We recently returned from our double-field-station field trip to San Gerardo and Palo Verde. Both beautiful places, and very different ecologically. San Gerardo was humid and cool, whereas Palo Verde was dry and hot. It was truly a wild experience to go straight from one to the other because my body barely had time to adjust. We spent our days hiking around to get a feel for the lifezone and learning the ins and outs of different species that lived there. We learned about 40 species within the 10 days of the field trip, and it was fascinating to learn about how each species has its own adaptations to the life zone and season that they live in. Our meals were filled with fits of laughter, and our nights filled with puzzling, guitar singalongs, and ping pong.

Every day that we were at San Gerardo I thought to myself: “I never want to leave here.” I looked out at the mountains full of forest, admiring the volcano in perfect view, and wished that those days would last forever. In order to get to the field station, you have to hike in, with all of your stuff on your back, down a steep hill that is almost 3 miles long. At the end, you hike all the way back up that 3-mile hill with a backpack filled with dirty clothes. Once I arrived at the parking lot at the top of the hill, shaking and sweating, I just wanted to roll all the way back down the hill and stay at the field station for another week. There was no wifi or electricity except for when they turned on the generator to cook meals. I loved the lack of electricity and wifi because it meant that I went to sleep early and wasn’t on my phone at all. The food was delicious, with so much variety and vegetarian options superior to anything I’ve ever had in my life. The showers were super cold, so we would run around the building to get sweaty before jumping into the shower. It was comical how everyone anticipated and feared the showers, but that was one of my favorite parts. Nothing beats a cold shower. 

Another quirk of this field station (and Palo Verde, but not to the same extent) was that the walls were comically thin. The six of us were split into 3 rooms, all lined up right next to each other, but the way that sound traveled allows us to talk amongst ourselves as if we were all in the same room. One of my favorite moments of the trip was when we were all showering for the first time since we arrived there and I heard a loud and high-pitched shriek. Since Beth and Sylvie were in the bathroom next door, I thought that it was one of them so I said “yeah, it’s cold right?!” to which Beth replied, “uhh… yeah I guess.” I was confused about her response. A few minutes later when we were done showering, we went outside onto our shared balcony and we were talking about the shriek. One of our professors, Johel, poked his head out of their door to say “that was Branko’s shriek.” Branko is our other professor, and he has not since lived this moment down. 

Later that night, we sat down to sing songs from “Alan’s songbook” while Branko played the guitar. Alan was previously involved with this program and is married to the current Program Director, so his personally crafted songbook has been used for many years of field station singalongs. There is a wide range of songs in Spanish and English, old and new, from many genres. Some songs are obnoxiously loud to sing, but they are so much fun that they always make an appearance in singalong nights. For example, we love to belt Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” every single time. As we were singing on the balcony, the people who run the field station came up to tell us that they had desert for us. Johel said, “They’re just giving us food so that we stop singing,” which led to a fit of laughter and joking about many different scenarios, each more ridiculous than the last, about how they could get us to stop singing. After that, they continued to call us downstairs for various things and every time it became a bigger joke that they were trying to shut us up. 

And with that fun anecdote, I will sign off! More fun stories to come . . .

Bird watching from the balcony at San Gerardo

Hello all my lovely friends!

Life has been pretty great this week, starting with a two night stay at a gorgeous little farm-stay called Terra Viva, situated in Monteverde. Because this study abroad program operates as a “bubble”, we have to quarantine and get tested before returning to the main campus so we stayed there as we awaited our test results. I had no idea what to expect when our instructors told us that we were quarantining at a farm, except for many cows and beautiful scenery which Terra Viva easily lived up to! One of my favorite things about staying there was the food and the atmosphere around the kitchen. We all ate at a large table, laughing over hot food and good conversation. One thing that I didn’t expect in Costa Rica was that juice is served at every meal, but I always appreciate a cool drink after a hot day.

At Terra Viva, we hiked several trails (one in the rain), and even got to feed baby cows out of a bottle! I wish I had taken pictures of the experience because it was so silly and hectic, since the babies would head-butt each other to get as much time with the bottle as possible. They were also incredibly drooly and I definitely needed to wash my arm after feeding them since it was so spitty.

Accidentally getting stuck behind cows during their milking time at Terra Viva 

Once we got our negative test results, we hopped in the van and went back to campus. I was feeling a little overwhelmed, as I normally do coming back from trips, mostly because there were so many new college students coming for the month on CIEE’s College Away Program that they’ve been running during COVID. We met the seven new students and hit it off right away (obviously because everyone is so nice!) and then quickly started up our classes.

