Strangling figs

You may have noticed that I forgot to upload the pictures I mentioned in my last post. Well, now they're there. And if you didn't notice, just pretend those last two sentences never happened.

Hart got here without a hitch, and it's been great introducing her to everyone here, and showing her around the garden and everything. If you want, she's also blogging her experiences, which you can read here.

Class time has reduced a bit, but we have plenty to do between readings, insect collecting/identifying, practicing plant taxonomy, statistics homework, and (claro) playing futbol.

This morning we went on a hike through some pastures, looking at the small forest fragments within the farmland. Yesterday morning we also hiked, this time to a stretch of trail in the jungle where we all sat down in isolated spots and did our mandatory 30 min. of field journal time. We'll be doing this at every site we visit, but we'll do it on our own for the remainder of the semester. It's nice to just let the thoughts and ideas pour out, without specific form or guidance to constrain you. Hopefully, I'll get some good ideas for independent projects during my observations. And, on the way back from the field observation, Mike stopped to climb the enormous strangler fig next to the trail. After I had gone on, apparently two more people climbed it, one of them being our oldest and most experience professor, Mauricio. The last time he climbed the tree was in 1989. I wish I had a picture of that, but here's what I do have.