A Very Delayed Update

So, blogging is harder to keep up with this time around. I've been to 4 different parks (Tirimbina, Volcan Arenal, Carara, Bosque de Ninos) in the past three weeks and now I'm planning my 3 weeks of vacation. I believe I need to leave the country for a bit to keep my visa fresh for the next semester, but I have to time it right so my 90 days don't run out too early.

I just spent the last four days in Bosque de Ninos, which is a forest that was preserved using money collected by children. It's up in the mountains and was colder than we expected. It was gorgeous though. There were two different types of forest at the campsite. On the one side there was a non-native, planted pine forest. The trees were literally in rows, and there wasn't a ton of vegetation. The other side of the camp had native cloud forest with tons of different species.

I spent my couple of days helping students look for mushrooms for their research projects. We would mark out a 20 x 50m plot and walk around looking for mushrooms. We usually came back with 80+ after maybe an hour and a half of searching. Especially in the native area, they were just everywhere if you looked close enough.

The wildlife count is pretty high at this point. Of course there's tons of iguanas around, and there's some wrens that live on campus. I've seen two different types of toucans, three species of snakes (2 of them venomous), white faced monkeys, howler monkeys, bullet ants (giants, named bullet ants because that's what it feels like when they bite), hummingbirds, giant social spiders, katydids, tree frogs, toads, the list goes on. I've got my heart set on a sloth before the year is up, and I'd love to see a tapir but apparently they're super shy.

I uploaded some more pictures to the last album. The one from the last post now has pictures from Carara Park and an outreach we did with school kids. This album has pictures from Tirimbina park and Arenal volcano and the associated park, waterfall, and hot springs. I've also been messing around with my camera and made this album for just some pretty pictures that don't necessarily have anything to do with anything.