monteverde, or the seriously misty forest

I wanted to write in this entry more about the town where I am staying and my research, supplemented by photos, because we are all getting bored by loads of text with nothing to ogle at, eh?

However, after my day and a half trip to Monteverde, one of the places I have now had the opportunity to visit twice in Costa Rica, I feel compelled to write about this place while the experience is still fresh in my mind.

Monteverde is the famous Costa Rican Cloud Forest. We headed there on Saturday so that Ashley could carry out a small project for her advisor, and heck, I didn't have anything planned for the weekend so I decided to join in. The project is exploring the effects of global warming on lizard populations in this cloud forest, and eventually elsewhere.
At 7:30am we left Bagaces via Marlon our driver (and indispensable friend by now), and it took about 3 1/2 hours to make it to Santa Elena, the town associated with Monteverde. It was strangely familiar to enter Santa Elena and Monteverde, as I remembered the restaurants, and the reserve from my trip in 2007.

The scenery during the drive was unbelievable, nothing that I could properly capture with my camera, but I will try to give you an idea:

en route to monteverde, on a very windy and pretty scary road

One more, just to see how these panoramic shots come out:

another view, con Marlon

So we make it our room and settle in a little bit, making sure to breathe the incredibly fresh air. Bagaces is pretty damn hot sometimes, so a cool mist with breezes has been a relief for two days (though it certainly isn't helping out the tan that I still lack).

We then walk over to el 'Laboratorio' to meet with Dr. Alan Pounds, who has been living up here for probably over 30 years. I am surprised to find how amusing and enjoyable his company is. We set off (sorry for the changing tenses) to check out the lizard sites, and not even two minutes into our walk, Ashley cautiously asks "er.....what's that?", and before I've even had a damn second to process what she's talking about, Alan reaches down by his left foot, swings his arm and scoops up....

a 4 FOOT LONG SNAKE

So I'm thinking that this man is just completely bonkers, because one usually spends their time avoiding touching snakes, at least Ashley Kelsey and I have so far. I quietly ask Ashley if it is venemous, because you look at these things and I know nature is tricky, but I was thinking there was no way this thing was harmless. Turns out, it was a King Snake, an imitator of the coral snake (don't pick these up...Alan learned this years ago). They are much bigger than coral snakes, and this creature was beyond beautiful. Ashley kept her distance at first, because she feels about snakes how I feel about cockroaches, plus the fact that cockroaches aren't going to squeeze or bite you to death.

You must excuse the 7 pictures I'm about to put up- Me with the snake, Alan with the snake, Ashley with the snake, group shot with the snake, Snake as accessory, etc. But it was cool. Really cool. In a way that hanging out with snakes in a reptile petting zoo cannot be.

The Snake + Alan's Arm:

So he's hangin out with the snake, obviously having a blast:

 and I think...I'd like to have that much fun, pass me that creature.

These are the second group of pictures I'm actually in out of the 500 I've already taken, so I'm taking my time. Except, about 40 seconds into my snake montage, I realize...holy hell I'm holding 4 foot long snake and am I really sure that this thing isn't going to murk me???

And so Ashley captures this moment:

the full image of my face is more frightening than the snake, but you get the idea.

Ashley, inspired by my incredibly show of bravery, decides that she, too, wants in:

--> transfer of snake -->

a day in the life of a fish hunter..

Here's a typical day of work at the station

• Wake up at 6:15. Yes, dear roommates and colleagues in NY, that's 6:15am, not at night.
• Get my act together, and head to the 'musmanni' bakery, where they are currently regretting revealing that can make cappucinos, because we order three every morning.
•  Pastries and bread have become an incredibly important part of my life...at every meal
• Marlon, our taxi driver shows up at 7:30 on the dot, and we hop in and drive about 45 minutes to the site. 15 minutes of this is by a highway, 30-35 is on a heavily bumpy gravelly road that does an excellent job of shaking up your innards before 8am.
• Get to the Lomas Barbudal Reserve at around 8:15, gather our equipment, and head down to either the stream behind the station, or hike about a kilometer and a half to La Catarata (the waterfalls)
• Hop in the water and survey for breeding pairs of Convict Cichlid fish. 
• The first day, we went to get in the water, and I realized I'd only been snorkeling once before 4 years ago, and had to have a quick tutorial on how to use a snorkel.
• We swim upstream and write down marked or unmarked pairs of fish on hand-drawn maps using waterproof notepads, and figure out which pairs we will observe or capture for the day.
• For capturing pairs we have to surround them with a seine net, and capture the male parent, then the fry, then the mother.
• Once we capture full 'families', we mark the parents so that we can recognize them later, measure and weigh them, and count and measure the fry, so we can get an idea of how parental 'fitness' is affecting how they behave as parents.
• Lunch break up at the station, back down by 1pm
• We are now able to capture about 5 pairs in a day, and then we get a cab home at 5pm

Watching the fish by the second week, we are able to very quickly recognize a pair with young. It took about a week to obtain useful data because our methods were...er...far from perfected (don't be fooled, they still are).

Currently on my way to Monteverde for the weekend with Ashley. She has to put up sensors for lizard research (luckily, or unluckily, neither of us know the slightest thing about lizards), and so I've decided to tag along. I went to Monteverde 4 years ago, but it is such a beautiful place, and the higher altitudes hopefully mean no insectos!

The most beautiful scenery on the way up that not even my camera can capture.

Just learned that my camera has the ability to take '3d panoramic images' Which is ridiculous- anyone got a 3d tv?

Hasta luego amigos

-bug (not beecho, I can't take that title from him)

here goes nothing...

Not sure how to start these things. They always sound cheesy, but heck this is my first blog so if it's cheesy and you disapprove, you may certainly find something else to do with your time.


It's two weeks into my trip to Costa Rica, and many of you are probably still wondering:
        'What is Alex doing in Costa Rica?'
While I realize I could have set this up before and tried to answer your question, the answer is- I had no idea what I was doing up until the day I got in the field.


So here we go:

I am currently living Costa Rica for six weeks studying fish behavior at the Lomas Barbudal Biological Station with two (other) biologists. Ashley is a PhD student studying fish behavior at UC Santa Cruz, and Kelsey is a biologist for fishing boats. 

        and here I am: Not quite a student of anything, but giving the world of conservation a shot.

I am now sufficiently exhausted by this blog set-up. So I will go and write later to give you a better idea of what I'm up to day-to-day, and see if I can post some pictures.

For now, love to all of you. I am doing my best to get emails out, but if you haven't gotten one yet it probably just means I treasure you even more because I'm just trying to get the wording in my note just right...

- Alex (bug) Muller