiology)

At the center, we were greeted by one of the professors there, Dr. Gutierrez. We were taken to a lecture hall and given an interesting presentation on the non-venomous and venomous snakes of Costa Rica. Apparently, in some cases non-venomous snakes are only called so because their bite is restricted physically–that is, despite having poison glands and fangs, they have no mechanism to reliably deliver their toxin to larger animals like Humans. After the presentation, he gave us a quick tour of the research labs in which they made their prized anti-venom. By injecting incrementally larger doses of venom into horses, the scientists allow the horse to develop an immunity to the injected venom. As more and more antibodies are produced, the horse becomes more resistant to the venom. Eventually, the horse has blood drawn to make a purified product of pure anti-bodies which can be readily used by humans in the case of a bite.

Finally, we reached the hotel in which we were staying. After a long while of searching for Wi-Fi and subsequently reading the humorous web-comic “Garfield minus Garfield”, we headed off for dinner, which was quite good, as most of the meals here have been. Now we are currently settling down for the night, getting ready for our long ride from San Jose to the research camp Las Cruzes near the southern end of Costa Rica.

The theme of today has been agriculture. The main ways that we learned about sustainable agriculture today were at organic farms. These are mostly experiments that Earth University is conducting to better understand how to implement sustainable farming techniques. The fruit of these experiments is not only in the practical knowledge gained, but also the food produced that feeds the entire community. First thing in the morning, after yet another delicious and wholesome Costa Rican breakfast,

we took a short bus ride to a banana plantation associated with Earth U. There, we saw how bananas were grown, picked, transported, protected, and processed in preparation for shipping.

We also learned some of the techniques that they use to prevent erosion, ensure high yields year after year, and deter pests without using harmful chemicals. Another big theme here is the elimination of waste. They have found creative and innovative ways to utilize seemingly useless trash such as manure and plant refuse as fertilizer, plastic bags used to protect the bananas as plastics and more bags, turn banana waste into paper, the list goes on. And they have the means to convert them on site. We toured their paper mill and methane gas producing apparatus, the latter with which they convert their food pigs’ waste into fuel used in stead of natural gas.

Ingeniously, the waste water is then sent for further filtering by a series of bogs containing algae that naturally cleans and purifies the water.

After our farm adventures, we returned to the beautiful campus for another tasty meal of the ubiquitous rice and beans, along with fresh fruit and fish.  Interestingly, it has not yet rained on us, which is surprising because it is the rainy season here and we have been in a tropical rainforest the whole time. I hope our luck holds, as we have been very productive and have learned much all of our days here, as well as staying on schedule. After lunch, we took a short siesta and then headed back out to the farms for more touring, although we did the majority of that in the morning. We returned to the Earth U. campus around 3:30 local time and have been relaxing and working on assignments until dinner. We even visited the gift shop and cafe, where others splurged. I finished off the rich milk shakes that the others were unable to finish, which were delightful. Shout out to my frugal dad, whose money it is I’m saving.

Anyway, it has been yet another fun and learning-packed day here in beautiful, eco-friendly Costa Rica.

Here is a slideshow (from our Flickr photosharing group). I hope more of you will join and share you favorites (and the stories behind them) at Flickr when you find time. -Mr. W