On Saturday, we went to the Cloud Forest Biological Reserve for our Humans in the Tropics class in order to learn more about ecotourism. In a typical year, the reserve hosts around 70,000 – 80,000 visitors who come from within and outside of Costa Rica to see the biodiversity of the cloud forest. One special animal that lives there is the Resplendent Quetzal, a large green bird with a red breast that can often be very hard to see. The male quetzal has a super long tail and a mohawk-like crest, while the female has duller (but still beautiful) plumage in order to avoid predation. They typically build their nests in decaying trees, and are socially monogamous which means both parents do parental care for their chicks. We were walking up a trail when suddenly we came across a group of people with large scopes focused on a dead log in the middle of a tree fall gap. We held our breaths in anticipation, waiting for them to tell us what they’d seen and… sure enough! It was a pair of quetzals! Having learned so much about them in elementary school, it was truly an awe-inspiring experience to see a pair of them in real life! We also saw a three-wattled bellbird, which is a crazy sounding animal that lives in Central America. Check out our species reports tab on the blog to learn more about it!

L to R: Sylvie, Me, Alejandra, Isabelle, and Branko (professor) at Cloud Forest lookout point

Very blurry picture (oops) of quetzal mates! The male is on the left with the red breast.

Next week we start our independent research projects (more on that later), which is a little daunting but so exciting. I’ll be sure to update about how data collection goes, don’t you worry my dear friends.

Till next week! Pura Vida!

Beth 🙂

We recently returned from our first field station trip to study a different Costa Rican life zone. We went to Tirimbina, which is a tropical rainforest in the Caribbean lowlands so it was much hotter and more humid than the CIEE campus. Before leaving, we asked one of our professors, Branko, about the rumors we heard about him previously being the academic director at the Tirimbina field station. He confirmed these rumors with the question, “Who told you?” On our way there, we stopped at one of the many gigantic windmills on the hills that we were driving through. One of the units for our “Humans in the Tropics” class is “Energy,” so Branko talked for a little bit about the windmills in Costa Rica. In proper TEC fashion, we finished off our mini windmill lecture by playing jump rope with the shadow from the windmill. After getting all of our energy out with the windmill-jump-rope we jumped back into the van and continued to Tirimbina. 

Once we arrived at the field station, the person working in the entrance called Branko “Don Branko” which is a relatively informal, but still respectful, way of greeting people in Costa Rica. Although “Don” is a common way of addressing someone here, we found it really entertaining. Especially in combination with the fact that Branko used to be the Academic Director of that field station and everyone seemed to know him there, we made a lot of jokes about how he secretly runs the place. We saw a lot of really cool wildlife i.e. sloths, poison dart frogs, kinkajous, and toucans. Everytime we saw some cool wildlife we joked that Don Branko coordinated for it to be there. We were waiting for our breakfast to come out of the kitchen one morning and Don Branko said “this area is a really good place for spotting sloths” to which of course we joked that he was saying that very loudly into a microphone so people would bring in the sloths. Sadly, when we left the Tirimbina field station Branko’s powers disappeared. 

Our other professor, Johel, is a hilarious storyteller. He has been doing fieldwork for long enough that he has seen the best and the worst field station drama, medical emergencies, terrible cafeteria food, and research gone wrong of course. The funniest story was one that we call the “gay snails” story, but I don’t have the skill to summarize that one. The wildest story was about an unidentified insect that bit him in Costa Rica the day before he flew to the U.S. where medical professionals were unfamiliar with the tropical insect bite, so it got infected and left him with a scar that he still has today. He told that story because one of the other students on the program had a bot fly in her skin that she found two weeks after it was probably delivered to her from a mosquito. She came out of the room and said, “Hey Johel, how do I tell if I have a parasite?”

We took a night hike the first night that we were there. Tirimbina has a very long suspension bridge across a wide river. It was always so magical to stand on the bridge and feel the wind, to look around at the trees and the birds, to look down at the water rushing so far below me with a mind of its own. We walked across the bridge at least a few times everyday that we were there, but it never got old. All 4 minutes that it took to walk the whole bridge were always a game of wobbly steps and admiring the view, looking for wildlife. Walking across at night for our night hike was a completely different type of magic. It was a little bit more mysterious, but also more peaceful. The stars were making themselves known that night, with a few purple clouds decorating the sky and the crescent moon hanging down like a little bowl. We saw lots of kinkajous in the trees above the bridge that night, and then we went down by the water to look for more species. We saw lots of strawberry poison dart frogs, spiders, and millipedes.

These past few weeks have flown by. After quarantining at the Monteverde Biological Field station for a week, Beth and I finally got our negative COVID test results back and we jumped around with joy, filled with excitement to join the campus bubble. The next morning we woke up right as the sun rose to eat breakfast and move to campus. After dropping our bags in our room, we jumped into field work with the other two students on our program. I spent the next few hours running around the regrowth plot on campus, which was used for farming up until the 1990’s when it was allowed to regrow naturally. We were measuring trees that had little metal tags on them which chimed in the wind. There were only a select number of trees that were in the species we were measuring and we joked that their tags chimed in the wind to taunt us. We were running around this huge plot, scrambling up and down the slopes, trying to find the right serial numbers, yelling out the numbers we found to our professor who couldn’t hear us over the wind, and then finally measuring the trees and cheering when we found one. I had so much fun running around this plot, laughing at our disappointments and cheering at our victories, I felt like a kid again. We saw a cool snake in the process, and thanked it in our acknowledgements when we presented on the data later that day.

After a full day of fieldwork and getting to know our TEC* crew, I was tired and not super in the mood to socialize. However, it was Friday night and the activity was karaoke- it was calling my name! I promised myself that I would leave early, especially since we had to get up early the next morning for our all-day Saturday class “Humans in the Tropics.” When I arrived, all of the students, RAs, and professors were there. At first I was watching the festivities from the sidelines, but I quickly grew comfortable and wholeheartedly joined in. In this field-station type environment it is normal for everyone to hang out, with less weight placed on the hierarchy of our roles here. This was a welcome surprise for me, especially after almost a year of social-distancing and quarantining. Suffice it to say I did not leave early. The structure was less like karaoke and more like dancing around, singing songs as the lyrics projected onto the wall from whatever YouTube karaoke we could find, and passing the mic around the group.

The studious but relaxed environment of this campus is exacerbated in our program since TEC is a group of 4 students and 2 professors, in a program that would usually have 15-30 students. I’m really looking forward to our trips to other field stations to study the different life zones of Costa Rica with our little cohort of 6. It is such a unique experience to be around my professors and my 3 classmates all the time. Last night we talked on the main campus porch with the RAs and professors about movie titles that are translated in funny ways to other languages and all of the ways that our names have been spelled wrong by people. I laughed the hardest when Pablo, the academic director, talked about Starbucks baristas writing everything from Pepe, to Bablo, to Puvo for him. Sometimes when we’re eating one of us will look over at the table where the RAs and professors eat together and one of our professors makes a face at us that makes us laugh so hard. It surprised me how fast I grew accustomed to being in a bubble with these people, not wearing masks, and feeling safe with them. Eating meals with a large group of people in a dining hall is an activity so familiar and mundane that I sometimes forget how novel it is at this moment. Every now and then I stop and think to myself how lucky I am to be here.

*Our program is called Tropical Ecology and Conservation, so we call it “TEC” for short.

We made it! I cannot believe that we are here. There are so many aspects of this situation that feel unreal. After finding out a few weeks ago that only two other students would be joining Beth and myself on this program that usually has 15-30 students we decided to go forward with it anyway, hoping that we get along with the other two students. Both of us were really excited to do study abroad in order to meet new people and immerse ourselves in the local community, both of which would be much harder in the COVID-safe bubble that CIEE has created on its campus. More importantly, however, we are so grateful that CIEE is doing everything possible to create the most COVID-safe situation for us, the involved staff members, and the surrounding communities.

After anxiously packing and preparing for this program, we were held up in Texas for another week due to the winter storm that shut everything down, including roads and power and water. We did our best to tune into zoom lectures for our program despite the circumstances, so that we wouldn’t have too much to catch up on once we finally got here. My dad kept joking that we were studying abroad in Costa Rica in Texas. Finally, five days after we were supposed to fly out, we flew out and got to Costa Rica with almost an extra week of quarantine under our belts.

All of that waiting was so worth it!! When we woke up the next morning, the program director came by to welcome us (socially-distanced) and explain everything about our quarantine situation. She noted that this exact program usually begins with a field trip that would have made it impossible to join five days late like we did, but that we were now able to join fairly seamlessly with the adjusted schedule for COVID safety. The program director is so nice and made us feel immediately at home. She walked us around the trails and told us about the animals she’s encountered here. 

That same morning, I left my breakfast out on the porch to get my coffee, and when I came back out there was a strange animal perusing around our porch. I had never seen an animal like it before, except that it kind of reminded me of a raccoon. It ended up being a coati, which is a species in the same family as raccoons, so I was kind of right! I was startled, and immediately thought to stand in front of my food to make sure the animal didn’t get it, but the little guy was harmless and just hung out with us as we ate and soaked in the morning. Later, the program director told us that there is a troupe of coatis that hangs out around here, but that one in particular thinks it’s a dog, lays on the dog bed on her porch, and tries to get into the house. She said: “they’re harmless, just don’t feed them.” Glad to know my instincts panned out! 

That night we walked with our two biology/ecology professors who took us down a trail and to a pond to find Leopard frogs and Cane toads for our species reports. I was astounded by how many stars I could see in the sky, how the only things we could hear were the wind blowing through the trees and the music of crickets, and how the air smelled like trees and dirt and everything nice. We found the species of frog and toad that we were looking for, and I was able to hold the Cane toad for a long time while we talked about him. His belly was so soft and he was adorable. Despite my disappointment in missing out on two weeks of “normalcy” (as normal as it can get) on this program due to our delayed quarantine period, I am so excited to be here. Tonight, I go to sleep filled with gratitude and excitement.